[Video] Watch Bloodhound accelerate to 'just' 334mph...
The sheer numbers involved when discussing the Bloodhound Land Speed Record project are mindboggling. It lives in a world where 334mph is a slow speed test. Where accelerating from 50-300mph in 13 seconds isn't impressive.
But to the rest of us, those are massive, massive figures. The Bugatti Chiron, in a completely unrealistic for the road spec, only just managed to nudge its way past 300mph (it did 304mph in September 2019) and it took several minutes to get there. Bloodhound will get there from 50 in less time than some small hatchbacks take to hit 60.
There will be plenty of well-polished videos on the subject, but we feel the best of the lot is a small Twitter video the team posted on October 28th, which shows in the truest of forms what that kind of speed really looks like. It just boggles the mind when you see it happen.
After a slow roll, the quite-frankly bonkers Andy Green fires up the afterburners on Bloodhound's mighty jet engine (one normally found in a Eurofighter Typhoon) and just disappears. There's genuinely no other way to describe it. The team are expecting to get over 500mph in this series of tests, before they go for the big one later in the year to smash that 1,000mph barrier.
Remember that in 1983 our minds were blown by Thrust 2 hitting 650mph, before Thrust SSC smashed the sound barrier (and hit 763mph) in 1997. That record has stood for 22 years. But 763mph will again feel 'slow' when compared to 1,000.
All we can say now is good luck team!
Image courtesy of Bloodhound LSR/Charlie Sperring.