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The Bloodhound Project 2. From there to here

2. From there to here

Friday, 12 December, 2008

The year is 1898…

In Washington the United States declares war on Spain. A man named Caleb Braddom names his new soft drink Pepsi-Cola. And in France two brothers by the name of Renault commence the manufacture of a one-horse-power petrol-driven device they call the Voiturette with the intention of actually selling the thing to the public – an obviously crazy venture with no future whatsoever.

Also in France an aristocrat called Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat consumes petit-dejeuner and then ascends to the driving seat of a very different car. On the outskirts of Paris both the Count and his vehicle are a most unusual sight. For one thing there are no horses drawing the device, which goes against all nature, and for another it is said to be powered by electricity, a source of motive energy which Frenchmen have heard of vaguely but with true Gallic suspicion are somewhat disinclined to actually believe in. In fact the conveyance is remarkably – well, slightly, anyway – streamlined in an era in which the word streamlined has not yet been invented. But the citizens take faint heart in the fact that the back end of the… well, machine…. is shaped rather like a slice of good French cheese.

Moreover there are strange men in town. It is said they are journalists from a new magazine called La France Automobile – whatever an automobile is. These journalists have stated excitedly that four – four, no less – of these horseless carriages will assemble on a straight length of carriageway in Acheres Park, Yvelines, there to contest a new thing called a World Land Speed Record. The smart money, canny Parisians are told, is on the Count de Chasseloup-Laubat.

The good Count duly obliges. At the helm – and it can only be described as a helm – of his Jeantaud electric car, Chasseloup-Laubat covers a measured kilometre at the incredible speed of 63 kph – 39 mph to a non-Gallic audience. 

It is the first World Land Speed Record.

France is sort of faintly interested. The rest of the world largely yawns. Chasseloup-Laubat and a Belgian rival battle it out for a year and a half, always using electric cars, and raise the record to 65 mph. A steam car trumps them in 1902, and then in the same year a young American named Willie Vanderbilt beats them all in – or more accurately, perched upon – a Mors propelled by one of the new and highly suspicious Internal Combustion engines. He raises the record to 76 mph.

These speeds may sound puny to us more than a century later.

But think about it.

You are cruising a motorway at 76 mph. Warm. Comfortable.

Now strip away the motorway and replace it with a rough and stone-strewn carriage-road or a slippery beach. And replace your smart wheels with flimsy wooden or wire-spoked rims shod with treadless pneumatic sausages not much wider than a bicycle tyre. And much given to blow-outs of most interesting suddenness.

Then take away your modern suspension and replace it with a chassis reminiscent of a haywain. Which most definitely has a mind of its own in the small matter of directional stability. Or indeed any other sort of stability. And dump your power steering for a complicated cat’s cradle of rods and linkages, all of which have a small amount of play which adds up to quite a lot of play by the time it finally reaches the rock-heavy steering wheel. Also replace your modern transmission with chain-drive which faithfully imitates a scythe should the chain happen to break – a not uncommon occurrence.

Oh, and throw away your servo brakes for a lever or pedal which produces a burning smell but not much else. And strip away the bodywork so you’re sitting on top of the whole unstable death-trap in the full wind-blast….

Now do you want to do 76 mph?

I often wonder what Count Chasseloup-Laubat  would have said had anyone told him that 99 years later another young man would drive a car at 763 mph, just beyond the local speed of sound, powered by a pair of engines the Count could never have remotely conceived of, yet running on metal-shod wheels which he would have already regarded as outmoded. And that some years later that same man – now not quite so young – would be aiming for 1,000 mph….

I suspect the Count might have shrugged and said: “Mais oui! That will ‘appen”.

The year is 1904…

In the USA, an inventor with a vision of producing automobiles affordable to everyday Mr America is struggling to create a company so to do. Convinced that the way to the hearts and minds of the people – and even more importantly to the wallets of backers – is through racing and record-breaking, he builds a car called the Arrow. Any assemblage of parts looking less like an arrow would be most hard to imagine, but the blunt-nosed device at least has an engine of nearly 17 litres to muscle its way through the air.

Being a native of Michigan, the inventor is used to harsh winters. Which is just as well. For in his attempt to wrest the Land Speed Record away from Europe and onto American soil – well, sort of soil – he elects to make his attempt on a bleak January day on a frozen lake called St Clair near Detroit.

You do not wear Hawaiian shirts in Detroit in January. His shivering assumption is that the Ice will at least be smooth.

Ice on a lake is not necessarily smooth. It cracks and re-freezes and creates ridges. It is also slippery at all times. The inventor causes cinders to be poured on it, fixes his mind on his vision, and keeps the throttle wide open. He slides and jounces through the measured mile at 91 mph – a new record.  Near-petrified with cold and fright he staggers away from the machine and makes a frozen inward vow that he will never ever again get into a racing or record car.

Briefly the inventor is the talk of America, and this enables him to raise enough money – sponsorship, investment, call it what youwill – to start a small automobile-making business.

His name is Henry Ford.

It is early 2007…

The BLOODHOUND Project starts in secret. Everything looks hunky-dory. The FTSE 100 has been climbing more or less steadily for four years and is heading for all-time highs. There are a few doomsayers in the City of London, certainly – but there are always doomsayers in the City of London, so what’s new?

Only this time the doomsayers are right. Come Christmas the economy rolls lazily upside-down and pulls the stick back. The resultant decent has a distinctly Kamikaze feel to it, and even now there is no real sign of pulling out of the dive.

It is October 2008…

In the Science Museum the BLOODHOUND programme is formally launched. Behind the fanfare lies a conundrum which Henry Ford would have understood instantly.

The need for fuel.

Not liquid fuel – in this case neither here nor there – but the fuel that makes the world go round.

Money fuel.

By its common – and most misleading – name: sponsorship.

Every schoolboy knows that (roughly speaking) aerodynamic drag increases with the square of velocity. Land Speed Record aspirants know a further immutable law of physics – that costs increase by something like the square of drag. Unless you happen to own a small chunk of real estate known as Manhattan or maybe Paris, you cannot meet these costs without sponsorship.

And any fool can see that right now the timing is utterly woeful, what with the whole world entering deep recession. There is little point in Richard Noble donning his red leotard and flying up to an executive suite only to encounter the CEO standing on the windowsill contemplating whether to jump. You are not going to grab the man’s attention.

To me, the only slight consolation is that Formula One is suffering as well. I do not denigrate the great F1 drivers – but great drivers will shine whatever the arena happens to be named. The fact is that 90 per cent of the sponsors involved in F1 are Ecclestone Mugs who get very little out of it but are fixated like rabbits in a headlight. Costs have spiralled beyond all reason – the price of one Formula One engine, for example, would fund the entire Bloodhound Project.

I, like Richard Noble, fought F1 for attention for a quarter of a century, watching all the major sponsorship bucks being sucked up into the F1 vortex. So forgive me, Lord, if I pray that F1 might now waddle its money-fat carcase over a cliff and leave some pickings for more worthy causes.

Such as BLOODHOUND.

But at this time I am less than confident.

Yeah, there is the educational side – which is pretty much in place, as I understand it. I confess that at first glance I regarded this as a bit of a ploy to get the always-gullible Great and Good on-side. Perhaps unwisely, I mentioned this thought to Richard Noble. Having now scraped my skin off the wall, I can state that BLOODHOUND is indeed an educational project, that Noble and Team are most seriously dedicated thereto, and that BET – the BLOODHOUND Educational Team – already have in place a vast and complex maze of pathways into Britain’s seats of learning, and vice-versa.

There will also be an education centre bang alongside the BLOODHOUND build-shop. If the build-shop is anything like every other engineering shop I’ve ever been in, then the kids might even pick up a few new words as well. (Along the lines of: “Oh f-dash it. I’ve just dropped this f-rather heavy hammer on my f-jolly foot”).

Only thing is, the educational side don’t contribute a red cent to the actual car-build.

In a way this is a grossly unfair thing to say, because the Universities of West of England and Swansea and others have contributed hugely, vastly, to design and development. But the underlying credo is that education is education, academic research is academic research, and all of that ain’t gonna be shelling out nothin’ for no rockets or rivets. Forget it. Nada. Thank you for the input, but…

Which brings us back to sponsorship. One sort is sponsorship is in-kind, which the BLOODHOUND  team call Product Sponsors, These companies do not in the main wodge out cash, but rather materials, products and expertise. And since every bit of BLOODHOUND must be purpose-built – it being slightly impractical to nip down to Halfords for a set of brake pads, for example – the Product Sponsors are absolutely vital. And there is of course an obvious coming-together of purpose. BLOODHOUND gets, say, a widget which they would otherwise cost them £250,000 – but it doesn’t cost the manufacturer / donor £250,000, because he’s doing it at cost, and he can then boast: “We’ve developed this and this technique working with BLOODHOUND, and you can benefit”. Winners all round.

Except for two minor snags. The first being that potential Product Sponsors are facing the same recession as everyone else – and the second being that if you do find them you can end up with a hangar-full of fantastic parts – engines, wheels, composites, electronic systems, research teams, computer programs, you name it – but sadly no actual money to bolt them all together and produce a car that runs. You are sort of in charge of the sweet shop but can’t afford to eat the sweets.

So sooner or later you have to find the last kind of sponsor, be he singular or multiple. He is called a Main Sponsor. Because he provides – money. Real cash money. Money you can use to pay people so they can actually continue to eat while they put the thing together.  Money for – well, everything. Give it all the good will in the world – you still have to have liquid money.

In my aerobatic career I always found that looking for sponsors was a bit like wearing a blindfold and firing a shotgun into the air in the pious hope there might be a pheasant passing overhead at the time. Out of 50,000 companies you can reckon that maybe at least five on any one day are eager to hear what you have to offer. The question is, which five? And on what day? And how eager?

In this present financial climate an impossible task.  At the big launch in October 2008 I nod wisely with the rest.  But secretly reflect to myself that BLOODHOUND might well be doomed…..

It is mid-December 2008…

I am proved happily, wonderfully, totally, wrong.

It turns out, against all the odds, that BLOODHOUND is not doomed.

It turns out, against all the odds, that in six short weeks BLOODHOUND has attracted some 45 new Product Sponsors to the tune of maybe £650,000. One very realistic man called Conor La Grue, BLOODHOUND’s recently-appointed Supply Chain Manager – read sponsor procurator – takes in his stride with outward calm that he is running three new sponsor meetings every week. I have not asked for his blood-pressure reading. I suspect he carries a Browning 9 mil to meetings as a final arbitrator, but have no actual proof of this.

Forty-five Product Sponsors in six weeks…!

BLOODHOUND, incredibly, is in fact thriving.

Of Main Sponsors someone on the BLOODHOUND team has come up with the simple and brilliant idea of having two stripes on the car and selling segments of these stripes to sponsors at a starting price of £75,000 a segment. These are selling, because like gold in a recession they are bargains for companies with vision. Noble has a rash on his legs from pulling on the red leotard, but in fact it is a Team effort.

BLOODHOUND is miraculously, amazingly, in the face of worldwide recession, doing well. I find this astounding and incredibly heartening. It seems there are still real people out there who do still dream real dreams.

Within the next year it is entirely possible that the company Henry Ford founded might finally achieve its original objective - to be a small automobile maker.

But I think Henry, teeth chattering after his ordeal by ice in 1904, would nod at BLOODHOUND today.

It’s going to work.