Apologies are due yet again! My last update was December and I must try and do a lot better than this! The project has picked up a fantastic pace now and because the team is so small when compared with the project scale, the personal workload is massive. The days move so fast that I find it hard to believe we are not still in February!
Frankly from December, I viewed the coming months with real worry. The Government were sending shockwaves through the country with the increase of VAT and the huge cuts caused because our debts are a similar % of GDP to Greece. That always frightens companies who respond with the knee jerk reaction of not paying their bills. The banks don’t lend – and our team need paying. We don’t have the featherbedding comfort of a big sponsor who will bail us out or soft government finance. Not only do we have to get through this awful period and keep going, but we have to expand in very difficult trading times. And there’s one more concern – we depend on innovation to attract our funding – and in rough times people don’t like to increase risk with innovation. In fact of course the market place is changing so fast that to do nothing is very high risk - and innovation is actually a lower risk than doing nothing –or that's how I argue it!
Two more big questions – given the rough trading conditions, would our sponsors drop out, and if they didn’t, would we be able to make the jump to the first Big Sponsor? This is something that was never achieved with Thrust2 or ThrustSSC – despite all the effort, the big sponsors stayed away and one look at the ThrustSSC livery shows no big sponsors other than Castrol who had supported from the early days. We would have to make the leap to the big sponsor to get the Bloodhound build through – could we do it today in these difficult times? Conor reckoned that we wouldn’t see sensible funds much before May – I hoped we could do much better.
The first answer was immediate – the existing sponsors were enthusiastic to continue – we could rely on them – so that was a great relief. So what about the Big One!
Last year we engaged with the Influence agency to help us with the sponsor hunt – the pressures were getting too large to enable us to concentrate on more than one big sponsor deal at a time. And last year we paid the price for it – we had a Big Sponsor who had said yes ... informally. Later they said no formally! We won't go back there again!! But the real problem was we had no other deals anywhere near maturity. Important lesson : get a very good sponsorship agency and process multiple deals on a big scale.
Of course the focus is on getting the Bloodhound SSC built and we have got started with Hampson, but our problems were in supporting them while dealing with other research, and that was slowing the Engineering team. We have always been concerned by the fact that we have to position the EJ200 jet at the back of the car – we couldn’t bring it forwards without designing an extension jet pipe which involves massive engineering and is outside our agreement. As we got to grips with the detail design, the rear car structure became heavier and the all important Centre of Gravity started to migrate aft. The static margin became negative and we had an unstable car. With Thrust2 and ThrustSSC, we were always able to achieve a significantly forward CG. But now we had a car with a light carbon front end and a heavy metallic rear end which included the EJ200 and Dan Jubb’s rocket. Bringing the CG forwards by adding extra weight at the front would be a simple solution but it would reduce performance by slowing both acceleration and deceleration. The team pushed the CG as far forward as they could with existing content and then concentrated on dragging the Centre of Pressure back by increasing fin size and changing the front section profile. By the start of this week, they had got it, and the worry was behind us. Ron Ayers had always said – Don’t worry there is a fix - it's just a matter of finding the right mix of variables to get the optimum result.
In 2006 , Andy, Ron and I were involved in the design and development of the JCB Dieselmax car which achieved a World’s fastest at 350mph on Bonneville. I was a consultant to the programme and Sir Anthony Bamford held a huge thrash in London to celebrate the success – team members we were called up to the stage and I was first, meaning that I was unsure of what was happening. Sir Anthony gave us each a small goody bag and we thanked him. I gave mine a cursory glance – there was a small box inside and I knew what it was from the weight and size – a small glass thingy of some sort. Got to be a lasered JCB backhoe in a glass block! I went back to the group I was with and parked my goody bag along with everything else on our table.
I wouldn’t do that if I were you!!
A JCB friend in the know put me right. I grabbed the bag and opened the box – It said ROLEX on the cover and inside was a Daytona Chronagraph with my name on it. I had never had a present like that in my life – what an incredibly generous gesture!
And it was that same name on the building where the taxi had dropped Andy and I off in Geneva. The Influence team had had an expression of interest from ROLEX. Andy had done a Grand Marshal role for them in the US and they had decided to have a closer look at the project. The meeting went very well - there was a great meeting of minds: I felt a great affinity with these people dedicated to highest quality and craftsmanship of their beautiful watches and some weeks later ROLEX confirmed their deal as our timing sponsor. It's going to be a very fine match and relationship.
We had made it through the first five months, we had solved our stability difficulties and we had our first Big Sponsor. What an incredible achievement in very difficult times from a really great team!
Over the first months of 2011, the education team were pulling the schools in at an incredible rate – I found that I had to update my powerpoint presentation every week. But there was something that was eating away at me. Here we are creating an incredible and innovative car and our education machine was doing great things with over 4,000 schools – but in a very traditional way. Surely we should be looking at the education in a more creative and innovative way?
Paul Jackson is the Chief Executive of Engineering UK – the body brought together to centralise and fund engineering promotion in schools and universities. Evidently Paul had been having the same thoughts and the specialist advisers he had hired had suggested he concentrate the entire activity on three points of focus:
- Stimulation
- Education
- Careers
So now Paul could restructure his promotions. But when he mentioned Stimulation, this struck a huge chord. Of course, this is how it works! One of the reasons why science and engineering is doing so poorly in the country is that there is nothing exciting going on! No great creative engineering stimulus in Britain and I am tired of watching the Top Gear people break things! And so we quickly realised that this is where Bloodhound fits – have a look at this as an indicator ...
The idea is that the blue graph line suggests the current level of stimulus in engineering as the kids progress through school. The teachers tell us that they have something of a problem generating interest. We know that Bloodhound generates huge interest from the age of 5 – and there is the potential to maintain that interest right the way through the age range. We think the red curve is indicative of what could be achieved by Bloodhound.
Two other influences happened; once again I had the BBC Radio 4 programme Costing the Earth on the car radio. Last time it had given us the important lead on the environmental concerns; Bloodhound SSC’s annual CO2 output turned out to be equivalent to just 4.12 lactating cows - so no worries there! This time they were focussed on the very high levels of power consumption needed by kids to run their ever increasing domestic IT equipment. The programme went on to explain that unrestricted kids who preferred to meet on line than in the street were racking up 45 hours every week.
45 Hours a week?
I called my teacher daughter Miranda: How many hours does a kid do in school?
30 hours a week, Dad!
Could this be why the UK education results are so poor compared with other countries assessed by PISA? Is this why we slipped from so far down the scale in 9 years? Is the centre of education moving away from the classroom ? Apparently the kids are finding it easier to learn from computers than in class! The classroom is an average place – education is there for the average, if you are not average you are going to lose out – but with your own computer you rewind again and again to learn the difficult material and advance at your own pace. IT education is not about averages – provided the material is there you can advance as fast as you like. There are a number of links which give an important background. Have a look at these leads to give you an idea:
Michael Wesch's You Tube sensation on how Web 2.0 is changing everything is here
The Khan Academy who are using video and self paced learning to change education have a TED talk here
Sugata Mitra on kids using computers to teach themselves in the slums of India is here
So now we began to realise the opportunity for Bloodhound. Bloodhound has a fantastic stimulus, if we could start to create an informal education machine which could absorb some of those unrestricted 45hrs a week, then this would add to the formal work going on the classroom. If this were possible then we would have a truly formidable education machine. Dave Rowley had always called this Education by Stealth.
I phoned our IT partners at UWE, Southampton and Intel – before I waste everyone’s time –is there anything in all this?
Their response was outstanding – they too had realised that the development work we were doing lacked something. We weren’t going to waste anything – but we stood to gain hugely.
But how in God's name were we going to do this?
The phone rang and it was Richard Knight from our PR company Mettle PR. You remember I talked about my old friend Hugh who was chief executive of a high profile education company – well Hugh wants a change ...
Hugh and I met a few days later and the result is a huge push to create an integrated Informal Education plan. This is going to be seriously interesting.
In the meantime the education team are progressing steadily and the first three education centres are being opened in Swansea, Manchester and Bristol. These will eventually be linked to the build centre in Bristol so that the Ambassadors and local people can follow the car build as it develops.
We are currently weak on Formal Education content but Steve Lewis is addressing this and now it's a matter of time before we have substantial additional teaching material on the site. The Education Team is growing fast and we needed a restructure with a new chief Executive. A long drawn out programme developed, but on the 31st May we have two finalists for the job - each meeting the BET team for a private two hours. We have to get a good decision here – because the pace is picking up at a huge speed and we cant afford more change.
Curiously, the Hakskeen Pan desert hasn’t dried as we expected – so the planned visit to pick up stones this month hasn’t taken place. Of course we are dealing with the very local climate here and it is never likely to deliver to our schedule. Andy Green has all the local weather records and in the past the place has been consistent – but of course not this year!!
On 11th May, Ian Glover and I found ourselves presenting at the Institute of Directors Convention in the O2. Potentially a brilliant opportunity to present Bloodhound to all these directors – but equally an opportunity to get it horrendously wrong and wreck our profile. We were very fortunate to have the opportunity – but since it was the deadly post lunch slot we might have been mistaken for the lightweight entertainment. The only way to tackle this was to make the presentation deadly serious and pepper it with humour. It was a high risk strategy, involving presenting them with national data that they might not be conversant with. I strode out on the stage in front of 1500 directors and went for it fast and furious. It worked – there were cheers and quite a number of potential sponsorships developing. At the end I left the stage and almost fell over the next presenter who just happened to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
I’ve been following all this, Richard – congratulations!
Then there was a problem – the IOD show would finish at 4pm and the exhibition area where we had our stand had to be dismantled to make way for the evening show. Having wound up all those directors we had to nail them as they came out. No problem – we picked up our stand and repositioned it in the middle of the 02 public gangway! There was one hell of a row as the security people tried to move us on – but we kept going despite the aggro and nailed the entire IOD audience as they came out! There was a wide grin on Ian’s face.
Coming shortly is the Falcon/Cosworth rocket test where we plan to run the rocket in UK for the first time using the Cosworth CA2010 engine driving the pump. With 200 decibels of noise – far beyond the threshold of pain - this should be quite something!
Interest in the project is building on quite a scale and we find that our show car is in demand 3-4 days every week and Andy and I are presenting at different events 2-3 times a week. I have taken to bringing a large Wickes builder's bucket with me and scooping up the audience's loose change as they leave. If the Church of England can take collections – so can we!
It's only now that all the hard work is really beginning to pay off – the ROLEX sponsorship has demonstrated that the project is attractive to global sponsors and the deals are building solidly. The workload is massive and now the big focus is to get the car built for operation in 2013. Frankly there is little research left to do and now it's all about building and money. Every Pound, Dirham, Franc and Euro counts – it's going to be a big fight to get this through but we are on our way!
Richard Noble, May 2011
