As 2015 is the year that the BLOODHOUND project will take our supersonic car to South Africa to attempt to beat the world land speed record, this year we plan to publish regular updates charting the car’s progress towards testing in Newquay in August and then on to South Africa in September.

How many parts are there in the BLOODHOUND car?

BLOODHOUND SSC is an extremely complex piece of kit with around 100,000 discrete parts – and that’s only if you count the EJ200 jet engine, the Jaguar V8 engine and the Nammo rocket as one part each. Of these, 2500 have been designed by the BLOODHOUND engineering team.

The big pieces, such as the monocoque, the upper and lower chassis and the front suspension sub-frame, are already in place, but there are still around 600 parts to be designed and 1,300 to make.

Working out a timescale

Each of the steps required for designing, making and assembling the BLOODHOUND car were worked out very early on and then the team identified their interdependency. The longest chain of interdependent steps gives you a “critical path”, which determines the entire duration of the project.

In July 2013, this process gave us an end date for completing the car of the end of 2016. However, by allocating additional resources to the project, and specifically to steps on that critical path, we managed to reduce its overall duration, allowing us to plan to run the car in 2015.

Project timeline

As we head into race year, we now have a simpler method for visualising the project’s key milestones and targets, so that all of the BLOODHOUND team and our supporters can see what we are aiming to do and when.

Figure 1 - BLOODHOUND overall project timeline and key targets

The good news is that all is on schedule. We even marginally exceeded our end-of-year manufacturing targets in December 2014, which is great news. There is still a lot to do, but we have the resources in place to allow us to take the car to Hakskeen Pan in South Africa in September.

Find out more

We will post further, regular updates on the progress of the car during this race year. Meanwhile, on BLOODHOUND BLAST you can read a more detailed version of this report, with further information about:

• the complexity of the car
• why critical paths are important in any project planning
• details of the major ‘work packages’ that go together to create a supersonic car.

 

Find this at www.bloodhoundblast.com