Bloodhound Land Speed Car, side view.
The Bloodhound LSR car is a jet-engine-propelled vehicle designed to do just one thing: set a new land speed record. But you can’t just fire up the horizontal rocket and go blasting into the books. Land speed records take time, and that’s what the Bloodhound team is doing out on the Hakskeenpan desert racetrack in South Africa.
Yesterday, the Bloodhound LSR hit 334 miles per hour, the fastest it has ever gone. That incredible speed took just 20 seconds to achieve, and it’s a big jump over what came before. The previous top speed was 200 mph, but the team thinks the car can crest 500 mph in the near future.
The Bloodhound team ran the car through three “run profiles,” or gradual tests to build up to the new speeds. The first, Run Profile 1, was a static engine test and then “a very slow speed (max 100 mph) check of the steering and brakes.” Run Profile 2 went up to 200 mph without using any extra fuel for reheating the jet engine. Finally, Run Profile 3 went 334 mph with full reheat. Bloodhound says it will carry out more run profiles over the next four weeks, increasing the top speed by 50 mph each time until it hits the 500-plus mph target top speed for this trial series.
The Bloodhound LSR uses an EJ200 Rolls-Royce jet engine that is used in the Eurofighter Typhoon combat jet that started production in 2003. The vehicle is piloted by current World Land Speed Record holder Andy Green. Green’s current record was set at 714.144 mph in a vehicle called the ThrustSSC in 1997. His plans with Bloodhound are to hit 1,000 mph at some point.
The Bloodhound LSR has been designed to reach 1,050 mph, but a lot of work needs to be done before Green attempts reaching that number. There will be two main phases in Bloodhound’s work to reach the four-digit number on land. Phase one will be to break Green’s current record. “This is necessary to understand how the car behaves as it enters the transonic stage initially and then supersonic speed levels,” the group says. Once that target is met, the team will take time to review the data generated in the attempt and then move on to phase two, the 1,000 mph challenge.
The wheels on the Bloodhound LSR have been in development for over 30 years to run on the hard desert floor. They are made of a solid, aircraft grade aluminium alloy, weigh 198 pounds each and can spin at up to 10,200 revolutions per minute. Here’s how the team describes the way they work:
“The wheels have a V-shaped keel which digs into the alkali playa (baked mud) surface by 15 mm when the car is stationary. As speeds increase, the wheels will rise up out of the mud surface and plane in much the same way as a speedboat rides up on the surface of the water. At 500 mph (804 km/h) and above, just a few millimetres of metal will be in contact with the desert surface, and the giant aluminium discs will act more like rudders than the wheels on a conventional car.”
The Bloodhound team is based in the UK and says the global audience for this record attempt is meant to, “inspire the next generation about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and will be a supersonic testbed for showcasing emergent digital technologies,”
