In 1983, Edinburgh-born Richard Noble brought the land speed record back to Britain. In 1997, ThrustSSC became the first car to break the sound barrier. A week ago, the entrepreneur was the worthy recipient of the prestigious Jim Clark Award. Here he tells Jack McKeown about his latest project to build the world’s first 1000mph car.
“After that McLaren and the rest packed their bags and went home. McLaren had a budget of £25 million. The Spirit of America team were reputed to have a $14 million budget. We carried out the entire project on a cash spend of £2.85 million.”
The team had to carry out thorough aerodynamic testing to prove the car wouldn’t take off and be destroyed when it reached Mach One the speed of sound.
To do this, they used a Cray 92 supercomputer, data from Thrust2, which had gone at Mach 0.9, and charmingly one of the team’s old Minis, converted to rear wheel steering and with a scaled down version of the jet car’s geometry.
Richard never doubted his team would beat the Americans and the F1 outfit, despite having a fraction of their financial resources.
“Having all that money to throw at it made them complacent,” he argues. “They had the money but we had the expertise and the ingenuity.” They also employed some innovative fund-raising techniques, using the internet to generate money way back in the mid-1990s.
“We needed 250,000 gallons of fuel (ThrustSSC returned 0.04mpg) and no-one would help us. None of the oil companies wanted to know us. So we used the ThrustSSC (SSC stands for supersonic car) website, which was generating 300 million hits a month, to ask people to sponsor our fuel at $25 a head. Everyone who gave us money got a ThrustSSC fuel certificate signed by Andy.”
Thrust2 and ThrustSSC now reside at the Museum of Transport in Coventry. After a layoff of more than a decade during which he set up an aircraft company, which became bogged down in bitter disputes with investors Richard has returned to the land speed fray to defend his car’s record.
“We began hearing of other groups who were planning an attempt on our record. There’s an outfit in Australia. And there was Steve Fossett, who was an American businessman, aviator and balloonist. We were quite worried about him. He had the money and the knowhow to create a car that could beat ThrustSSC.”
Tragically, Fossett died in a plane crash in 2007, but Richard had already been spurred into action.
“We had a bit of a dilemma. Did we wait to see if any of these teams would beat our record? It might be five years before they could get the record, and then it would take six years for us to get our challenge ready. We decided just to take them on and build the ultimate car that no one would be able to beat. This is going to be the last one we do so we wanted to make it something special.”
Richard has set the team a lofty target building the first car to reach 1000mph.
“To do this we need the right engine. I wanted to get an engine from a Eurofighter. They’re incredibly light and powerful, a real feat of efficiency. So I met with Lord Drayson (then Minister of Science of Innovation) and asked for one. To my astonishment he said ‘yes’ on the condition that we get Britain’s schools involved in our project. I agreed on the spot, and now we have over 4400 schools signed up 660 of them in Scotland and a team of four to go around them explaining BloodhoundSSC to them.
“Lord Drayson said we need to inspire kids with projects like ours because we don’t have enough scientists and engineers. Back in the 60s when Concorde was first flying, everyone wanted to be an engineer or a scientist, but these days no one does. We’ll be reaching out to 1.5 million schoolkids.”
This will also be the first of Richard’s land speed attempts to have a significant financial backer. Rolex are providing sponsorship. Richard says he can’t divulge the amount, but press reports say the project has £10 million of funding.
“We’ve got the online support of more than 5000 people,” he says. “We’re hoping the car will be ready by early 2013 and then we’ll take it over to South Africa for testing. The South African government have been fantastic. They’ve set a team of 300 men to clear 24 million square metres of stone from the desert so we’ll have the perfect track.
“The other good thing about being in South Africa is we’ll have an eight-month weather window for testing. We’re hoping to have broken 1000mph by late 2013 or early 2014.”For more information visit www.richard-noble.com.”I was standing at the midpoint of the course, six miles in. It was an absolutely devastating thing to see. This car approached, going faster than any aeroplane, and when it went by us it was completely quiet, utterly silent, because it was going faster than the speed of sound.
“Then there was this astonishing double bang. The plastic covers on the desks of a school 15 miles away were blown off. The trucks carrying all our equipment were rocking on their axles.
“It was the first car ever to break the sound barrier and it was an incredible experience to be there.”
Richard Noble is describing the scene in 1997 when his car, ThrustSSC, broke the world land speed record and the sound barrier, averaging 763mph over the course of a mile across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
No car has driven faster in the 14 years since then and Richard is currently designing ThrustSSC’s successor, BloodhoundSSC, which he hopes will secure the land speed record for another generation.
On June 4, Richard was in Scotland to receive the Jim Clark Award. Handed out annually by the Association of Scottish Motoring Writers with the blessing of the late motorsport legend’s family, it honours Scottish high achievers in the world of motorsport or motoring.
“It really means a lot to me,” he says. “Jim Clark was an incredible driver and a legend in the world of motorsport.”
Born in Edinburgh, Richard (65) was the son of a Cameron Highlander who fought in the Second World War. He spent his childhood years in Inverness and it was here that the seeds of his speed dreams were sown.
“We were driving round Loch Ness I think it was in 1952 and we were passing Drumnadrochit when I saw John Cobb’s speedboat Crusader sitting in the water,” he remembers. “He was going to use it for an attempt on the water speed record. I saw this incredible boat and I thought ‘this is for me’.”
Cobb died later that year in his speedboat, but the inspiration he gave the young Richard lived on. After graduating from Winchester College Richard became a paint salesman.
“I sold Dulux paint,” he chuckles. “Then I was moved to another division where I was in charge of £20 million of sales of manmade fibre. I was only about 25 or 26.”
Eventually, the market collapsed and Richard found himself out of a job.
“I wanted to go and see the world so I worked nightshift for a while to save money, then got some friends together, bought a Land Rover and drove it from London to South Africa, going across the Sahara Desert.”
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After earning money in South Africa for the return journey this time through East Africa, Iran and Turkey Richard devoted himself to breaking the land speed record, then held by American Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America.
“Between 1972 and 1977 I built Thrust, which was designed to break the American record,” Richard says. “In 1977 I lost the car in an accident and it had to be scrapped. After five years of work and effort I got £175 in scrap.”
Undeterred, Richard immediately began work on Thrust2. Starting with his £175, he generated £1 million in sponsorship and by 1983 the 35,000 horsepower, jet-engined car was ready. They air freighted Thrust2 to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and on October 4, 1983, Richard took to the driving seat for the record-breaking run.
“It was an amazing experience,” he says. “I can still remember every single detail. Around 550mph we started to get supersonic and I could see the shockwaves developing over the car. When we finished the mile run and I deployed the brakes I pulled six Gs.”
This meant that Richard was experiencing six gravitational forces in other words, his body weighed six times its normal weight.
“It wasn’t too painful but there’s an effect called the somatogravic illusion caused by extreme g-force which sends false readings to the brain. It made me convinced I was driving straight downwards towards the centre of the earth. I’d never heard about the effect before so it was really disconcerting.”
Thrust2 averaged 633mph over the one-mile mid-section of the 13-mile desert course, beating Spirit of America’s 594mph and restoring the land speed record to Britain after more than 20 years. Overnight, Richard became a national hero, finding himself in demand for interviews and public appearances.
“Britain was going backwards at the time. Taking the land speed record back to Britain really buoyed the nation.”
Driving a car at over 600 miles per hour was disconcerting but not frightening, Richard says.
“If you get scared you’re probably not the right person to be doing it. The moment you get frightened is when you make a mistake and things go wrong. I had one bad run during testing in 1982 because of pilot error. Luckily no one was hurt, but we had to do an expensive rebuild of the car.”
Richard’s land speed record stood for 14 years until his own ThrustSSC broke it. Although he was in charge of the project, he handed the driving seat over to Royal Air Force fighter pilot Andy Green. Using two Rolls Royce engines from the Phantom jet fighter generating 100,000bhp, ThrustSSC was as powerful as 145 Formula One cars and could accelerate from 0-600mph in 16 seconds.
On October 15, 1997, in the Black Rock Desert, Wing Commander Green accelerated along the 13-mile course, hitting a top speed of 763mph and becoming the first person to break the sound barrier in a car. His record came 50 years and one day after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 research rocket plane on October 14, 1947.
It was an incredible achievement, especially given that it was accomplished by a small group of enthusiasts with very limited financial backing.
“We were up against some major players,” Richard says. “The race team McLaren were involved. They had huge financial backing and they said some quite disparaging things about us. I think they regarded us as a bit of a Mickey Mouse outfit that had no chance of success. But we did our research, we got our aerodynamic testing completed, we proved it could be done and showed how it could be done.
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