The Bloodhound Is Back, and Getting Ready to Set a New Land Speed Record

It’s a bit Everest, isn’t it?” For a brief moment, Ian Warhurst doesn’t sound like a mechanical engineer. Echoes of Henry Segrave, George Eyston, John Cobb, Malcolm and Donald Campbell, Art Arfons, Craig Breedlove—brave, quixotic adventurers who dreamed of being the fastest humans on earth—reverberate through the room. “You’re going into the unknown, doing something that no one else has done before.” A pause. “That’s got to be appealing, hasn’t it?”

A little over a year ago Warhurst was wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Having sold his turbocharger parts manufacturing business to an American corporation, he found himself at the age of 49 wealthy enough never to have to work again. But a WhatsApp message from his eldest son, Charlie, changed everything. “Hey Dad, have you seen that Bloodhound’s getting sold? Why don’t you buy it? Ha ha.”

Bloodhound. Warhurst had long known about the British project to set a new land speed record, not the least because he’d followed Bloodhound founder Richard Noble’s 1997 attempt with the Thrust SSC, driven by RAF fighter pilot Andy Green to a new record of 763.035 mph.

Noble’s canine-monikered follow-up to Thrust had begun in 2008, and Warhurst had been following its progress closely. He’d been given a gold supporter’s certificate by his brother in 2009 as a 40th birthday present. He’d also seen the Bloodhound car being used to inspire young people to take up science and engineering, a personal passion.

By 2018, however, the Bloodhound project had run out of money, the car having run just a handful of low-speed shakedown runs, to 200 mph, on an airfield in Cornwall, England. “I was surprised it was actually going to come to an end,” Warhurst recalls. “So I thought, ‘I wonder if I can help? I’m sitting here with a load of money in the bank and nothing to do. ‘”

Barely 10 months later Warhurst was standing on a dry lake in the Kalahari Desert watching Bloodhound become only the sixth car in history to top 600 mph.

That was never the plan.

When Warhurst contacted Noble, he learned bankruptcy administrators were planning to cut up Bloodhound and sell off some of its military-spec hardware. He raced to the project’s HQ in Bristol, west of London, met with chief engineer Mark Chapman, and made a quick decision.

“I realized that if I didn’t do a deal when I left the building,” he recalls, “the person coming in behind me would be carrying the angle grinder.” Within a week he’d set up a company and had become the proud owner of a land speed record team.

“I had no idea what to do next,” Warhurst admits. “I thought I was just buying the assets and would just hang on to them for a while and hand them back to the team.”

But the team—the technicians, fabricators, and support staff—had scattered as the money had dried up. And the sponsors, some of whom had been with the project for a decade, had also moved on. The more Warhurst looked at what he now owned, the more he became convinced that rather than sticking Bloodhound into a museum where people could ponder what might have been, he should enable it to do what it was designed to do: break the land speed record.

“The car had been designed; it’d been built,” he says. “All I had to do was get it out to the desert and run it.” Bloodhound was given a new white paint job (“a blank canvas”), the project’s name was tweaked to reflect its mission statement (Bloodhound LSR), and a new logo was developed. Warhurst believed he could find new sponsors to fund the land speed record runs. But first, Bloodhound had to prove itself.

Bloodhound had been designed in 2008 to hit 1,000 mph—a big, sexy number well above the existing record—but Warhurst quickly decided it wasn’t something the team should initially chase.

“Nobody really knew if it was possible to go 1,000 mph until we got to 850 mph,” he says, “and I’m thinking, ‘850 is a land speed record. That’s massive. Let’s just focus on that. ‘” The businessman in Warhurst kicks in. “If you have no idea what 1,000 mph looks like, how can you budget for it?” he asks, pointing out that to be safe, most people would double or triple their estimates and hope they had enough money. “That’s not how I run a project,” he insists. “I want to know what I’m doing, how I’m going to do it, and what the actual costs of that are going to be.”

The first phase of determining the cash burn involved a carefully planned high-speed testing program across the Hakskeen Pan dry lake in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. “I knew that if we’re going to do something with the car, it had to be straight away,” Warhurst says. “We had to get to the desert and actually do it; otherwise people would start losing interest.”

The public target for the test program was 500 mph. “If we got to 500, we’d have all the data we needed to go on to the next phase, the land speed record,” Warhurst says. The team’s internal target, however, was 1,000 kph (621 mph), a nice round number for the media to digest. Green—still a serving RAF officer, the current land speed record holder, and the man nominated to drive Bloodhound from the project’s inception—would drive.

Bloodhound arrived at Hakskeen Pan in the third week of October. As part of Noble’s original program, 317 members of the local Mier community, funded by the Northern Cape government, had during previous years moved a staggering 18,200 tons of rock—mostly small stones and pebbles that could be lethally damaging to a car traveling faster than the speed of sound—from 8.5 square miles of the lake surface, enough to mark out 25 separate 10-mile-long tracks with large safety areas on both sides.

“We couldn’t run over the same piece of ground twice because the car breaks up the baked mud surface,” Warhurst says. “We needed multiple tracks so we could build speed slowly and safely—going up in 50-mph steps, comparing real-world results with theoretical data.”

Bloodhound would run at Hakskeen Pan in “desert spec” for the very first time, the wheels with rubber tires used for the 200-mph test runs in Cornwall replaced by solid forged aluminum wheels measuring 35.4 inches in diameter, weighing 198 pounds each, and designed to spin at up to 10,200 rpm without being torn apart by centrifugal force. The wheels have a V-shaped profile that digs 0.6 inch into the dried mud when Bloodhound is stationary but is designed to make them plane across the surface at speed like a speedboat on water. At 500 mph, with just the tiniest fraction of metal in contact with the ground, the giant discs act more like rudders than wheels.

The first task: Firing up the Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine, whose 20,000 pounds of thrust—equivalent to 54,000 horsepower—is usually applied to powering the Eurofighter Typhoon, Europe’s front-line jet fighter. The engine had been in storage at Rolls-Royce since 2017, where it was filled with a corrosion inhibitor fluid. It took a few attempts to start, a task made more difficult by the 1,968-foot altitude and desert heat. But once the 25-strong Bloodhound LSR team had fixed a few minor issues (such as a faulty fuel pump sensor and a leaking coolant tank), Bloodhound was ready to roll.

Warhurst wasn’t the only one excited to see Bloodhound on the move in the desert for the first time: “I had people coming up to me shaking my hand, in tears, because they’d worked so hard for so long to finally get the car running.”

The ever-cool Green, however, treated the carefully designed series of test runs with the professional detachment of a test pilot. First, a static engine test, followed by a 100-mph check of the steering and brakes. Then a 200-mph run using max power without reheat—the afterburner—and a coast-down to establish rolling resistance. And finally, a 350-mph run using full reheat—Bloodhound thundering from 50 to 300 mph in 13 seconds—with stability tests before and after peak speed, then a coast-down after engine shutdown to measure rolling resistance without the jet engine’s idle thrust. This run also allowed to team to collect data on parachute deployment.

Finally, it’s the morning of November 16. Sunny, the temperature a mild 77 degrees, winds no more than 3 to 6 mph. Green straps in for Run 34. A white line runs from under Bloodhound’s low-slung nose straight across the baked brown crust to the far horizon. Green throttles up then lights the afterburner. Bloodhound takes just 7 seconds to go from 100 to 200 mph, and just 30 seconds after that to blast past 600 mph. Throughout, Green’s calm, clipped commentary sounds like someone reading a shopping list.

The team thought they’d hit 600 mph, the target for this run. But two of the three GPS units confirmed Bloodhound had brushed 628 mph—1,010 kph—before Green lifted. Bloodhound had proven it had the potential to beat the land speed record and passed the 1,000-kph mark for good measure. Warhurst and the team celebrated then packed up and headed back to Britain.

To break the land speed record, Bloodhound will need to be fitted with a rocket motor to provide additional thrust. The original design called for a hybrid rocket fueled by hydrogen peroxide and a carbon-based material, with a fuel pump powered by a 5.0-liter Jaguar V-8 engine.

In theory that setup would produce enough thrust to take Bloodhound to 1,000 mph. But, Warhurst says, taking the land speed record can be achieved with a less powerful mono-propellant rocket. And technological advances over the past decade or so have offered some simpler and safer solutions.

Norwegian rocket maker Nammo has developed a mono-propellant rocket powered by concentrated hydrogen peroxide that decomposes into steam and oxygen when pushed through a special catalyst mesh and delivers about three-quarters the thrust of the Rolls-Royce jet engine.

Instead of a Jaguar V-8 internal combustion engine powering the fuel pump, an electric motor will pump 42 liters of fuel per second into the rocket motor for 20 seconds. It’s a safer, more compact, more reliable solution, and the weight of the batteries can be better distributed in the car. The upgraded electrical system will also allow Bloodhound engineers to replace hydraulically actuated systems with faster, more reliable electric ones.

Assuming the funding is in place, the plan is to return to Hakskeen Pan in 2021 to attempt the record. “If we go in July and August the temperature there ranges from 32 to 68 degrees F, which is great for the jet engine, great for the humans, and great for the concentrated hydrogen peroxide, which you don’t really want sitting in steel containers on a hot desert floor,” Warhurst says.

The target? To average more than 763.035 mph over a measured mile, in two directions. That means dealing with a debris flow from the front wheels that can bend metal, countersteering against the gentlest crosswinds at 500 mph and more, and going supersonic for an extended period, something no other car has ever done. (Thrust SSC went supersonic for just over a second on its record-breaking run in 1997, triggering two almost simultaneous sonic booms.)

The science says it can be done. But until Green has throttled up, lit the afterburner, ignited the rocket engine, and driven Bloodhound through that mile in 4.5 seconds or less—each way—it’s still a journey into the unknown.

“I don’t wrestle this every day,” Warhurst says. “I’m doing it because it should be done.”