As car launches go, you have to say this is being successful. If a tad unconventional.

For one thing it is taking place at 0800 on a Thursday morning at the Science Museum in Kensington – not a timing likely to endear the event to persons who live a long way from Kensington. I’m told the hour is something to do with live morning TV, and find myself regarding the (very charming) TV crews with a malevolence they do not personally deserve.

For another thing, there is a significant absentee here. Namely, the car. The car is conspicuously not among those present.

It is 40 years since I was a motoring journalist, but one thing I do remember is that if you’re launching a car it is normally de rigueur to produce the car. I mean it’s sort of traditional. If you’re launching a car you have the bloody car on the stand, right?

Er, well, not this morning.

What we have this morning is a three-foot long model of a possible car, and Richard Noble on the stand. He kind of replaces any mere car. World Speed Record setter in Thrust 2 at 633 mph a quarter century ago, and driving force – no, not just driving force, irresistible force against all opposition – in creating Thrust SSC and seeing it through until in 1997 a certain fighter pilot called Andy Green finally bust the sound-barrier in that hazardous device at 763 mph. What you would call anywhere – forgive me – a man of balls. Two men of balls.

When Richard describes a car – albeit so far non-existent – then 300 hardened journalists stand up and listen to him. They do not in fact have any physical choice in this matter, since seats are not provided – but all around me, they stand and listen to Richard Noble.

If Richard says there will be a car called BLOODHOUND SSC – Supersonic Car – then there will be such a car. If Richard says it will accelerate by jet engine and rocket booster to reach 1,000 mph – then of course it will. Well, maybe, anyway. If Richard says he can find the finance for it – of course he can. If Andy Green says he can drive it – of course he can.

I am, perhaps, among others in fervently hoping that Richard Noble does not step out of the Science Museum and walk under a Number 8 bus.

I wonder – I do wonder – if the whole project could survive without him. Being a tactless soul who has known Richard for many years I present this notion to him in the aftermath of the launch speeches. He blinks for a moment and then laughs – a sound not unlike an empty oil-drum rolling down an escalator – and says the project has now acquired an inertia of its own. ‘With the team we now have – of course it would survive!’

Personally, I’m sure Richard’s right….  well, not entirely sure.

You don’t meet many Richard Nobles in the course of a lifetime. I see Richard as a sort of buccaneering super-salesman powered by some kind of internal jet engine all of his own. For 25 years I ran an aerobatic display operation which required industrial sponsorship at all times so that we might indulge the foible of eating as often as we flew. In that quarter-century, at the expense of much nerve-chewing effort, I achieved a whole six major sponsorships at various intervals. In that same time period, for his record attempts, Richard Noble pulled in more like 200 sponsors…..

Never mind the small detail of his being a Land Speed Record driver – he is also the most dynamic human being I have ever met. When with him I avoid telephone kiosks because I can never shake off the feeling that he’s going to dart into one, re-appear five seconds later in a red leotard and a blue cape, say “Excuse me” politely, and whiz up to the executive suites of the nearest office tower to raise more sponsorship. Talk to Richard for 10 seconds and you come away feeling you’re the greatest buddy he’s ever encountered. Talk to him for a minute and his sheer enthusiasm crackles into you and quivers in the wall behind you. And he can seemingly do this all day and every day and with all persons – back-room boffins, captains of industry, scientists, volunteer-mechanics, the board of a university, peers of the realm, politicians, government ministers, wide-eyed ten year-old kids – you name it. The world should be eternally thankful that Richard Noble did not choose to run the Mafia.

Take just one example. Try this. Walk into the Ministry of Defence and say, ‘ Hey, I hear you have a couple of EJ200 jet engines left over from the Eurofighter prototype programme. Could I sorta borrow them for a few years?’

MoD will politely explain to you exactly where the door is.

Unless, of course, you happen to be Richard Noble, backed by Lords and Ministers you have carefully hypnotised. Then the nice people at the MoD say; ‘Certainly, Richard, how many do you want?’

I think of this as the Noble Factor.

Witness there is one EJ200 jet engine – a Eurofighter Typhoon engine, no less – sitting on a trestle in the Science Museum on this yawning morning.

It may have cost more to develop than the Science Museum.

That’s going into the BLOODHOUND.  A second one is available if required. It is among the most efficient and high-tech military jet engines in the world.

On another trestle is the casing of the Falcon rocket which will sit atop the EJ200, the idea being to wind BLOODHOUND up to about 300 mph on the jet – which sure ain’t gonna take long – and then punch in the rocket in case Andy Green is getting bored. This rocket, they say, will produce 25,000 lbs of thrust to add to the jet’s 20,000 lbs.

Now what I know about rockets can be written on the back of a stamp. But I do know that adding 25,000 lb of thrust to 20,000 lbs at 300 mph is going to be (a) noticeable, and (b) distinctly non-boring.

Also on the stand is an 800 hp V12 racing car engine. A piston engine.

Hang on – a piston engine?

Ah. Turns out it will sit transversely behind the pilot seat and be the fuel pump for the rocket engine.

The what? The fuel pump?

Ahem. Well, yes. We need to deliver a tonne of High Test Peroxide at 1,100 psi to the rocket for its 22 second burn-time. So this is driving the pump. It also starts the main engine and runs the hydraulics.
An 800 hp fuel pump. For maybe the first half of Land Speed Record history an 800 hp engine was enough – more than enough – to drive the car and hoist the record.

Now 800 hp is just the fuel pump.

Somehow, staring at this – this 800 hp fuel pump – brings home to me in the bleak and echoing London Science Museum the enormity of the Bloodhound project.

The objective – 1,000 mph. Mach 1.4. Faster than most current fighter aircraft. Needing an 800 hp fuel pump…..

Oh, and Mach 1.4 on the ground, which kinda complicates things.

Wind tunnel tests?  No. For one thing they are truly hideously expensive, and for another they cannot realistically reproduce the conditions of this speed for a ground-borne vehicle, it being difficult to pass model ground under a model car at 1,000 mph. So you do the design by computer generation. They call it a Computer Fluid Dynamics programme.

Here, sadly, I glaze over. My computer competence begins and ends with pressing the Start button and giving the thing a surreptitious kick if it doesn’t fire up. All I really know is if they get it seriously wrong then Andy Green could acquire a major problem whose middle name is Sudden. But that is not news. Andy knows that. Richard knows that. The Team know that. Dwelling on it is rightly not a thought.
But 1,000 mph….?

The team? In the Science Museum on this morning are one not-young guy – Ron Ayers, the legendary aerodynamicist of the Bloodhound missile and Thrust SSC, and a man I definitely address with an extremely respectful ‘Sir’ – and maybe twenty definitely young people who vary from geek-looking to up-and-coming-sleek-looking.

They are The Team.

When you talk to Ron Ayers it is like talking to a local department of God. And when you talk to these young folk they are hugely, mightily impressive. If I was gonna drive this Bloodhound – which I can say fairly cheerily, since the prospect of my being asked to drive it is approximately 1,000,000-to-one – then this is the team I’d want to have behind me.

This team put together by Richard Noble.

Oh, there is hugely more here than I have touched on, or even taken in at this hour of the morning in this museum. There is the educational aspect – the involvement with schools – which has been explained to me five times and which I have understood five times for about three minutes each time and then kinda lost track of. The theme here is STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths – and it seems the idea is to use the BLOODHOUND project to get kids more fired-up about STEM than they are about the latest pop-group, being as how Britain is pretty well supplied with pop fans already but could certainly do with more scientists. The objective is obvious – it is the methodology I keep forgetting every three minutes, and over my third tepid coffee I resolve to investigate it at a later date. That any many other aspects.

There is also a Lord talking to us this morning. One Lord Drayson, the Minister for Science and Innovation. He actually talks a lot of sense, which must make him feel a bit out of things in the Westminster fishpond. He talks about STEM too, emphasising (and I paraphrase) that BLOODHOUND is a sexy way of pulling youngsters into science and engineering degrees. I find myself thinking that if the Establishment didn’t offer quite so many easy degree options such as sociology and fashion studies the problem might not be quite so acute, but nonetheless our Lord is right. He has taken on board the message and is passing it on.

I find myself glancing at Richard. He is neither swinging a hypnotic watch nor wearing a red leotard.
There are many things I have yet to learn about the BLOODHOUND project. I am but an outside commentator. I am looking at it from outside the box.

But Richard, don’t you go walking under any No 8 buses, you hear me? The need for the Noble Factor is far from over.