Thank Frankel it's Friday: Why it is vital someone saves Bloodhound SSC

It saddens me too to see some people taking an evident delight in the project’s current difficulties. The overwhelming response I received when I started tweeting the news on Monday was positive and supportive towards the team, but some still sneered: a pointless pastime, irrelevant to the modern world and just a few genuinely offensive barbs aimed at specific team members. You might not be interested in the project, you might not even agree that its aims are worthwhile, but talk about kicking a man when he’s down…

And of course those keen to stick the boot in don’t take time to think about the positive effect the project has already had, a project whose number one goal was not to break the Land Speed Record or reach 1,000mph, but to inspire a new generation of young scientists and engineers. And by interacting with over two million children in 220 countries and by generating material now used by over 6,000 schools in the UK, that target has already been reached and, regardless of what happens to the car itself, that project, run as a separate charity, will continue.

Me? More than anything I just like the people involved. When I used to work in Teddington, I remember going to Richard Noble’s house to watch old Land Speed Record films. I found his relentless enthusiasm and encyclopaedic knowledge entirely infectious. And when I caught up with him again 30 years later at Newquay Airport last year as we waited to watch Bloodhound SSC make its first public run, I found that positivity entirely undimmed despite the fact that, at the time, he’d been working flat out on the project for over a decade.

As for Andy Green, I’ve never been able to work out if he’s the sanest man I’ve ever met, or the most mad. He’s definitely one of the two. Talk to him about driving a car with more power than the QE2 (yes, really) across the surface of the planet at 1,000mph, and he’ll convince you that you took a greater risk brushing your teeth this morning. Not only does he have an answer to every question, but an utterly plausible answer conveyed in terms even I can understand, almost invariably backed by examples and comparisons.

The team behind Bloodhound is much the same. I can remember engineering chief Mark Chapman explaining that to test the integrity of Andy’s acrylic canopy, they fired a 1kg bird at it at 900mph, and that the armour around the cockpit will withstand the impact of a cricket ball bowled at, wait for it, 2,000mph. All this presented in such a laconic, matter of fact manner he could be explaining the inner workings of his toaster.

But none of this explains why it is so important to me that Bloodhound gets off its knees, back on its feet, onto the South African mud flats and into the record books, so important that I’ve not really been able to get it out of my head this week. And I guess it come down to a few factors, not the least of which is I’ve been a Land Speed Record nut for as long as I can remember, long enough to recall Gary Gabelich breaking the record in the indescribably beautiful Blue Flame in 1970. At the time I was five years old.

There’s more to it than that though. We live in a world where perception is now more important than reality, where experiences come in safe, pre-packaged and increasingly virtual form. The rewards may not be so great, but hey, at least they’re risk free. Regardless of what Green says, driving a car at 1,000mph is far from risk free. One of few things he’s never been able to convince me of is that it is anything less than bloody dangerous. And I admire people who are prepared to put it all on the line: their money, their reputations, even their lives if need be, to have a go, to push back the boundaries of human endeavour and do what has not been done before. That is how we progress, and how we inspire others to push their own probably smaller, but no less important personal boundaries.

Which is why I hope more than I can say that the money is forthcoming, that Bloodhound gets to South Africa and proves its doubters wrong. With all that they have given to the project for such a very long time, it is the very least the team deserves.