The Bloodhound Supersonic Car, described by its designers as the world’s fastest and most advanced racing car, is unveiled in London after years of research, designing and techniques.
Bloodhound SSC can produce 135,000 hp of power with a speed of 800 miles per hour (1,288 kmph). One hundred and ten man-years have been invested in the design, build and manufacture of the car which is on track to challenge the land speed record later this year in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa. The Bloodhound team scoured the globe to find the perfect desert to run the car on, it needed to be at least 12 miles (19km) long, two miles (3km) wide and perfectly flat. The Hakskeen Pan, Northern Cape, South Africa was selected. At full speed Bloodhound will cover a mile (1.6km) in 3.6 seconds, that’s 4.5 football pitches laid end to end per second.
The complete 13.5m streamliner uses jet and rocket motors, which include a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine along with a supercharged Jaguar V8 engine, to produce around 135,000hp thrust. This is as much as seven times the power output of all the cars in Formula 1 combined. The car will be the centre-piece of a free exhibition at the London venue which is expecting a footfall of over 8000 people.
Bloodhound SSC has a 2m high tail fin to stabilize the vehicle at high speeds. The carbon fibre panels on one side of the world’s most powerful vehicle out for display have been partially removed in order to show the technology inside the car.