We British have traditionally tried to regard stress as a slightly dirty bodily function rather beneath our dignity. Upper lip stiff enough to support a Lee Enfield rifle and all that, eh what?  We Brits don’t actually DO stress…

Twaddle, of course. Complete twaddle. We Brits do stress just fine, thank you very much. It’s just that we have a sort of tribal aversion to admitting it.

If, however, you are designing something so outlandish as a 1,000 mph car, where the margins for error are very adjacent to zero in all directions, your acquaintanceship with stress is going to be a daily familiar. Admit it or not.

Want to increase the daily stress?

Not too difficult.

Simply organise a two-day PR bunfight – the first day for Product Sponsors, and the second for the world’s press. These days are taking place (on 23 and 24 November) as you read this. The BLOODHOUND team has been slotting preparation into their day-jobs for several weeks, and sleep has become an increasingly precious commodity.

Stress? Certainly. But nobody denies these days are necessary.

166 Product Sponsors are due, and possibly overdue, for an overall update on WHIH – What In Hell Is Happening – it being manifestly impossible for the BLOODHOUND team to ring 166 sponsors every week to tell them how things are progressing. (Well, I suppose they could, but then nothing would be progressing, because they wouldn’t have time for anything else).  So… nobody argues about this being necessary.

Likewise the Press Day on the second day. Richard Noble has no need to don the red leotard to emphasize that BLOODHOUND must have a press re-launch a year after the first one to keep the impetus going. Everyone recognises that.

It’s just that ….. well, it’s not exactly convenient.

I don’t mean this rudely. Let me explain.

At a traditional car PR bunfight it is traditional to announce a breakthrough of some traditional barriers, whatever they may be. Perhaps a revolutionary double-clutch auto transmission system, or if all else fails a revolutionary re-positioning of the ashtrays. Sorry, cup-holders, nowadays.

But BLOODHOUND is not….. well, er, traditional.

In fact, BLOODHOUND is breaking through traditional barriers every two or three days.

Certainly, these are mostly – by no means wholly, but mostly – virtual in computer banks at this stage. But they are very, very real. The capacity for analysis has increased many-fold over the past twelvemonth – to the point where Boeing, let us say, might have sneered a year ago but would now be looking on and saying "How in ‘tarnation did they do that much that quickly!”

Not traditional.

Which means that producing a report on the current state of the art is rather like chopping into a smoke-trail left by one of my display aeroplanes – it’s true right now, but by the end of the day it might well have changed. In BLOODHOUND, there are no convenient moments to say; “Right, we’ve reached this stage now”. Or not those that might providentially match the date of a Press Day.

What there is, is a constant sense of urgency.

Aerodynamics obviously leads. If you ain’t got that right, there are many other things you cain’t progress too far. It for example being more than slightly time-wasting to spend a week designing a hydraulic control run to go just there, just inside the skin, only to have Aerodynamics come along and say ‘Ah, but the skin’s going to move 5mm inboard now…’

Boeing spend the equivalent of the Gross National Product of a reasonably-sized country on such research and produce a result after a decade. BLOODHOUND have spent £2 million so far on a much more difficult project and today are damn nearly there.

But it does mean it’s kinda difficult to take a today snapshot and present it with due razzmatazz.

Take the cases, in no particular order, of a doghouse and three deserts.

The doghouse is BLOODHOUND’s new home. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t call it the doghouse. It’s the new BLOODHOUND TECHNICAL CENTRE, and please do not forget it. It’s just that BLOODHOUND TECHNICAL CENTRE doesn’t quite trip off the tongue in everyday conversation, so the team tend to call it the doghouse. Where the design team will be based, and where the car will be assembled for real.

Three Authorities pitched to house the BLOODHOUND Project – Belfast, Farnborough, and Bristol. The team took a vote and Bristol won – nothing to do with the fact that most of the team now live in or near Bristol, of course. Well…. actually and undeniably, yes, it was at least a bit to do with that. Ask a highly-pressured design team to re-locate in toto in mid-project and of course you’re going to put a dent in the sense of urgency…

So, the doghou… sorry, the BLOODHOUND TECHNICAL CENTRE… is in Bristol. In what was previously the Maritime Heritage Centre, closed these several years and used for storage. Storage of records and artefacts – now re-located – of the life and times of one Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose ship the SS Great Britain is preserved in the nautical equivalent of aspic not 100 metres away.

The former Maritime Heritage Centre is not ideal in some ways. It is only just big enough, and the BLOOHOUND Education Centre especially may require visitors to draw in their stomachs a tad before sitting down. Also the car parking could become – well, challenging.

But the feng shui is right. I personally love the joint. It is beautifully situated on a quay of the Avon and will be a cheerful place to work, especially in the summer. Its proximity to the SS Great Britain is especially fortuitous, and I treasure a mental image of Richard Noble and the ghost of I K Brunel sitting down for a beer together and talking about a sense of urgency. Shade and living would have a very great deal in common.

To be announced today is one massive new sponsor, Intel. This is like getting a whole new industrial continent on-side, and will – er, we’ll come back to that – affect almost every aspect of BLOODHOUND from computer resources to education. The totality is a matter for another time, but suffice it to say that the ‘er’ is because long before the quill pens were even hovering over the contract, Intel jumped the gun and have been providing extra computational power on an awesome scale for some months now. So awesome in fact that I personally understand not one jot of it, but the BLOODHOUND design team, who do understand these things, are seriously impressed.

Intel are now poised to rush into the new doghouse and install an entire new IT infrastructure which can probably re-design an F16 in its tea break. Sadly, somewhere in the paperwork process of actually getting the team into the doghouse there seems to be involved a chunk of bureaucracy which has the sense of urgency of a particularly tardy glacier – but I gather this is shortly to be resolved.

The opposite of a glacier is three deserts…

The opposite of a glacier is a desert. Or rather three deserts.

The Koehn dry salt lake is on the edge of the Mojave Desert in California. It is not a lovely place – grandiose in its way, perhaps, with the El Paso mountains as a dramatic red backdrop to the north – but lovely? No. In high summer the sun sears down from an endless blue sky onto the endless white salt pan and the temperature soars to 50 degrees C. At this time of year it is a modest 40 deg C. On most days the place is a vast white skillet which fries your brains.

Yet it is very important to BLOODHOUND, half a world away.

For this is the region where Daniel Jubb’s Falcon Projects has two test sites. One is more than slightly secret. The other one, on the edge of Koehn dry lake, is most appropriately called FAR – it being very far from anywhere. In fact FAR stands for Friends of Amateur Rocketry – a somewhat misleading name, because as well as providing several most serious organisations with an experimental launch site, it also hosts a number of schools and universities involved in similar endeavours.

It is also the home of BLOODHOUND’s Falcon rocket test programme.

As you may know, the first full firing of BLOODHOUND’s 18 inch rocket took place there a month ago. It was a bit behind BLOODHOUND’s self-set punishing schedule, but when the desert was stunned by the shrieking thunder of the Falcon at less than half power – history was made. This is the most powerful hybrid rocket ever designed in the UK. Period. It will have a profound effect on future hybrid rocket research. Period.

The procedures for analysing the first test results and preparing the 18” beast for its second firing – at higher power – are quite staggeringly complex. In the meantime the testing of the ‘baby replica’ 6” rocket continues apace, the idea being that this research programme stays firmly ahead of the Big Squib, for obvious reasons. (One of them being that in the unlikely event of an – er, shall we say unfavourable outcome – a 6” detonation, whilst most unwelcome, is markedly preferable to an 18” ditto, which has the potential for re-locating the Koehn desert into, say, the middle of Las Vegas).

The next 6” test will be another milestone, the intention being to carry out a full-duration firing for the first time. In a typical manifestation of Sod’s Law, this firing will probably take place a few days after the grand PR bunfight…

So now we move 10,000 miles…

Then there is the next desert, which is 10,000 miles away from Mojave.

This is the Verneuk Pan in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province – which promised much as a probable run-site for BLOODHOUND.

When you say it quickly, finding a run-site for a Land Speed Record attempt doesn’t sound all that difficult. Okay, you need a straight run at least 12 miles long and dead flat. Well, there must be some roads around the world which meet those criteria. You need it to be closed off, obviously, since whipping through the evening traffic at 1,000 mph might generate the odd adverse comment – but surely some government somewhere would be more than happy to do that?

Well, yes, they would – but a road is a non-starter for other reasons, first and final among them being that a road requires tyres. And tyres, however specialist, are going to start flying apart around half way up the speed range. So you have to use solid wheels. And solid wheels don’t work on a paved road. Yes, there are other problems as well – such as the odd roadside McDonalds, etc, which might become spread rather thinly around the place should A Green have a slight sideways excursion – but really the wheel situation stops the discussion before it starts. Roads are out.

Which leaves deserts. Either a dry salt-flat or a mud playa. Salt flats are a last resort because they tend to be too hard – sort of like Nature’s motorways – which leaves the mud playas. So now you’re looking for a firm mud playa desert, at least 12 miles long, dead flat, uniformly hard, uniformly drained, not prone to herds of aardvarks strolling over it at the wrong moment, and preferably not in an active war zone.

Which means the world suddenly got a lot smaller. Because there aren’t that many of those about.

To cut a long story short, after a year-long worldwide search which must have propelled Andy Green into some sort of Airmiles record-book, the Verneuk Pan looked the best of a very short short-list.

Except for one small detail.

Stones.

The Verneuk Pan is littered with about a million-trillion small stones. When Malcolm Campbell went there for an LSR attempt 80 years ago – which was ultimately unsuccessful – he spent the price of a modest country estate clearing the stones for his run-track. BLOODHOUND needs a 12 mile run, and the price of country estates has kind of inflated in the interim.

However there are two BUT’s – one good, one bad.

The good But was – and is – the Northern Cape Government, who are an extremely progressive ANC outfit very keen to promote their region to the rest of the world. Keen enough, indeed, to undertake clearing the stones in order to get BLOODHOUND into the Province.

The bad But is – it turns out them there stones may not in fact be clear-able.

The very word Verneuk translates from Afrikaans into English as to ‘trick, mislead, or swindle’. And Verneuk did just that.

The initial survey results were favourable. Yes, the Verneuk Pan was stone-ridden – but yes, they could be graded away. And so the surveyors investigated further…

And found that in many places the sub-strata under the playa consisted of the same stones. So you grade it, and what happens? More stones come to the surface. Not utterly insuperable – but far from ideal.

Which brings us to the third desert.

The Hakskeen Pan, a mere 300 miles north-west of Verneuk and also in the Northern Cape, had been ignored for the good and adequate reason that it had a road running right across the middle of it – which could clearly be a slight problem. Approach a crossroads at Mach 1.4 and sure as hell at the same moment somebody’s going to decide to drive an ancient Toyota or a herd of goats across it. But the South African BLOODHOUND team, smarting from Verneuk, went and had another look – and found (a) that the ‘road’ was a shale causeway, (b) that it was now disused, and (c) that although clearing it out of the way ain’t gonna be no five-minute job, it’s a helluva lot more practical than shovelling up the stones off Verneuk.

So now Hakskeen is the favoured run-site. And the Northern Cape Government, having decided that hosting BLOODHOUND is going to be the publicity coup of 2011 and possibly longer, are taking on the task of scraping off the causeway, preparing the run-track, and even fencing in the entire Pan for security. At something like 30 miles of fencing, making it a kinda big playground.

A rather special guest has flown up from South Africa to BLOODHOUND’s PR exercise in Bristol to talk about this. One Hazel Jenkins, the Premier of the Northern Cape Government. That is commitment…

But back to the desert. As soon as the South African BLOODHOUND team reported back, John Piper and Andy Green dashed out to look at Hakskeen, taking with them an outwardly simple-looking but actually very complex test rig to measure wheel-penetration on the playa surface. Using this rig was theoretically simple – all you had to do was press down on it with 5 tonnes weight and measure the surface penetration of a segment of ‘wheel’ – or several different segments of different possible wheels.

Turned out not to be so simple. Because if you’ve got a 5 tonne lorry and shove the jack at – say – half way along it on one side you’re only going to get two-and-a-half tonnes. So you then load up the lorry with two tonnes of sand and get all the people on the job to scramble up there to add to the weight and incidentally the hilarity…

But the job got done. And the Hakskeen Pan is now selected. And the Northern Cape Premier is now over here confirming a whole nation’s allegiance to the BLOODHOUND Project…

All very fine, but…

But you know what impresses me the most?

To tell the truth, it is not the huge sponsors or the governments. They are vital, obviously. Fascinating, obviously. And I will be talking to them more as BLOODHOUND moves on.

But it is the smaller companies I find particularly inspiring. A company called Straintek, for example, produced strain-gauging kit for the wheel-test load cell. Strain-gauging is what they do, so this wasn’t outlandish for them. Except that for BLOODHOUND they turned it round in two days instead of a more realistic 10 days. And there is no invoice.

Likewise Newburgh Engineering in Rotherham, who created the whole test-rig in very short order. Yes, again this is the sort of thing they normally do, although not usually with quite the urgency of BLOODHOUND’s normal operational velocity. Newburgh largely gave the project over to their apprentices, who improved their skills in engineering techniques I have barely heard of.

In fact, Newburgh and Straintek are prime examples of the grass-roots of BLOODHOUND Product Sponsors.

Newburgh uses BLOODHOUND to inspire their apprentices, a 1,000 mph car project being something they can see, whereas many of their tasks will be Top Secret and for all they know might be related to anything from a secure loo in Number Ten to an aiming device in our latest bomber. Well, if we had any latest bombers, that is... Newburgh also engage with local schools…

So…

So pardon me, major sponsors like Intel, Lockheed Martin, and Northern Cape Province. Your tremendous commitment is vital, much appreciated, and I will be back to you.

But today, ladies and gentlemen, in your homes or wherever you may be, may I personally ask you to raise a glass.

To our smaller sponsors. Most of the 166. Who respond with a cheery grin and a sense of urgency. Without which BLOODHOUND would never be possible.