Old Newquay thread seems to have disapeared......
Bloodhound Diary: Newquay is go!
A British team is developing a car that will be capable of reaching 1,000mph (1,610km/h). Powered by a rocket bolted to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine, the vehicle will first mount an assault on the world land speed record (763mph; 1,228km/h). Bloodhound should start running on Hakskeen Pan in Northern Cape, South Africa, in 2018.
Bloodhound is Go! That's the phrase we've been waiting for and now the
dates are confirmed: we'll be blasting the car down the runway at Newquay in Cornwall at the end of October.
We've picked three separate events to show off the car. The best day (if you can make it) is 26 October, which will be the car's first-ever public runs.
This is the VIP and media day, and we're giving all our 1K Club Gold Members the chance to join our other VIPs, to say thank you for their support
The public day is 28 October, which will give everyone the chance to come along and see the fantastic support we're getting from Cornwall Airport Newquay, as we run the world's most advanced straight-line racing car along their runway.
Finally (and perhaps most importantly), we're having a schools' day on 30 October, as we bring Bloodhound's "Engineering Adventure" to life for future engineers in the most exciting way possible.
At the Bloodhound Technical Centre right now, there's a lot of work going on to get the car ready for its first test runs and our first public "show". To keep it simple, the car will be running with the jet engine only, as the rocket system isn't ready yet (we don't need it for runway testing).
There's still a long list of work to get the car ready for Newquay.
The task list is a logical one, starting with lower-chassis assembly, then fitting the front and rear suspension, and the final installation of the cockpit and systems will be completed while the upper-chassis is being assembled. The lower-chassis is already being finished off, with the installation of the "rocket tunnel" as the last major piece of structural work on the car.
But hang on a minute, I've just said that we won't be using the rocket this year, so why are we fitting the titanium "tunnel" that the rocket sits in? There's a simple explanation.
The tunnel is a structural part of the car, adding torsional stiffness (in other words, reducing the tendency to twist) in the lower-chassis. After a lot of folding, drilling and riveting, the tunnel is now fully installed, some two weeks ahead of schedule - a great start by the workshop team.
Once the car is fully assembled and "workshop-tested", we'll aim to move down to Newquay by the start of October. So what's going to happen when we get to Newquay and how fast will the car go when you come to see it run?
The peak speed on the runway will depend on several things that we need to find out during our October test sessions, before the high-speed public runs at the end of the month. The first thing we need to know is how the jet engine performs at slow speed.
Bloodhound's jet air intake (the big upside-down mouth that sits just behind the cockpit) is optimised (i.e. it is the right size) for around 850mph,
For simplicity, Bloodhound has a fixed intake, designed to give maximum power (and minimum drag) at supersonic speeds, so it is deliberately made fairly small. This means that at very slow speeds, the intake will not be able to feed the EJ200 jet engine with all the air it needs, so we are likely to be power-limited until the car is well over 100mph.
Once we've tested the intake, we'll know how quickly we can accelerate the car.
That's only half the challenge though, as we have to stop the car again before reaching the other end of Newquay's 1.7-mile runway. That means measuring the precise grip of the high-speed aircraft tyres (which were not designed for a 5-tonne, jet-powered car) and measuring how much energy the brakes can absorb.
When we add together the engine intake limits, the acceleration distance, braking distance, brake energy limit, and so on, we'll come up with a maximum speed for runway runs.
We've announced an intention to do "up to 200mph". How fast do I think we can go? Here's the bit where I risk embarrassment by taking a guess. With a bit of luck, I think we'll be able to reach just over 200mph on the runway at Newquay. Want to find out?
Come and watch!