Bloodhound SSC Technical Details

The Bloodhound Project centres on Bloodhound SSC, a supersonic car that is designed not only to go faster than the speed of sound (supersonic) but to over 1,000mph (1,600km/h). It will cover a mile in just 3.6 seconds. Bloodhound SSC is approximately 13.4m long and weighs 7.5 tonnes. The design is a mix of car and aircraft technology, with the front section being a carbon fibre tub like a racing car and the back portion being a metallic structure built like an aircraft. The two front wheels sit within the body and two rear wheels are mounted externally within wheel fairings. To reach the design specification speed of 1,050 mph the car will use a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine, normally found in a Eurofighter Typhoon. The jet engine will get the car up to 600 mph roughly, at which point the three NAMMO rockets designed to launch small satellites will be fired taking Andy supersonic and hopefully into the record books once more. Bloodhound will accelerate from 0 - 1000 mph in just 55 seconds, Andy Green the driver will pull 2 G in acceleration and when he pulls the parachute after a high speed run he will experience 3 G of deceleration. That equates to a 60 mph per second deceleration. The jet engine and rockets together will produce more than 135,000 horsepower: that’s more than six times the power of all the Formula 1 cars on a starting grid put together. Bloodhound also utilises a 5.0 Litre Supercharged Jaguar V8 engine producing 600hp as the rocket fuel pump. The wheels on the car are made from an Aluminium alloy and weigh 100 kilograms each with a total diameter of almost 1 metre. At 1,000 mph the wheels will spin 175 times per second resulting in a radial force of 50,000 G. To put that into context, if you put a 1 kilogram bag of sugar on the wheel, at 1,000 mph it would weigh 50 tonnes. Atlas Copco tools will be used to fasten these wheels on to the precise torque specified by the designers. So far over 110 man years of effort have been invested in the design, build and manufacture of Bloodhound SSC.