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Building the most complex land vehicle in history

4th April 2014

By: Conor La Grue

  

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I’m in my sixth year on the Bloodhound project and it’s changed a lot from when there were just seven of us in a little room at the University of the West of England. Last year was our most productive yet. All the extra design resources coming online had a knock-on effect on the amount of car we were able to get into build and the number of people working directly with suppliers increased accordingly.

Delivering the technical partnerships required to build the most complex land vehicle in human history has been a mammoth exercise in its own right and is one that has been accomplished solely thanks to a huge team effort.

Bloodhoud is, after all, only a temporary organisation – there is no volume production once the prototype is done. That brings with it its own challenges as we have to justify every penny and every moment of our time spent, and so, putting systems and processes in place to make functions robust has to be balanced against the transient nature of the project.

We accomplish a ‘right first time’ high-quality deliverable not through reams of structure and standard operational procedures in order to drive good practice, but instead by having the right people on each task and by bringing in the experience and expertise that can work within that minimum process environment. So our quality system is born from the quality of our people and the pedigree of our technology partners, rather than any defined system that we are following.

We know that, for our partners, it means we are a challenge to work with. With our requirements being uncompromising, we rely on our partners to help shoulder the burden of running in the way we must in order to ‘just build one’. We joke internally that, in engineering terms, there is an easy way, a hard way and then the ‘Bloodhound way’, as what we are doing is far harder than anything any of us has ever done before. This also means we are always learning, which in itself is one of the greatest rewards of being involved in the project.

On the commercial and technical front, the huge number of technologies and partnerships that we have put in place over the last five years are now bearing fruit. There is no time in the plan to develop a conduit to supply a technology. Instead, the plan assumes I have a cog in the supply chain machine ready to take on every component as it is released by the design team.

We now work with over 230 partners, suppliers and other companies across disciplines that include space, aerospace, motorsport, marine, medical, industrial, defence and numerous others. Many of those are sponsors, but others are approved suppliers that do their best to help us on full commercial terms – and some of them are a little bit of both.

I have to ensure we deliver every component of the Bloodhound supersonic car (SSC) and I am responsible for the project management of all the components. However, with thousands of parts to make, no one person could make this happen and I can only do that with the support of an amazing group of people who make this possible.

As the project has grown, so has the support I’ve needed to keep all our relationships with our partners moving. One of my key partners is Overmarsh Engineering, which has vast experience in the motorsport and aerospace industries and in getting highly complex, one-off components manufactured.

As the supply chain has grown, Overmarsh has provided a proportional amount of support, working with our ever-expanding partner base as well as bringing its own supply partners on board – in short, a flexible and pragmatic solution to help us towards getting thousands of one-off components manufactured.

Our whole design team has to make sure the car is one we can actually build and that the components are within the realms of possibility . . . even if many of the components go right to the edge of what is actually achievable. We all sit deliberately close together in the drawing office to make sure we stay properly “aligned”. (Never underestimate the power of eavesdropping when it comes to the design and build of the Bloodhound SSC).

The project is now a ‘seven days a week’ exercise. Project director Richard Noble is a force of nature and is utterly determined to make the project a success – and we are all right behind him.

It is a team effort that always has to balance the fact that we are designing, building and operating the world’s ultimate land vehicle in order to get the ultimate land speed record with the reality that we will then be disbanding.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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