Nothing that I’ve done all year has made me feel luckier to earn my living this way than to spend a chunk of yesterday with Richard Noble and Andy Green, discussing precisely how the former is going to arrange for the latter to drive across the surface of the planet at over 1000mph.
As you might imagine, raising the cash to finance such a project is not easy at the best of times, let alone in the current economic climate. Then again, we are all in dire need of something to feel good about, and you if can’t get excited about and a car that’ll do London to Birmingham in six minutes, you need to have a long hard look at yourself in the mirror.
Full details of what was said will be in the mag soon, but some flavour of their mindset can be found in their mission statement which reads: ‘To confront the impossible and overcome it.’
Noble is as inspirational now as he was 25 years ago when he relieved the Americans of their stranglehold on the Land Speed Record, by driving across the Nevada desert at 633mph, his Thrust 2 car right on the point of becoming an aircraft.
Meanwhile Green, the only person ever to have been supersonic on land, continues to talk about breaking the Land Speed Record as if there was nothing particularly unusual about driving across the face of the planet at 766mph.
Clearly 1000mph is a challenge of an entirely different magnitude, but if anyone can do it, these guys can. But they need your help. They need to you go to their website, www.bloodhoundssc.com, join the 1K club and give them £20 for your slice of whatever they achieve.
If you question its worth, look at the video below and ride in car with Green as he goes through the sound barrier for the
first time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHnNxMJLfvA
Then watch Noble being interviewed seconds after claiming his Thrust 2 record.
When asked why he’d done it, he replied simply: ‘For Britain and the hell of it.’ If that’s not worth 20 quid, I don’t know what it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6uwlWhcmGI