A bell rings. ‘Oh, God, what
the hell is that?’ Richard Noble curses, throws down his glasses and sweeps
his receding
mane of greying hair from his brow in a gesture that suggests he is near
the end of his tether.
He runs heavily downstairs to the intercom which connects to the gates
on the private estate in Surrey, where he lives.
‘Hello, who is it?’ he barks.
No answer. He curses, and rushes
back to me. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. Always something. Where were
we?’ he asks,
searching around for his glasses and asking me if I have seen them. I
remind him that he was talking about the problem of
attracting young people into engineering.
Same routine: ‘Oh, God.’ Sweeping
hair. Down to intercom. This time he presses the right button and a voice
comes
through. It is Ian Glover – the president and organiser of the ‘1K Club’
of enthusiasts who are supporting Noble’s Bloodhound
SSC (Supersonic Car) project. Noble has obviously forgotten that he has
arranged this meeting. He buzzes to let Glover
through and comes back with a sheepish grin to say, ‘Things are a bit
chaotic at the moment, I’m afraid.’
Glover is brought up to the
dining room, where I am introduced. He says he will sit quietly on a sofa,
and gets out his laptop.
Noble and I then try again to pick up the threads of our interview. After
a short time, Noble is obviously getting edgy.
‘How much longer do we need?’ he asks. ‘Can we cut this short? Sorry. I
do need to talk to Ian.’ We fold our papers
and Noble drives me to a nearby rail station, where he is visibly relieved
to get rid of me.
In an artist or an academic,
this chaotic performance might be amusing and endearing. But in a man who
is organising
an attempt to build a jet-and-rocket-powered car which Andy Green – the
current land-speed record holder
– will drive at 1,000mph, Noble’s behaviour seems rather alarming.
Where you might expect the calm super-efficiency of Nasa or the McLaren
Formula One team, Noble gives the impression
of a man who is working under unbearable strain (he tells me that he is
at his desk from 7am to past midnight every day)
and is living in desperately trying conditions.
‘This is the most exciting thing you can do on God's Earth,’ he tells
me, ‘but it’s incredibly stressful.’
The house where we met, at the
end of last year, belongs to his grown-up daughter and he is staying there
because
his own marriage has recently broken up. Piles of Noble’s belongings –
books and papers and posters and files and folders
– line the walls and are heaped on tables.
Is it possible that such a seemingly
chaotic, ex-public school windbag could be capable of the outlandish, pioneering
feat
that he is proposing to attempt? 1,000mph for a car is simply off the
chart of human endeavour.
In its 110-year history, the
land-speed record (the speed of a car over a measured mile, with two timed
runs in opposite
directions within a single hour) has often been raised by fractional increments,
with sudden leaps in between.
Nobody has ever raised the record by even as much as 20 per cent.
The one who came closest to
bringing that off was Andy Green himself on September 25 1997, driving
Thrust SSC
at 760.343mph across the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
If, in 2010, as Noble intends,
Green drives Bloodhound SSC at 1,000mph, he will raise his own 13-year-old
record by
almost 33 per cent.
Despite Noble’s jumbled haystack
act, however, there are probably no two men on earth more likely to pull
of this unfeasible
achievement than Richard Noble and Andy Green.
Noble himself broke the land-speed
record in 1983 when he was 37, driving his turbojet-propelled car Thrust2
at 633mph.
Fourteen years later, when Green became the first man on Earth to drive
a car through the sound barrier, Noble was the
project director for Green’s car, Thrust SSC.
They have proved their courage
and their ability in this stratospherically demanding pursuit of record
breaking
– which involves the highest achievements of engineering and aeronautics.
The most critical problem with
a car travelling at hundreds of miles an hour is simply finding a way to
stop it lifting
off the ground like a plane. Green and Noble have been searching all over
the world for a suitable site for the
record attempt.
The salt flats in Utah and the
Black Rock Desert in Nevada are now not smooth enough (Green almost lost
control of
Thrust SSC over the ruts of Black Rock). Sites in Australia and South
Africa might be possible but some would have to
be cleared of pebbles by hand; a single marble-sized stone could cause
catastrophe.
I have spent an afternoon with
Green in the past and found him to be an authentic hero in the Boy’s Own
mould.
He was self-effacing, funny, mentally dazzling, super-fit and – as his
record proved – courageous beyond the conception
of ordinary, earthbound mortals. When we first met in the early 2000s,
he was the RAF’s Top Gun instructor, training
combat pilots for Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the late Nineties, he was
a detachment commander for British fighters in the No-Fly zone of Southern
Iraq.
Earlier that decade, he had been flying Tornados in Operation Deny Flight
in Bosnia.
Green won dive-bombing prizes
at RAF Chivenor and graduated as best student on Phantoms.
With such a record, he might now be on his way to commanding the RAF’s
entire parade.
But his career CV is less than half the story with Andy Green.
As if becoming the fastest man
on Earth was not enough to fulfil his desire for death-defying excitement,
Green was also
– as he remains – captain and lead man for the RAF’s Cresta Run bobsleigh
team, is an enthusiastic skydiver and
– a recent development – motor-racing driver.
Lean as a flagpole at over 6ft
4in, with a professional athlete’s BMI of under 22, he runs between 30
and 50 miles a week,
works out in the gym and, at 47, weighs exactly the same 83kgs today as
he did 12 years ago when he drove Thrust SSC.
He has an innocent, boyish enthusiasm that is completely authentic.
Noble affirms that Green has never asked to be paid a penny for his efforts.
Other record-breakers indefatigably
promote themselves on the after-dinner speaking circuit and earn sumptuous
fees
on the back of their adventures. Not Andy Green. ‘Why on earth would I
want to do that?’ he says with unfeigned bemusement.
‘I can hardly think of anything I would enjoy less.’
We met again in November 2008
– a few weeks after Noble and Green had announced the Bloodhound project
– at the MoD’s HQ just behind Whitehall, where Andy has now been working
for two years.
Where Noble expresses everything
in a pitch of the highest hyperbole, Green was at pains to put the 1,000mph
target
into more modest, realistic terms. ‘If we only get to 900mph,’ he said,
‘it would still be a huge success. I am only 50 per cent
convinced that 1,000mph is possible but it’s going to be interesting to
find out. If I’m not completely convinced at the time
that it is attainable then it isn’t going to happen. There’s nothing derring-do
about this.
I absolutely won’t attempt 1,000mph unless I am certain that it’s do-able.’
Despite his confidence and matter-of-factness,
I found myself increasingly uneasy about the prospects for this project.
It was being launched at the most adverse moment for half a century in
the capitalist world’s economic affairs.
Global corporations were slashing their marketing and sponsorship budgets
to zero.
Richard Noble’s chances of raising the $20 million necessary to fund the
project in such a climate seemed almost risible.
Meanwhile, I suddenly realised
the 1,000mph target itself was largely nugatory. It may be a magical figure
in Britain but it
means nothing to two-thirds of the world’s population. For those people,
what counted was the 1,000km/h record that the
American race car driver of Croatian descent, Gary Gabelich, achieved
almost 40 years ago. Are they likely to feel that a
miraculous number has been achieved and a genuine frontier reached if Andy
Green drives Bloodhound at 1,609.344km/h?
Then, too, I started to have
doubts about Noble and Green’s enthusiasm for the social and educational
benefits of the project.
The Government – in the person of Lord Drayson, Minister of State for
Science and Innovation – has committed $600,00
to the educational development of the Bloodhound project, encouraging
schools to use it as a teaching aid for science,
maths and technology. Noble and Green both believe this effort will encourage
young people to see the magical potential
of engineering and, in future, help to relieve the dearth of graduate
engineers in Britain.
Late in Spring 2009, I check
in with Bloodhound’s media representatives, half expecting to be told that
Noble had run into
impossible barriers in raising money and that the entire undertaking was
on hold. On the contrary, they say, it’s roaring along.
Fund-raising is going well. Sponsors are lining up. Design work is on
schedule. A 1K Club meeting is being arranged in
Bristol where Noble and Green will speak.
In a big shed on the campus,
they lift a garage door on a roller to reveal the MDF skeleton of Bloodhound.
It looks like the
backbone of a colossal dinosaur, so long at more than 40ft that it has
to be edged into the shed sideways.
Cradled in the undercarriage of this framework is an engine that looks
just about big enough to power a Formula One
racing car. ‘Is that… the engine?’ asks a timorous enthusiast. ‘No,’ laughs
Mark Chapman, the senior design engineer,
who is showing us the mock-up: this is nothing but the fuel pump for the
rocket. It’s an 800bhp V12 engine (which is actually
more powerful than a contemporary F1 engine) the sole purpose of which
is to pump a ton of high test peroxide at 1,100psi
into the rocket in a 17-second burn.
The jet that will propel the
car up to 300mph comes from a Eurofighter Typhoon engine. The rocket which
sits on top of
the jet is a Falcon, developing 25,000lbs of thrust. Add that to the jet’s
20,000lbs of thrust and Andy Green will be sitting
on enough power to put him into space if the vehicle was intended to lift
off.
When Green speaks, he describes
the 9g load of gravity for which he must train, a load which would snap
a normal person
into a blackout instaneously. ‘What happens if you do black out?’ someone
asks. Green looks at him for a long, still second
and then says, ‘We have to make absolutely sure that doesn’t happen.’
Making sure that won’t happen
is the preoccupation of the team’s leading aerodynamicist, Ron Ayers, the
world’s most
successful expert in this field. Ayers explains that wind-tunnel tests
are impossible for this project because you can’t simulate
a model moving over the ground at 1,000mph. It has to be developed entirely
by computer fluid dynamics.
One of his colleagues is Anne
Beresford. When I tell her I can’t see this project exciting schoolgirls
and luring them into
engineering, she answers, ‘I can see why you think that but my position
has always been that engineering ought to be
an option for girls, not something they should be dragged into.’
When I ask her if she is confident
that the project will succeed, she immediately answers ‘Oh, God, yes.
There’s no doubt in my mind. If we can’t do it, nobody can.’
