You’re a law-abiding citizen and you’re going to drive a car at 70 mph.

Okay, so what back-up do you need?

Well, you’ll say, nothing. You turn the key, proceed on your journey, and hit 70 in the appropriate places en route as you go. No, you don’t need back-up…

Or is that right?

In fact when you think about it there is a huge amount of back-up.

At it’s most basic, there are roads. Which did not materialise overnight.

And there are fuel stops every few miles.

And there are food emporiums every few miles.

And there are garages where you take your car to be serviced – a choice of thousands of them.

And in the event of any misfortune there is the Fire Brigade to Wee-Waw its way to you and unravel the car from your person. And an Ambulance Service to similarly  Wee-Waw said person to the nearest centre of human bodily repair.

Oh yes, there’s back-up all right. It is called infrastructure.

So now want to drive at 1,000 mph?

You want to drive a car at 1,000 mph? Ah – well, now you need a vast dead-flat mud playa. Which has – guess what – no infrastructure. Zero. Zilch. Nothing.

Road? You are in a desert.

Fuel stops? You are in a desert.

Food? Ditto.

Garages? Ditto.

Emergency services? You are in a very unfriendly desert.

No. If you aim to drive a car at 1,000 mph, there most decidedly is no infrastructure. Which means you have to bring in your own infrastructure in the shape of back-up vehicles various. And since a ground-born 1,000 mph car is not so much an automobile as a kind of surface-hugging spaceship, some of these back-up vehicles are going to veer a smidgen towards the weird and wonderful.

In fact, take a guess at how many support vehicles are needed for BLOODHOUND to run. Go on, take a guess…

All right, an unfair question. And indeed, the answer is not finally defined even now.

But it will be in the region of 30 vehicles, 11 trailers, and at least four aircraft.

When you say BLOODHOUND SUPERSONIC CAR quickly, these little logistical details tend to sort of get lost in the turbulence. Almost as if BLOODHOUND will drive from its point of origin to the run-site under its own steam, frying 843 cars in its jet efflux in the process. (Not unfairly in a brutally amusing sort of way, since 843 drivers out of every 1,000 habitually insist on driving too close to the car in front and thereby cause a great number of unnecessary accidents).

But in fact the logistical problems are very real. And their solutions very, very essential.
Essential, yes. But with the roll-out of BLOODHOUND – never mind the first runs – more than a year away at best, surely not exactly urgent?

We-ell – yes and no. In fact call it yes – yes, parts of it are urgent. I’ll come back to that.

BLOODHOUND obviously needs a major vehicle manufacturer on board to provide – sponsor – the bulk of these vehicles. Not necessarily the whole lot, because it is entirely possible that a company who produces luxury cars or another who produces lorries may not have considered in their specifications such small matters such as withdrawing a warm-ish rocket-casing from a car and replacing it with a fresh one, there not being widespread demand for same.

So the support vehicle sponsor or sponsors have some interesting times ahead. Some of the vehicles will be pretty much standard – but others will very definitely not be…

And at this point I have to come over slightly coy.

The BLOODHOUND Project keeps no secrets. It says here. The team are still optimising the last of the aerodynamic problems – come look, it’s all on the website. They’re still working on the wheels – come look, both BLOODHOUND’s and Lockheed Martin’s research is there for all to see.

Support vehicle sponsors? Well, there are….er, sorry, I can’t tell you how many there are. They are…. er, well, I can’t tell you their names, either. These things are commercial secrets for the moment at the behest of the potential sponsors themselves for most obvious reasons, not least being that those who don’t get a look-in would hardly like to have it breezed about the joint.

I am personally consumed with a sort of retrospective envy. When I was flying aerobatics I used to pursue sponsoring car companies with an avidity which fell somewhere between Lothario and an SAS sniper. Yes, I successfully had four major automotive sponsors at various times over a quarter-century period – but the acquisition and retention of same used up all the tact and persuasion bones in the Lecomber bloodline for several generations to come. And here’s BLOODHOUND with auto-makers actually vying for the privilege. Pardon me while I turn around in my lair a couple of times and sulk for a bit. But watch this space – the outcome may be quite soon.

So just what does BLOODHOUND need?

Well, to start with it’s worth bearing in mind that many vehicles concerned with the actual record runs need to be twinned. You need two each of a variety of vehicles.

The reasons for this are several – some obvious, and some slightly less so. Obviously you need safety cover as BLOODHOUND fires up at the launch point, and equally obviously you cannot abandon the thing shrieking away stationary in pre-run mode while you potter all the emergency and support vehicles ten miles up-desert to the turn-around point. Health and safety principles would purse their lips. So possibly would the APU piston engine’s ice-based cooling system. And so would Richard Noble and Andy Green. Possibly especially Andy Green.

The same goes for the fuelling vehicles. Once they’ve fuelled BLOODHOUND at the start-point then they themselves have to be re-fuelled and by the time you’ve done that…

So you have to double-up a number of these vehicles – one team at the launch-point, and the other ready, organised, and wagging its tail at the turn-around point.

Priority one is the emergency vehicles. We all know of course that BLOODHOUND will run perfectly straight, have no snags whatsoever and be as reliable as a car with Rolls Royce stamped on it. But priority one is still the emergency vehicles…

The sexy side of this is First Response, or Rapid Intervention. All fire/rescue vehicles have to have a reasonable turn of speed – it being, for example, not a lot of use trundling at 20 mph down a two-mile runway with a burning aircraft at the end of it – but BLOODHOUND, whose whole raison d’etre is to be ten miles away within 90 seconds, does add a kinda new dimension to the issue. Here the team need vehicles capable of carrying onboard two kitted-out and fully trained fire/rescue crew complete with breathing apparatus, a large water tank for diluting an HTP spill, separate foam fire-retardent, pump and hoses for the delivery of same, plus equipment for dealing with an HTP injury. A specification which looks complex but not over-daunting to a vehicle sponsor – until you add that said vehicle should also be capable of winding up smartly to 140 mph or preferably faster…

After the run-preparations are complete these cars – or more likely large 4 X 4’s – will slam off at high speed, one to position three miles down-track and the other at six miles – the idea being that there will always be a First Response vehicle never more than four miles from any embarrassment.  As BLOODHOUND passes them they will set off in pursuit with the pedal to the metal.

Not exactly a normal vehicle requirement.

And then there are the cranes. Two of.

These are the mother-ships of BLOODHOUND. In many ways.

First and foremost they are Second Response emergency vehicles, armed with much more water and foam than First Response, even heftier fire-fighting kit, cutting, jacking and spreading gear, crew breathing apparatus, and most of the rest of the paraphernalia carried by, say, an airport fire engine. Plus, above all, the capability of very rapidly picking BLOODHOUND up wholly or at least partially should a roll-over accident have inconvenienced Andy Green’s ability to open the canopy. No-one expects this of course – but you sure as hell have to have a plan for it.

Which in turn means the cranes have to be quick. Which your average crane is not exactly famed for. Nobody expects a Second Response vehicle to hit 140 mph, but it does need to wind up to at least half that. Which possibly argues a semi-military type of unit with a crane on the back which can not only pack a whole lot of weight but also crank up to a decent rate of knots while so doing.

Call that the first priority of the crane vehicles. There are others.

At the start-point you need a crane to lift BLOODHOUND up while the transporter drives out from under it. Okay, there are at least three other potential ways of getting the car to the start-point, any one of them possibly valid – but the fact is that you DO need a crane at the other end anyway, to lift the thing up so you can get at the wheels to test them for cracks in between runs. There is much discussion about how this may be best achieved. For example you could lift the front end first to do the front wheels and then the back end to do the back – but this has the slight disadvantage that as soon as you lift the back end the long nose goes hunting for worms with the pitot tube, which could be inconvenient.

Your old Grandmother might have advised you never to take a betting tip from Lecomber, but my money says the team will end up craning the whole car so they can do visual and eddy-current checks on all four wheels at the same time very quickly. And if you’re crane-lifting the car at one end of the run it makes sense to do it the same way at the other end as well, if only to keep all the procedures and kit the same.

And this is where the matter acquires a certain degree of urgency. Because if you’re going to design lifting points (and/or towing points) into BLOODHOUND, now is the time to do it. In an ideal world the team would rather not have to design-in craning points at all because they can only add complication, at least two more quick-access panels, and above all the greatest enemy, weight. But this wicked world of ours is not ideal, and there is reluctant acceptance of the fact that you’re going to look a bit of a dork if you leave them out at this stage and then decide later that you have to have them. And so they have to be designed-in now.

Which means you also need to design your lifting tackle, which needs to connect-up real fast and I imagine sure as hell ain’t gonna be nothing so simple as a couple of chains.
And that in turn means you need to know all about the crane and the craning vehicle. Not in a year’s time, but within the next few weeks.

It does not end there.

The crane vehicles obviously need to be hefty, because if you try to lift up a fully-fuelled seven-tonne BLOODHOUND and the crane-truck then falls over onto the car you are again going to look a dork. In theory the cranes are only ever going to be lifting a fuel-exhausted BLOODHOUND of about five-and-a-half tonnes – but do you wanna bet on it? If at some time BLOODHOUND can’t think up a reason for being hoisted fully-fuelled then I for one will be most astonished.

These above are what I tend to think of as the aggressive vehicles, highly modified and adapted to their roles. But the requirement doesn’t end there. Oh, dear me, no.
You need two pick-ups carrying jet fuel for the EJ200 plus the appropriate pumping gear for re-fuelling. They will also tow trailers carrying pressurised nitrogen, de-ionised water, clean water – and of all things a freezer unit holding enough ice to launch a thousand cocktails. This last because the Auxiliary Power Unit is ice-cooled – air intakes for a radiator being much frowned-upon – and the coolant needs to be sucked out into a drain-tank after each run and the ice replenished. (The freezers – or one of them at least – might in fact end up on the crane vehicle, but this is a bit early for final definition).

Then you need a couple of vehicles for positioning the jet engine start-carts. These vehicles to also double-up for towing de-FODing gear – a posh expression for removing any last small stones from the run-track before each run.

Then you need two Pariah tank vehicles.

These will carry the  ‘passivated’ tanks containing 1,000 litres per copy of High Test Peroxide plus all their esoteric and equally passivated pumping gear – in other words the rocket fuel, or more accurately the rocket fuel oxidizer. These two vehicles are destined to be lonely because you most definitely do not park an HTP tanker anywhere near a Jet A1 tanker or indeed practically anything else you can think of from the family cat onwards. Technically, HTP does not by itself explode in a fiery ball, but under certain – call it almost any – circumstances of leaks and especially contamination it can produce high enough temperatures for everything else around it to combust and explode, which combustion the HTP then enthusiastically magnifies. So you park the two HTP tankers about a mile away from camp and at least a mile away from each other and the central storage point…

I think I’ll go light my pipe somewhere else.

To continue. Then there’s the vehicle needed to carry the kit to haul out the spent rocket casing and insert a fresh one. This may be done by the crane trucks, who may also carry the fresh rockets. May – but there is time to cogitate that and find the best solution. Could be one or even two different vehicles.

Then there’s the track layout truck, with line-painting gear and specialist GPS so it can paint a dead-straight line 12 miles long in the middle of … nothing. This is going to be especially busy because BLOODHOUND’s going to need anything up to fifty tracks and the eco-friendly paint doesn’t last long before it gets covered in dust or just sort of disappears into the eco.

And then there’s the Control Centre – an artic lorry with the trailer as a control room linked up to all the car telemetry, everyone else on the site, and – not joking – probably five or six satellites as well.

Then there’s the ‘Laptop Van’ at the other end of the run, tapped into the control centre.
Then there’s a mobile clean workshop – probably a lorry of about ten tonnes –which will have an interior like an operating theatre for working on highly delicate mechanisms.

And then there are security vehicles – at least four of same.

And then there is catering, because however much a 40 or 50-strong team may live on drive and determination they’re still going to need the odd fried egg from time to time.

And then there is the BLOODHOUND transporter itself, an air-ride low-loader artic provided by Graham Lockwood of Wigan, whose motto seems to be “Right lad, let’s just go do it – don’t matter what it takes!”

And then there’s two aircraft, probably microlites because of their superb visibility, to survey the track before each run. Plus an Air Ambulance aircraft on standby.

And – last but by no means least, although at this stage a bit of a distant dream – perhaps one of the biggest cargo-freight aircraft in the world. An Airbus Beluga, Antonov 124, Boeing 747 Freighter or Lockheed Galaxy would be nice to get BLOODHOUND and accoutrements to South Africa. Not drop-dead essential, perhaps, but much preferable to a time-consuming sea trip followed by a dockside crane driver dropping the vital container the last ten feet and saying “Oops – butterfingers”.

It’s called infrastructure. And taking it with you.