Articles
Over my 45 years as an engineer – I started as an apprentice back in 1950 – I have been struck by the dramatic changes in public attitudes to risk.
Post World War Two, risk was an accepted part of life. Although there were fewer cars on the road and far less combined mileage travelled, the number of accidents was far higher than today.
Automotive design was rudimental back then: there was no internal padding, no collapsible steering wheels, no crumple zones and no seatbelts. The pressing need to reduce risk simply hadn’t got through.
All that changed in 1965 with the publication of Ralph Nader’s seminal book Unsafe at Any Speed. Eventually unsafe cars became unsellable, and nowadays safety is at the forefront of consumers’ minds when they make a purchase.
In my own specialist area of land-speed record racing, a more enlightened attitude to risk had also started to emerge. The early days of record attempts were characterised by a gung-ho spirit, with little regard for driver safety. But I could see that technology was advancing and that there needed to be a more scientific approach to land-speed record attempts.
With my background in the aircraft industry, I started using aerospace testing methodology during the development of the Thrust supersonic car. Having used computational fluid dynamics in the design phase, we needed to validate the results with a step-by-step, highly instrumented test-run programme. We tiptoed towards the speed of sound, rather than adopting the old-fashioned attitude of putting our foot down and charging towards the target.
Some of the increments we achieved when testing the car were as little as 0.01 of a Mach number, because I feared the onset of unsteady flow characteristics. But that never happened, and we edged forward to prove that it wasn’t going to be a problem. It was just like testing a prototype aircraft.
Even then, I was sometimes accused of irresponsibility for even trying to go faster than the speed of sound. The programme was considered by many people to be ludicrously dangerous.
I remember having a confrontational conversation with a qualified engineer who was so convinced that we would have an accident that he said when it happened he would go public and say he had warned me. I explained the risks I perceived, and I put across what I was doing to counter them. And I said: “If you can tell me why those precautions won’t work, I will stop the project.” He couldn’t give me an answer.
Now, on the Bloodhound supersonic car, we aim to get to 1,000mph – travelling 31% faster than we did with Thrust, and 60% faster than any other team in the world has ever gone. We are exploring new areas of dynamic, aerodynamic and engineering knowledge. And so we will use the same careful, step-by-step process as we move towards our aim.
During testing, there will be something like 300 instruments on the car – and any of our engineers will be able to object at any point if they think anything is unsafe. Unless we have everyone on the team onboard at all stages, we won’t go any further.
So will we get to 1,000mph? I would never be foolish enough to commit myself and say we are definitely going to achieve that. But the project is progressing well – we have 250 high-tech global engineering firms supplying knowledge and components. We have a structured test programme, and in Andy Green we have a remarkable driver with the best reflexes I have ever seen. We are confident in what we are doing and how we are going about it.
On a project such as Bloodhound, there will always be an element of risk. It’s the nature of the game. But if we thought that any particular risk was unacceptable, the project would be stopped tomorrow.