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Countdown to Kalahari land speed record attempt begins

Royal Air Force wing commander Andy Green driving a maroon Geely Boyue down Hakskeen Pan at 160 km/h. Video and editing: Duane Daws.

4th November 2016

By: Irma Venter

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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It is a few minutes shy of twelve and the heat shimmers like water on Hakskeen Pan.

Royal Air Force wing commander Andy Green gets behind the wheel of a maroon Geely Boyue, journalists in tow, and chases down the pan at 160 km/h – a mere fraction of the speed at which he will travel here next year when he attempts to break his own land speed record, set at 1 227.9 km/h in 1997 in Nevada, in the US.

Leaving the marquee tent behind, he speeds down the pan next to a line of bright orange traffic cones.

“See how the cones fall away up ahead? It’s because the earth is round. What you see is the curvature of the earth.”

The car leaves the line of cones as the 54-year-old Green searches for a pile of stones the Kalahari communities of Rietfontein, Loubos, Groot Mier and Klein Mier have cleared by hand to create the Hakskeen Pan land speed record track – all 16 000 t of it. By hand. One by one.

A few turns and he finds the communities’ handiwork.

It’s an amazing feat, says Green. “They did what nobody thought possible.”

He turns the Boyue around. The bright white tent and the cones have disappeared from sight.

Curvature of the earth. Abracadabra. One of the flattest places on earth and yet something as big as a marquee tent can dissolve into thin air.

Green has to find his bearings.

“This always happens. Let me think now.” He drives left and finds the row of cones again.

A South African company will paint markers with ecofriendly vegetable dye to allow Green to keep his line when navigating the 19-km-long, 22-million-square-metre pan in an attempt to set a new land speed record.

The Bloodhound supersonic car will build up to its initial 1 287.4 km/h record attempt next year, with 1 609 km/h to follow in 2018.

Each new run – faster than the one before – will be made next to the previous one, steadily building up to the magical 1 000 miles an hour number.

As the track is 19 km by 500 m, with large safety areas on both sides, it allows the team to lay out up to 50 individual tracks side by side.

This is important as the Bloodhound cannot run over the same ground twice, as the car will break up the baked mud surface as it travels across the pan.

FLASH IN THE PAN
What does Green expect on that record-breaking day?

“It will be very hot and noisy,” he says.

To counter the heat of the Kalahari desert, the Bloodhound team will run the vehicle between seven and nine in the morning. Running later in the day will put the car’s cooling systems under greater strain.

‘Noisy’ is perhaps an understatement, as the Bloodhound is set to create a sonic boom as it speeds through the sound barrier.

To do this, the Bloodhound will use three rather raucous power plants: a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet from a Eurofighter Typhoon, a cluster of Nammo hybrid rockets and a 550 bhp supercharged Jaguar V8 engine that drives the rocket oxidiser pump.

Between them, they will generate 135 000 thrust horsepower, equivalent to 180 Formula1 cars.

All this power will have some interesting effects on Green – a fighter pilot and the first person ever to have broken through the sound barrier on land.

The Bloodhound will accelerate at 2.5 G, and then decelerate from 1 609 km/h at 3 G, which is equivalent to slowing from 100 km/h to standstill in one second.

G forces are measured in multiples of the earth’s gravity. When we are standing upright, we are exposed to 1 G.

When fighter pilots ‘pull G’, they feel a force greater than gravity. For example, 3 G is three times the earth’s gravity. This makes them feel heavy, and movement becomes difficult.

Green should, however, be used to the effect of G forces, owing to his training as a fighter pilot.

In total, Bloodhound will go from zero to 1 609 km/h in 55 seconds and back to zero again in a further 65 seconds, during which time the car will cover 19.3 km.

The vehicle will slow down by turning off the rocket and the jet. Airbrakes will be used at 1 367.9 km/h, followed by wheel brakes at 321 km/h. Two parachutes can be deployed at 1 046 km/h, should the airbrakes fail.

Stopping will be “very violent” and disorientating, says Green.

Bloodhound programme director Richard Noble – who piloted the Thrust II to claim the world land speed record in 1983 at 633.47 miles and hour – says the effect of a severe, sudden stop on the balance organs of the body is called a somatogravic illusion.

“The whole world twists and you are absolutely convinced you are going straight down into the centre of the earth.”

When the car accelerates, Green will experience a strong sensation (principally through the otolith organs in the inner ear) that he is tilting backwards, as if the nose of the car is rapidly pitching up.

When the Bloodhound slows down, however, he will get the opposite sensation, as if it is pitching down.

To retain control of the car, Green must realise that these effects are just an illusion.

Green says fighter pilots and racing drivers are indeed used to the sensation, even if it promises to be “more exaggerated” in the Bloodhound.

Another interesting fact is that Green will have to face the same effects twice within the space of an hour.

The Bloodhound – and Green – will have to breach the 1 600 km/h mark twice in 60 minutes, in opposite directions, for world motorsport governing body, the FIA, to ultimately declare it a record.

ACHILLES HEEL
Bloodhound chief engineer Mark Chapman knows what he and the rest of the Bloodhound team do not know about their attempts to set a new land speed record.

This includes how Hakskeen Pan’s surface will interact with the Bloodhound’s solid aluminium wheels.

After all, the first wheel designs literally exploded during testing.

The Bloodhound’s wheels will spin at 10 200 rev/min – or 170 times a second.

Drag is also unknown. There are many computational models, yes, but “you can’t put the Bloodhound in a wind tunnel”, says Chapman. “Now we will have to see if we were right”.

Slowly inching up the speed of every run in 160 km/h increments from zero to 643 km/h, and 80 km/h increments thereafter, will, however, create the necessary data to validate the team’s theories and allow for adjustments to be made.

Taking it slowly is Chapman’s approach to derisking the record attempt as much as possible.

He says any accident of a 7.5 t vehicle going faster than a bullet will be catastrophic.

“Yes, it is risky, but it is about how you manage the risk that matters.”

Not even the weather is left to chance.

The Bloodhound project has its own weather stations on the pan and has been using dedicated satellite pictures for the last three years to track weather patterns, rainfall and surface drying rates.

Chapman is an aeronautical engineer by training. Prior to his full-time position on the Bloodhound project, he was part of the team that worked on the development of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter.

The big difference between his work on the military project and on the Bloodhound is that he can tell “everyone everything about this project”.

“Our number one goal is sharing. Our target audience is eight-year-old kids – to get them excited about science, technology, engineering and maths.

“My kids are between seven and ten and, every time I tell them about the project, their eyes get as big as dinner plates.”

HOT STUFF
Work to find a suitable running site for the Bloodhound land-speed record attempt began in 2007.

Green used satellite imagery and a bespoke computer programme to identify flat areas of earth potentially suitable for a 1 609 km/h land speed record attempt.

After discounting thousands of false hits and following visits to 13 deserts in the US, Australia, Turkey and South Africa, Verneukpan in South Africa stood out as the number one choice.

Verneukpan was, of course, the site of Sir Malcolm Campbell’s 1929 land speed record attempt (at 350.054 km/h).

The site was covered with stones, but close to the required length, at 18.9 km, and very hard.

However, a subsequent survey discovered that clearing the surface stones risked disturbing an underlying layer of shale, which would render the surface unusable for high-speed racing.

At this point, Cape Town-based helicopter filming specialists Skip Margetts and Rudi Riek suggested another location some 512 km to the north: Hakskeen Pan.

A type of dry lakebed, known as an alkali playa, it presented the prospect of a hard, flat surface, 19 km long, that would be repaired by seasonal rains.

Work to prepare the track began in 2010.

R1-BILLION
It will cost the Bloodhound team R1-billion, spent over ten years, to break the land speed record – if they succeed.

With a global recession thrown into that ten-year period, Chinese carmaker Geely this year added its name to a list of sponsors to finally ensure that the Bloodhound will make its first run in South Africa in 2017.

Chapman is positive that Green and the Bloodhound will reset the land speed record, and that none of the funding and global work to entice children to take up studies in maths and engineering will be in vain.

“I have no doubt the car will go fast. We will get the record.”

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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