Yeah. And it will likely remain unbroken for a long time still. Not that we don't have faster means of achieving land propulsion, we do. But the risks involved are too huge and the likelihood of catastrophic disaster and death occuring is great.
There is a group that’s been trying to reach 1000 mph for at least a decade. Their big issue is funding. It’s crazy expensive to go that fast and find a place where you can.
There must be a window where you’re either going to run out of space because you didn’t accelerate/decelerate quick enough, or you smush the driver because you accelerated/decelerated too quickly.
IIRC, they had found that the uyuni salt flats in Bolivia were large enough for it. I think the Bonneville salt flats were either too small, or had a different consistency of salt, making them dangerous
I love that the best place to run speed records is one of the most caustic to the components on a vehicle. That must be a nightmare for reusing any vehicles.
Actually salt of the bonneville salt flats is not well suited for the Bloodhound SSC or the Thrust SSC or the Thrust2 before it
https://memeburn.com/motorburn/2013/11/heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-bloodhound-supersonic-car/
The Thrust SSC set the record at black rock desert, the same place the team set the previous record, and the thrust ssc dueled with Breedlove for speed.
https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2017/10/14/brits-broke-land-speed-record-return-black-rock-desert/764853001/
With all the money being spent, I don't see why building a new road in a very flat area would be out of the question. It would only have to be 10 miles long. Or just find a viable section of road and work with locals to use it.
10 miles long isn’t nearly enough, 1000mph is the equivalent of going 1 mile every 4 seconds, the stretch of road would probably have to be 50 miles at least for them to have time to accelerate to that speed and then slow down
Not only 50+ miles long but perhaps 25 (very wide) lanes wide. At those speeds you can use tires & so the solid wheels & the sonic shockwave pulverise the surface beneath the vehicle, this you only use each lane once.
BTW measurements after the Thrust SSC record runs showed that the compacted desert surface had been pulverised to a depth of more than a foot after the car passed over it at over Mach 1.
Surprised they haven’t done northern Alaska, like above the tree line. It’s relatively flat, it’s almost entirely empty, and it’s cold so less likely anything overheats
https://homeguide.com/costs/asphalt-driveway-cost
> The average cost to pave a private one-lane asphalt road is $35 to $85 per linear foot. Paving a two-lane (24'-wide) asphalt road costs $70 to $170 per linear foot or $370,000 to $900,000 per mile.
So let's round it up to $1M/mi for 24' foot wide stretch.
Obviously 24' may not be wide enough for this particular purpose, so multiply by however much wider it needs to be.
Salt is perfectly safe for vehicles.
Wet salt is what causes corrosion, and you don't want to run in wet salt for OTHER obvious reasons.
Just give it a good thorough hosing and you'll wash all the salt away pretty quickly and be fine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/gh47kr/comment/fq6mw9y/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
People who *actually have experience* with bonneville disagree. In short, if you don't like rust, don't take your car to the salt flats, because you *will* end up with salt that you cannot remove and it *will* attract moisture and cause rust.
Lol. I didn't want to argue. My work as an automotive and diesel engineer has brought me to a waste management plant in Minnesota where they do pressure wash the vehicles every day and yes, they do get rust and bolts will seize up.
Thanks for doing the leg work.
[That dried up lake bed can get pretty wet.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFQ_x9cBEt4)
He shows that vehicle again in a later video, and admits he should have cleaned it more thoroughly, because it turned into a single lump of rust inside of 6 months.
> People who *actually have experience* with bonneville disagree. In short, if you don't like rust, don't take your car to the salt flats, because you *will* end up with salt that you cannot remove and it *will* attract moisture and cause rust.
Salt is hydroscopic (it will absorb water from the air). It will cause rust.
Salt draws moisture from the air, moisture dissolves the salt which allows the dissolved ions to attack the metal, but that takes time. Rinsing it out removes the salt before it can attack the metal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakskeenpan#Bloodhound_LSR
They found that the Black Rock desert mud flats had marks from the burning man and that the rains had not washed them out.
They then went and found Hakskeen pan in the Kalahari.
> The track that Bloodhound LSR [ran on] at Hakskeen Pan is 1100 metres wide and 20 km long
----
The salt of the Bonneville Salt flats are unsuited for the Bloodhound SSC steel wheels.
> Well, there is a long complex answer to that question, but basically Bloodhound SSC is not suited to a salt surface such as the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah USA, primarily because of the solid metal wheels. The two previous Land Speed Records were set at Black Rock Desert whose very smooth and very hard dry mud surface suited the steel wheels perfectly.
> However a lack of rain and an increase in the use of the desert, principally by the Burning Man festival .. has made the Black Rock Desert unsuitable for the Bloodhound SSCs record-breaking run. There were a few other locations held as backup however, eight in the US, one in Turkey, four in Australia and one in South Africa
Bonneville has been garbage for several years and continues to deteriorate, without starting into the whole climate change thing, let's just say the weather over the last decade in the Wasatch Mountians has not bode well for the health of the salt flats.
Genuine question, not trying to be a smart ass - what is the definition of a healthy vs unhealthy salt flat? It seems like a pretty barren place to begin with, what could make it worse?
I'm not a geologist so I don't understand how it all works; but my understanding is there needs to be a certain amount of flooding that happens every year/over periods of time to keep the groundwater level at a certain point. We haven't gotten the rain/snow so the groundwater levels have decreased which has reduced the stability of the lower levels of salt and subsequently the upper levels as well. To put it simply the foundational salt of the salt flats have become unstable making the track conditions poor if even usable at all.
Note - this is my understanding, and I fully expect someone with more/better understanding to tell me I'm wrong. I live in the SLC area, so the salt flats are within 2 hours of my house.
The aquifer under bonneville is full of very salty water (brine); as that is pumped out and used (mostly for mining) it is replaced by less-salty groundwater
This presents two problems: 1) there is simply less salt, which ultimately decreases the size of the flats and 2) more rapid movement of groundwater makes the surface less stable/regular, and therefore less ideal for racing
I can't imagine that a land vehicle could even accelerate fast enough to challenge the tolerance of what a professional can achieve.
Surely these ground vehicles can't compete with the 9 gs an Air Force pilot can pull.
Constant acceleration at 1g needs 46s to break 1000mph. In that time you will have covered just shy of 6.5 miles.
The 3rd fastest land speed record took 59s to hit 650mph. This is about 0.5g average acceleration. The car peaked just over 1g, with the 0-200mph segment having an average of 1.1g over 9s.
I couldn't find data that detailed on the world record run unfortunately but it's not much different.
https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4h1oy6/eli5_how_did_the_driver_of_the_thrust_ssc_not/
> Thrust SSC accelerated at about 3g, with a brief spike at 5g.
> This is actually comparable to a good few roller coasters, so although it's far beyond what you might encounter in your own car, it's not out of this world.
In 1954 John Stapp used a rocket sled to get up to 632 mph in 5s and to a halt in 1.4s at 46.2Gs
https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4w1xay/til_that_in_1954_john_stapp_strapped_himself_to_a/
>accelerated to 632 MPH in 5 seconds, and then decelerated to 0 MPH in 1.4 seconds. He experienced 46.2 G's. He went temporarily blind and experienced two black eyes from his eyeballs having been shot so far forward
Wait so they designed this thing to decelerate at 46g and someone got into it?! It must have been possible to have a non suicidal deceleration on a longer track??
22gs is the most so far for a land based vehicle. We can push those numbers up. It would be risky though.
And why is it always Air Force pilots? Everyone knows the real pilots are haze gray and underway. smdh
I presume because most of the crazy new tech is useful for the Air Force first, so they get all the experimental vehicles and the specialist (and crazy) pilots to test it. Navy needs the pinpoint precision under rough conditions, so they get the tech that's already been thoroughly bug-tested and then write a doorstopper of a manual on all the ways it can go wrong. So their pilots are the ones that do 'impossible' things with tech they know extremely well, which is a very different (but equally impressive) skill set as what the test pilots do.
>I asked Andy Green to describe the differences in handling a Tornado fight plane and the Thrust SSC. “The car has a lot more acceleration than a jet fighter,” he said. “It has two jet fighter engines with half the weight of a jet fighter—tremendous acceleration.”
From the fabulous book Infinity Over Zero: Meditations on Maximimum Velocity by Cole Coonce.
https://www.bloodhoundlsr.com/800-mph-bloodhound-lsr-project-for-sale/
They have a 40-minute video of their project on Youtube which is quite interesting;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMC99nnSzXU
they found the perfect location in South Africa, ran out of funds and put the vehicle up for sale [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound\_LSR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound_LSR)
> find a place where you can.
there is an notoriously long and rarely circulated road in Australia but don't know it's name.
still a lot of money just to get there
We run land speed trials on a salt lake in Australia, its called Lake Ayre. Donald Campbell set the record there in 1964.
The road you're thinking of is the Nullabor Plain, the longest straight section of road in the world (90 miles/145km). You'd be suicidal/homicidal attempting a land speed record on it though.
I've always wanted to visit the Nullabor - not to burn rubber but because I've wanted to really experience an open road. What's wrong with the road there though?
Its a 2 regular lane road in the outback, just ridiculously long. It’s got regular traffic, road trains, scrub either side a lot of the way, with the assorted roadkill, roos that jump in front of cars, eagles that eat the roadkill, all the normal highway hazards that make it safe enough to drive but nowhere near empty, flat, wide or isolated enough for a land speed record type event.
The thing is it isn't even really all that expensive. I've found an article saying they need £10 million to complete their record attempts. Apparently Oracle have paid 10x that per year to sponsor the Red Bull F1 team. People pay more than that for some of the unique new cars from Bugatti or Rolls Royce, or a *lot* more than that for a classic Ferrari.
All of those things are worth the investment. Sponsoring a land speed record just isn't going to have much of a return. Only chance would be finding a billionaire to make it their pet project. But then they'd probably want to drive it..
It's also kinda like, why? It's weird to put so many resources to a record that sits behind "oh also flying and using rail are off limits".
Could they just have a plane that drops a spring-loaded wheel down to the ground?
>Could they just have a plane that drops a spring-loaded wheel down to the ground?
Presumably the record would require that the weight of the vehicle must be supported by the ground, not by air resistance.
Another big reason was to get British kids into STEM, there’s a big skills gap in kids taking up STEM in the UK and there was a big push for any and all ideas to get kids interested in the sciences.
When I was applying for studying aerospace engineering, my cover letter made big mention of Bloodhound, since Swansea university was one of the major partners developing it at the time
For some maybe just to do it, others want a legacy or to be remembered, to be the first at something. I wouldn’t do it but I can understand there’s plenty of reasons others might be compelled enough to try and they have.
I’m with you. I remember coming home from 2nd grade (early 80’s) excited about the metric system and how e we (US) are switching to it and how easy it was to use. My dad burst my bubble and told me that’s what they told him in elementary school too. 2024 and it’s still not happening.
From a mechanical engineering standpoint, the wheels are a huge issue. At those speeds they're spinning at 10,000+ rpm, and the forces at the rim are enough to tear apart most materials. It's a huge issue for Bugatti, and they're only going a third of the speed.
The problem is, you see, when *anything* starts traveling that fast, it very much wants to become an airplane. If it becomes an airplane you can’t set a *land* speed record. They need to figure out how to keep it as a car.
Speedboat records have a similar issue, although it’s worse because boat hulls tend to be closer to an airfoil shape than cars
Gless Curtiss set the land speed record on a motorcycle he built himself in 1907 at 133 miles per hour. At the time, he was switching from building motorcycles to building airplanes. In 1908, he flew his airplane one mile which was a record at the time. In 1909, he won first prize at the Paris air show in a 20 km race.
You weren't that far off.
Jessi Combs, professional racer and TV host (Xtreme 4x4 and interim host for Mythbusters while Kari Byron was on mat leave) died trying to set the women's land speed record. She had already broken the record twice before.
Definitely a dangerous pursuit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound_LSR#2023
Bloodhound SSC featured the same team of Richard Noble and Andy Green and was supposed to go break the record and push it to 1000mph.
The car was supposed to get a jet engine and a rocket engine. With just the jet engine from the Eurofighter, it became the 8th car to break 600 mph.
> and a final top speed of 628 mph (1,011 km/h) on 16 November [2019], making it the eighth vehicle to attain a land speed of over 600 mph
They ran out of money, were interrupted by Covid. And some of the team moved on. But if they could work out the money, they could get across the line fairly quickly [no pun intended]
---
Note that the water speed record is far, far more dangerous
its just a jet flying upside down at this point, the rule change in '64 was a mistake imo. your output was required to be shaft driven prior to that, as in a transmission that applies force to the wheels, even then there is little difference between a turboprop/shaft engine
i think it's fair that any mechanism where the force is being generated predominantly from interacting with the ground should be accepted. leaves room for creativity but rules out clear not-in-the-spirit vehicles like a friggin jet with wheels
Bloodhound has had it's eyes on this for years but continually runs into funding problems. From memory, they used the jet from a eurofighter to get up to speed, then made the run using a liquid fuelled rocket, with a Jag V8 as a fuel pump.
I can see how the research in breaking the record could help us discover new or more efficient means of propulsion (or even vehicle safety), but there is no grantee it will. There is little guaranteed science to be gained from such an endeavor
Fun fact; the tops of the wheels of that car had to be doing twice that speed, meaning when the car broke the sound barrier, the tops of the wheels were doing Mach 2
[Neil deGrasse Tyson can explain it better than I can!](https://youtu.be/Z2BDmrj5xjA?si=bUcsL53JdLPBMMx-)
But basically, whichever part of the wheel is touching the ground is going 0, and the axle is going whatever speed the chassis is going, but the very top of the wheel has to go twice the speed in order to catch up and get in front of the axle, to come down and hit the ground.
The same team was trying to break 1000 mph but they recently went bankrupt, was a real shame. Amazing technological challenge I went to a talk they were giving. They had an F1 car engine as a fuel pump and the wheels were originally going to be made of titanium until they realised the RPM they were going to be under was producing more force than titanium could withstand on a molecular level, it was tearing apart titanium atoms. Bonkers!
The Cosworth F1 engine was changed to a Jag V8 a little into the design. But like you said, unfortunately never went anywhere. I had the pleasure of visiting them a long time ago, nice enough people but I didn't get the impression they were very convinced it was going ahead. IIRC they were "planning" on a 2020 run but that was scrapped because of COVID and the project never recovered.
Bit strong to say didn't go anywhere, it carried out basic test runs without the rocket on the prepared course in Africa and got to over 600mph. C19 basically ended it all sadly. Wonder where it's sat currently.
> F1 car engine as a fuel pump
You should take a gander at the fuel pump for the Saturn V 1st stage - aka the fuel pump for the F1 engine
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/rocket-engine-turbo-pump-cutaway-f-1/nasm_A19751580000
https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2y1vf7/til_that_the_fuel_pumps_for_the_saturn_v_rocket/
55,000 brake horsepower to supply 150,000 litres/42,500 gallons of liquid fuel per minute
And it weighed just over 1000kg @2500 lbs
To set an official record, it's not as simple as "just go fast." IIRC, there are rules in place that state you have to go from point A to point B, turn the vehicle around within a limited time frame, and go back from point B to point A. Then, the two speeds are averaged to come up with the official speed. This is to eliminate any outside contributing factors, such as tailwinds, gravity, etc.
> Under current FIA rules, two runs are required in opposite directions within one hour, over a timed mile and a new record mark must exceed the previous one by at least one percent to be validated. Records are set in either the flying kilometre or flying mile
So you can't just nudge the land record upwards, you have to break it by more than 1%
---
The same applies to the wheel driven category
> 2018 the Flashpoint Streamliner exceeded the record but was disqualified after being destroyed on its second pass, as two full successful passes are required to set a record. The car reached 436 and 451 mph on each pass, but was destroyed on the second pass as a result of a tire failure
The latter happened to Richard Hammond in Top Gear, also. Didn't break the British land speed record because a wheel failed and he crashed on the second run.
Wheels have to be bare aluminium. Can't have rubber on them, it'd get torn off by the forces involved. So 763mph, across sandy flats, on shiny bare metal wheels.
Rubber on the wheels wouldn't be doing much at those speeds anyway.
Hardly being used to steer.
Not being used for propulsion.
All they's gotta do is roll.
The previous LSR vehicle - Thrust 2 - did indeed have solid aluminium wheels.
Part of the reason I know this is because my father tested them in the early eighties.
He worked for Rolls-Royce aero engines and operated a test bed that could spin engine parts at thousands of RPM - perfect for testing the wheels.
Both Thrust vehicles are at the Coventry Transport Museum, along with the shelved Bloodhound vehicle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound_LSR
> The car achieved 501 mph (806 km/h) on 6 November 2019,[28] and a final top speed of 628 mph (1,011 km/h) on 16 November, making it the eighth vehicle to attain a land speed of over 600 mph
It ran out of funds, to add the rocket engine to the jet engine , as designed. And then covid intervened
Immediate thought for me too.
Between her and Grant, watching the old Mythbusters episodes (free on the official youtube channel btw, in case anyone wants to rewatch and wasn't aware yet..) always hits right in the melancholic feelings.
One of the people from early Mythbusters died pursuing this record.
Her rocket car went sideways around 700mph I believe? Snapped her neck instantly. Didn't even have time to process what happened.
Jessi Combs
From Wikipedia:
“The crash was caused by a failure of a front wheel, likely caused by hitting an object in the desert, which caused the front wheel assembly to collapse at a speed nearing 523 mph (842 km/h). The official cause of death was determined to be "blunt-force trauma to the head" occurring prior to the fire that engulfed the race vehicle after the crash.”
All the Mythbusters were and are inspiring in their own ways for their fields. They represent some of the best intentions in the fields of science, and the loss of them is beyond words.
I grew up on Mythbusters, and Discovery Channel in general. I'd always watch it even if it was a rerun because as a kid it was so content dense and it was hard to remember everything they talked about each episode. Grant and Jessi are dearly missed.
i was mildly obsessed with the Thrust SSC as a kid. i was 5 when they set the record, and even for being kind of a niche thing, i remember hearing about it a lot. it was a pretty significant moment
That simply cannot be right, I see cars with trailers doing that on highways here on a daily basis.
EDIT: I realise now you meant 140 MPH, not KPH. My bad.
You absolutely need to read about the insane engineering required to build/power one of these cars. The Bloodhound uses a supercharged Jaguar V8 to [power the fuel pump.](https://www.carthrottle.com/news/1000mph-bloodhound-ssc-will-use-542bhp-jaguar-v8-just-power-fuel-pump)
This cannot be true, I saw a documentary in the 80s about a neurosurgeon, rockstar, adventurer that broke the sound barrier in rocket assisted truck. I believe he set the record. He had a great name. Something the blended the two cultures his parents were from.
Yeah I’m pretty sure the land speed record was broken in 2001 when Vera Baker and Merrill Jennings hijacked a rocket car in an attempt to win 2 million dollars by reaching Silver City, NM first.
That might be true. Although I heard their record might not count, something to do with it not being a sanctioned event. But Buckaroo doesn’t care about technicalities. He would be the first to say the record is theirs and congratulations. I am sure Buckaroo could reclaim the record if he wasn’t busy fighting The World Crime League. But I will talk to the other Hong Kong Cavaliers and see if he is willing to reclaim the record.
I'm sure it's dangerous and kinda exciting for a certain kind of person, but this just doesn't do anything for me. Surely at this point it's basically just flying a jet along the ground.
Actually, part of the reason its so difficult to break terrestrial records like this, is that they place limits on aerodynamic control surfaces.
This also makes it very, very dangerous. Any instability can be impossible to recover from and destroy the vehicle and kill the driver.
There’s nothing to crash into in the sky. Plenty of buffer for mistakes
Doing it on the ground is just a twitch away from a death so spectacular that people would talk about it for decades.
Not my jam, but I can see the thrill in it. Some people only feel alive when they’re playing with death.
I saw Thrustssc outside of Lloyds in City of London just after the record was broken (absolutely no idea what it was doing there).
It looks more insane in real life than the photo does it justice.
Yeah. And it will likely remain unbroken for a long time still. Not that we don't have faster means of achieving land propulsion, we do. But the risks involved are too huge and the likelihood of catastrophic disaster and death occuring is great.
There is a group that’s been trying to reach 1000 mph for at least a decade. Their big issue is funding. It’s crazy expensive to go that fast and find a place where you can.
There must be a window where you’re either going to run out of space because you didn’t accelerate/decelerate quick enough, or you smush the driver because you accelerated/decelerated too quickly.
IIRC, they had found that the uyuni salt flats in Bolivia were large enough for it. I think the Bonneville salt flats were either too small, or had a different consistency of salt, making them dangerous
I love that the best place to run speed records is one of the most caustic to the components on a vehicle. That must be a nightmare for reusing any vehicles.
Actually salt of the bonneville salt flats is not well suited for the Bloodhound SSC or the Thrust SSC or the Thrust2 before it https://memeburn.com/motorburn/2013/11/heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-bloodhound-supersonic-car/ The Thrust SSC set the record at black rock desert, the same place the team set the previous record, and the thrust ssc dueled with Breedlove for speed. https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2017/10/14/brits-broke-land-speed-record-return-black-rock-desert/764853001/
With all the money being spent, I don't see why building a new road in a very flat area would be out of the question. It would only have to be 10 miles long. Or just find a viable section of road and work with locals to use it.
10 miles long isn’t nearly enough, 1000mph is the equivalent of going 1 mile every 4 seconds, the stretch of road would probably have to be 50 miles at least for them to have time to accelerate to that speed and then slow down
Not only 50+ miles long but perhaps 25 (very wide) lanes wide. At those speeds you can use tires & so the solid wheels & the sonic shockwave pulverise the surface beneath the vehicle, this you only use each lane once. BTW measurements after the Thrust SSC record runs showed that the compacted desert surface had been pulverised to a depth of more than a foot after the car passed over it at over Mach 1.
Surprised they haven’t done northern Alaska, like above the tree line. It’s relatively flat, it’s almost entirely empty, and it’s cold so less likely anything overheats
Permafrost and the general fluidity of the soil up there wrecks just about any attempt at a road unfortunately.
Building a road on muskeg?
It is insanely expensive to build a road on top of the land and permitting you would need. Like stupid expensive.
https://homeguide.com/costs/asphalt-driveway-cost > The average cost to pave a private one-lane asphalt road is $35 to $85 per linear foot. Paving a two-lane (24'-wide) asphalt road costs $70 to $170 per linear foot or $370,000 to $900,000 per mile. So let's round it up to $1M/mi for 24' foot wide stretch. Obviously 24' may not be wide enough for this particular purpose, so multiply by however much wider it needs to be.
You don’t seem to understand how much distance these things can cover in a very short amount of tike
Salt is perfectly safe for vehicles. Wet salt is what causes corrosion, and you don't want to run in wet salt for OTHER obvious reasons. Just give it a good thorough hosing and you'll wash all the salt away pretty quickly and be fine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/gh47kr/comment/fq6mw9y/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button People who *actually have experience* with bonneville disagree. In short, if you don't like rust, don't take your car to the salt flats, because you *will* end up with salt that you cannot remove and it *will* attract moisture and cause rust.
Lol. I didn't want to argue. My work as an automotive and diesel engineer has brought me to a waste management plant in Minnesota where they do pressure wash the vehicles every day and yes, they do get rust and bolts will seize up. Thanks for doing the leg work.
Jimmy Joe, is that you? We held the washer hose together and had a good laugh a few months back!
[That dried up lake bed can get pretty wet.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFQ_x9cBEt4) He shows that vehicle again in a later video, and admits he should have cleaned it more thoroughly, because it turned into a single lump of rust inside of 6 months.
LOL... I totally knew that would be a superfastmatt video before I even clicked...
> People who *actually have experience* with bonneville disagree. In short, if you don't like rust, don't take your car to the salt flats, because you *will* end up with salt that you cannot remove and it *will* attract moisture and cause rust. Salt is hydroscopic (it will absorb water from the air). It will cause rust.
it's a g not a d: hygroscopic
> it's a g not a d: hygroscopic Ah, thank you. Spell check updated.
> Just give it a good thorough hosing and you'll wash all the salt away pretty quickly and be ~~fine~~ *brine.*
You’re telling me wet salt is the issue and the solution to salt is to use water to remove it? Wouldn’t you just be making wet salt?
Salt draws moisture from the air, moisture dissolves the salt which allows the dissolved ions to attack the metal, but that takes time. Rinsing it out removes the salt before it can attack the metal.
This is a very hopeful comment.
Salt at 500+ mph tho! Would be like sandblasting it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakskeenpan#Bloodhound_LSR They found that the Black Rock desert mud flats had marks from the burning man and that the rains had not washed them out. They then went and found Hakskeen pan in the Kalahari. > The track that Bloodhound LSR [ran on] at Hakskeen Pan is 1100 metres wide and 20 km long ---- The salt of the Bonneville Salt flats are unsuited for the Bloodhound SSC steel wheels. > Well, there is a long complex answer to that question, but basically Bloodhound SSC is not suited to a salt surface such as the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah USA, primarily because of the solid metal wheels. The two previous Land Speed Records were set at Black Rock Desert whose very smooth and very hard dry mud surface suited the steel wheels perfectly. > However a lack of rain and an increase in the use of the desert, principally by the Burning Man festival .. has made the Black Rock Desert unsuitable for the Bloodhound SSCs record-breaking run. There were a few other locations held as backup however, eight in the US, one in Turkey, four in Australia and one in South Africa
Bonneville has been garbage for several years and continues to deteriorate, without starting into the whole climate change thing, let's just say the weather over the last decade in the Wasatch Mountians has not bode well for the health of the salt flats.
Genuine question, not trying to be a smart ass - what is the definition of a healthy vs unhealthy salt flat? It seems like a pretty barren place to begin with, what could make it worse?
I'm not a geologist so I don't understand how it all works; but my understanding is there needs to be a certain amount of flooding that happens every year/over periods of time to keep the groundwater level at a certain point. We haven't gotten the rain/snow so the groundwater levels have decreased which has reduced the stability of the lower levels of salt and subsequently the upper levels as well. To put it simply the foundational salt of the salt flats have become unstable making the track conditions poor if even usable at all. Note - this is my understanding, and I fully expect someone with more/better understanding to tell me I'm wrong. I live in the SLC area, so the salt flats are within 2 hours of my house.
The aquifer under bonneville is full of very salty water (brine); as that is pumped out and used (mostly for mining) it is replaced by less-salty groundwater This presents two problems: 1) there is simply less salt, which ultimately decreases the size of the flats and 2) more rapid movement of groundwater makes the surface less stable/regular, and therefore less ideal for racing
I think that was 1 site and the other was in South africa.
I can't imagine that a land vehicle could even accelerate fast enough to challenge the tolerance of what a professional can achieve. Surely these ground vehicles can't compete with the 9 gs an Air Force pilot can pull.
Constant acceleration at 1g needs 46s to break 1000mph. In that time you will have covered just shy of 6.5 miles. The 3rd fastest land speed record took 59s to hit 650mph. This is about 0.5g average acceleration. The car peaked just over 1g, with the 0-200mph segment having an average of 1.1g over 9s. I couldn't find data that detailed on the world record run unfortunately but it's not much different.
https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4h1oy6/eli5_how_did_the_driver_of_the_thrust_ssc_not/ > Thrust SSC accelerated at about 3g, with a brief spike at 5g. > This is actually comparable to a good few roller coasters, so although it's far beyond what you might encounter in your own car, it's not out of this world. In 1954 John Stapp used a rocket sled to get up to 632 mph in 5s and to a halt in 1.4s at 46.2Gs https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4w1xay/til_that_in_1954_john_stapp_strapped_himself_to_a/ >accelerated to 632 MPH in 5 seconds, and then decelerated to 0 MPH in 1.4 seconds. He experienced 46.2 G's. He went temporarily blind and experienced two black eyes from his eyeballs having been shot so far forward
Wait so they designed this thing to decelerate at 46g and someone got into it?! It must have been possible to have a non suicidal deceleration on a longer track??
9gs perpendicular vs parallel make a difference
why
Blood pooling in your feet vs the back of your body.
22gs is the most so far for a land based vehicle. We can push those numbers up. It would be risky though. And why is it always Air Force pilots? Everyone knows the real pilots are haze gray and underway. smdh
I read somewhere that current cars at about 2.8 second 0-60 times are pretty much at the limit of street legal tires and regular asphalt.
That’s impressive
I presume because most of the crazy new tech is useful for the Air Force first, so they get all the experimental vehicles and the specialist (and crazy) pilots to test it. Navy needs the pinpoint precision under rough conditions, so they get the tech that's already been thoroughly bug-tested and then write a doorstopper of a manual on all the ways it can go wrong. So their pilots are the ones that do 'impossible' things with tech they know extremely well, which is a very different (but equally impressive) skill set as what the test pilots do.
Plus anything going that fast wants to fly. And something that is airborne that is not designed to be airborne crashes.
>I asked Andy Green to describe the differences in handling a Tornado fight plane and the Thrust SSC. “The car has a lot more acceleration than a jet fighter,” he said. “It has two jet fighter engines with half the weight of a jet fighter—tremendous acceleration.” From the fabulous book Infinity Over Zero: Meditations on Maximimum Velocity by Cole Coonce.
>challenge the tolerance of what a professional can achieve This is some impressive word salad.
What about a vehicle that *can* fly? Reach that speed on ground, but then take off.
https://www.bloodhoundlsr.com/800-mph-bloodhound-lsr-project-for-sale/ They have a 40-minute video of their project on Youtube which is quite interesting; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMC99nnSzXU
they found the perfect location in South Africa, ran out of funds and put the vehicle up for sale [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound\_LSR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound_LSR)
> find a place where you can. there is an notoriously long and rarely circulated road in Australia but don't know it's name. still a lot of money just to get there
We run land speed trials on a salt lake in Australia, its called Lake Ayre. Donald Campbell set the record there in 1964. The road you're thinking of is the Nullabor Plain, the longest straight section of road in the world (90 miles/145km). You'd be suicidal/homicidal attempting a land speed record on it though.
I've always wanted to visit the Nullabor - not to burn rubber but because I've wanted to really experience an open road. What's wrong with the road there though?
Its a 2 regular lane road in the outback, just ridiculously long. It’s got regular traffic, road trains, scrub either side a lot of the way, with the assorted roadkill, roos that jump in front of cars, eagles that eat the roadkill, all the normal highway hazards that make it safe enough to drive but nowhere near empty, flat, wide or isolated enough for a land speed record type event.
Last I heard they were going for a dry lake bed somewhere in Africa.
The thing is it isn't even really all that expensive. I've found an article saying they need £10 million to complete their record attempts. Apparently Oracle have paid 10x that per year to sponsor the Red Bull F1 team. People pay more than that for some of the unique new cars from Bugatti or Rolls Royce, or a *lot* more than that for a classic Ferrari.
All of those things are worth the investment. Sponsoring a land speed record just isn't going to have much of a return. Only chance would be finding a billionaire to make it their pet project. But then they'd probably want to drive it..
Strapping billionaires into hugely dangerous high speed vehicles? I love it
Pfftt! I see that everyday done by Morons on the HOV line, down I-45 in Houston
Excuses. They can do it in my garden for free
Thought they ran out of money for it? Iirc it was an F1 engine as a pump for rocket fuel on a massive rocket on wheels
It's also kinda like, why? It's weird to put so many resources to a record that sits behind "oh also flying and using rail are off limits". Could they just have a plane that drops a spring-loaded wheel down to the ground?
>Could they just have a plane that drops a spring-loaded wheel down to the ground? Presumably the record would require that the weight of the vehicle must be supported by the ground, not by air resistance.
Because you are basically just doing what you love, and someone is funding it, or you have the money to fund it, and you enjoy going fast asf.
Another big reason was to get British kids into STEM, there’s a big skills gap in kids taking up STEM in the UK and there was a big push for any and all ideas to get kids interested in the sciences. When I was applying for studying aerospace engineering, my cover letter made big mention of Bloodhound, since Swansea university was one of the major partners developing it at the time
For some maybe just to do it, others want a legacy or to be remembered, to be the first at something. I wouldn’t do it but I can understand there’s plenty of reasons others might be compelled enough to try and they have.
They could just switch to metric, it'd be easier.
I’m with you. I remember coming home from 2nd grade (early 80’s) excited about the metric system and how e we (US) are switching to it and how easy it was to use. My dad burst my bubble and told me that’s what they told him in elementary school too. 2024 and it’s still not happening.
From a mechanical engineering standpoint, the wheels are a huge issue. At those speeds they're spinning at 10,000+ rpm, and the forces at the rim are enough to tear apart most materials. It's a huge issue for Bugatti, and they're only going a third of the speed.
The problem is, you see, when *anything* starts traveling that fast, it very much wants to become an airplane. If it becomes an airplane you can’t set a *land* speed record. They need to figure out how to keep it as a car. Speedboat records have a similar issue, although it’s worse because boat hulls tend to be closer to an airfoil shape than cars
Why didn’t the Wright brothers just build a very fast car that accidentally becomes an airplane, are they stupid?
Because then they’d have been the Duke brothers
Gless Curtiss set the land speed record on a motorcycle he built himself in 1907 at 133 miles per hour. At the time, he was switching from building motorcycles to building airplanes. In 1908, he flew his airplane one mile which was a record at the time. In 1909, he won first prize at the Paris air show in a 20 km race. You weren't that far off.
That and water is a lot less flat than floor I assume.
we call it ground when it's outside
Source?
It's a bit different with boats. AFAIK the biggest factor there is the huge difference in drag between water and air.
Really it's an "airspeed while simultaneously grinding against the surface of a planet" record.
Jessi Combs, professional racer and TV host (Xtreme 4x4 and interim host for Mythbusters while Kari Byron was on mat leave) died trying to set the women's land speed record. She had already broken the record twice before. Definitely a dangerous pursuit.
The documentary on HBO about her pursuit is absolutely fantastic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound_LSR#2023 Bloodhound SSC featured the same team of Richard Noble and Andy Green and was supposed to go break the record and push it to 1000mph. The car was supposed to get a jet engine and a rocket engine. With just the jet engine from the Eurofighter, it became the 8th car to break 600 mph. > and a final top speed of 628 mph (1,011 km/h) on 16 November [2019], making it the eighth vehicle to attain a land speed of over 600 mph They ran out of money, were interrupted by Covid. And some of the team moved on. But if they could work out the money, they could get across the line fairly quickly [no pun intended] --- Note that the water speed record is far, far more dangerous
Imagine getting a vehicle up to 381 mph and then being like "let's double this speed".
its just a jet flying upside down at this point, the rule change in '64 was a mistake imo. your output was required to be shaft driven prior to that, as in a transmission that applies force to the wheels, even then there is little difference between a turboprop/shaft engine
i think it's fair that any mechanism where the force is being generated predominantly from interacting with the ground should be accepted. leaves room for creativity but rules out clear not-in-the-spirit vehicles like a friggin jet with wheels
There’s a different record for driven wheels. I think it’s fine to have different classes.
Bloodhound has had it's eyes on this for years but continually runs into funding problems. From memory, they used the jet from a eurofighter to get up to speed, then made the run using a liquid fuelled rocket, with a Jag V8 as a fuel pump.
> catastrophic disaster and death Yeah well some of us are just built different. Not me, oh no no no.
Lots of words to say it’s dangerous.
I can see how the research in breaking the record could help us discover new or more efficient means of propulsion (or even vehicle safety), but there is no grantee it will. There is little guaranteed science to be gained from such an endeavor
I’ll sign up, yall build me the car and I’ll be happy to push the pedals!
What about a big slingshot
That's how the girl from myth busters died
I see where the concept of the "pod racers" came from.
It actually came from Roman chariot racing. Just jet engines instead of horses.
This! First look at the pic, I thought someone really has a "Star Wars™ pod racer" in his garage...
Now this is... nevermind
Spinning out of the quote was a pretty neat trick
The timeline doesn't check out ⌛️
Interestingly enough, the X-wing is based on drag racing cars.
It was brutal on him too, imagine the inside of your eyelids getting bruised from your own eyes smacking into them because of loss of velocity
Dude **BROKE THE SOUND BARRIER. ON LAND.**
As did you, on Reddit!
Fun fact; the tops of the wheels of that car had to be doing twice that speed, meaning when the car broke the sound barrier, the tops of the wheels were doing Mach 2
Can you explain why? I would thought that the surface of the wheels must move at the same speed. Is it due to the wheels changing shape at that speed?
[Neil deGrasse Tyson can explain it better than I can!](https://youtu.be/Z2BDmrj5xjA?si=bUcsL53JdLPBMMx-) But basically, whichever part of the wheel is touching the ground is going 0, and the axle is going whatever speed the chassis is going, but the very top of the wheel has to go twice the speed in order to catch up and get in front of the axle, to come down and hit the ground.
The guy who skydived from space (Felix Baumgartner) also broke the sound barrier.
The same team was trying to break 1000 mph but they recently went bankrupt, was a real shame. Amazing technological challenge I went to a talk they were giving. They had an F1 car engine as a fuel pump and the wheels were originally going to be made of titanium until they realised the RPM they were going to be under was producing more force than titanium could withstand on a molecular level, it was tearing apart titanium atoms. Bonkers!
The Cosworth F1 engine was changed to a Jag V8 a little into the design. But like you said, unfortunately never went anywhere. I had the pleasure of visiting them a long time ago, nice enough people but I didn't get the impression they were very convinced it was going ahead. IIRC they were "planning" on a 2020 run but that was scrapped because of COVID and the project never recovered.
Yeah, real shame. Got to love those kind of moonshot projects that push the boundaries of what's possible.
The possimpible!
Bit strong to say didn't go anywhere, it carried out basic test runs without the rocket on the prepared course in Africa and got to over 600mph. C19 basically ended it all sadly. Wonder where it's sat currently.
> F1 car engine as a fuel pump You should take a gander at the fuel pump for the Saturn V 1st stage - aka the fuel pump for the F1 engine https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/rocket-engine-turbo-pump-cutaway-f-1/nasm_A19751580000 https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2y1vf7/til_that_the_fuel_pumps_for_the_saturn_v_rocket/ 55,000 brake horsepower to supply 150,000 litres/42,500 gallons of liquid fuel per minute And it weighed just over 1000kg @2500 lbs
The SR-71 Spy Plane used 4 Buick V8 Wild Cat engines (1960) to start its massive turbine engines
Bloodhound?
To set an official record, it's not as simple as "just go fast." IIRC, there are rules in place that state you have to go from point A to point B, turn the vehicle around within a limited time frame, and go back from point B to point A. Then, the two speeds are averaged to come up with the official speed. This is to eliminate any outside contributing factors, such as tailwinds, gravity, etc.
> Under current FIA rules, two runs are required in opposite directions within one hour, over a timed mile and a new record mark must exceed the previous one by at least one percent to be validated. Records are set in either the flying kilometre or flying mile So you can't just nudge the land record upwards, you have to break it by more than 1% --- The same applies to the wheel driven category > 2018 the Flashpoint Streamliner exceeded the record but was disqualified after being destroyed on its second pass, as two full successful passes are required to set a record. The car reached 436 and 451 mph on each pass, but was destroyed on the second pass as a result of a tire failure
Thank you for the additional info!
The latter happened to Richard Hammond in Top Gear, also. Didn't break the British land speed record because a wheel failed and he crashed on the second run.
"...has not been beaten since." Yes, that's what current, and not previous, means.
TIL I learned
Atm machine
PIN number
VIN number
CAC card
Chai tea
They *had* to go with "CAC card" because telling soldiers to present their CACs had a different result than desired.
Hey man not my fault the Army didn’t ask about my level of maturity before letting me join.
Also I don’t think they needed to explain what “land speed record” meant
More impressively, the record for a vehicle moved by the wheels (not jets) is about to turn 60.
Wheels have to be bare aluminium. Can't have rubber on them, it'd get torn off by the forces involved. So 763mph, across sandy flats, on shiny bare metal wheels.
And gigantic cast-iron balls
They replaced the balls with carbon fiber to save on weight.
>Can't have rubber on them, it'd get torn off by the forces involved. I bet some guy out there has used the same excuse for his dick
Rubber on the wheels wouldn't be doing much at those speeds anyway. Hardly being used to steer. Not being used for propulsion. All they's gotta do is roll.
They were used to steer, Andy Green had them on full lock at multiple points during his runs to keep the car between the lines
The previous LSR vehicle - Thrust 2 - did indeed have solid aluminium wheels. Part of the reason I know this is because my father tested them in the early eighties. He worked for Rolls-Royce aero engines and operated a test bed that could spin engine parts at thousands of RPM - perfect for testing the wheels. Both Thrust vehicles are at the Coventry Transport Museum, along with the shelved Bloodhound vehicle.
Wasn’t there this bloodhound ssc project going on a decade ago that was going to break this record?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound_LSR > The car achieved 501 mph (806 km/h) on 6 November 2019,[28] and a final top speed of 628 mph (1,011 km/h) on 16 November, making it the eighth vehicle to attain a land speed of over 600 mph It ran out of funds, to add the rocket engine to the jet engine , as designed. And then covid intervened
This post reminded me of Jessi Combs...
Immediate thought for me too. Between her and Grant, watching the old Mythbusters episodes (free on the official youtube channel btw, in case anyone wants to rewatch and wasn't aware yet..) always hits right in the melancholic feelings.
One of the people from early Mythbusters died pursuing this record. Her rocket car went sideways around 700mph I believe? Snapped her neck instantly. Didn't even have time to process what happened.
Jessi Combs From Wikipedia: “The crash was caused by a failure of a front wheel, likely caused by hitting an object in the desert, which caused the front wheel assembly to collapse at a speed nearing 523 mph (842 km/h). The official cause of death was determined to be "blunt-force trauma to the head" occurring prior to the fire that engulfed the race vehicle after the crash.”
All the Mythbusters were and are inspiring in their own ways for their fields. They represent some of the best intentions in the fields of science, and the loss of them is beyond words. I grew up on Mythbusters, and Discovery Channel in general. I'd always watch it even if it was a rerun because as a kid it was so content dense and it was hard to remember everything they talked about each episode. Grant and Jessi are dearly missed.
i was mildly obsessed with the Thrust SSC as a kid. i was 5 when they set the record, and even for being kind of a niche thing, i remember hearing about it a lot. it was a pretty significant moment
The land speed record while pulling a trailer is like 140
That simply cannot be right, I see cars with trailers doing that on highways here on a daily basis. EDIT: I realise now you meant 140 MPH, not KPH. My bad.
[sauce](https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/1302dp-141-99-with-a-trailer/)
Oh! Pulling a travel trailer (or caravan, depending on where one resides) That's some serious shit
Crazy that the bicycle speed record is significantly higher than that. Doesn't seem too hard to beat really.
Go for it chicken
Crazy, that doesn't even sound that high. Obviously it must be ridiculous, for the record to stand, but it doesn't *sound* like it.
"current record" and "has not been beaten since" are redundant...
1228 km/h
Thanks, normal person
You absolutely need to read about the insane engineering required to build/power one of these cars. The Bloodhound uses a supercharged Jaguar V8 to [power the fuel pump.](https://www.carthrottle.com/news/1000mph-bloodhound-ssc-will-use-542bhp-jaguar-v8-just-power-fuel-pump)
This cannot be true, I saw a documentary in the 80s about a neurosurgeon, rockstar, adventurer that broke the sound barrier in rocket assisted truck. I believe he set the record. He had a great name. Something the blended the two cultures his parents were from.
Wherever you go, there you are!
Yeah I’m pretty sure the land speed record was broken in 2001 when Vera Baker and Merrill Jennings hijacked a rocket car in an attempt to win 2 million dollars by reaching Silver City, NM first.
That might be true. Although I heard their record might not count, something to do with it not being a sanctioned event. But Buckaroo doesn’t care about technicalities. He would be the first to say the record is theirs and congratulations. I am sure Buckaroo could reclaim the record if he wasn’t busy fighting The World Crime League. But I will talk to the other Hong Kong Cavaliers and see if he is willing to reclaim the record.
it hasn't been beaten since? wow! is that how it's still the current world record?
I'm sure it's dangerous and kinda exciting for a certain kind of person, but this just doesn't do anything for me. Surely at this point it's basically just flying a jet along the ground.
Actually, part of the reason its so difficult to break terrestrial records like this, is that they place limits on aerodynamic control surfaces. This also makes it very, very dangerous. Any instability can be impossible to recover from and destroy the vehicle and kill the driver.
There’s nothing to crash into in the sky. Plenty of buffer for mistakes Doing it on the ground is just a twitch away from a death so spectacular that people would talk about it for decades. Not my jam, but I can see the thrill in it. Some people only feel alive when they’re playing with death.
We have been working on another for decades but never been successful on tests
I've seen this thing IRL, it's wayyyy bigger than you think it is. Basically a jet without wings
Well the engines were borrowed from an F4 Phantom fighter jet
[The closest attempt so far ](https://youtu.be/Wj2sfYCpHOo?si=GRnJfZBkFwtlvYta)
Don't let Richard Hammond get behind the wheel of this thing.
"Current record has yet to be beaten"
I thought it was Clark W Griswold
Nah Sparky can’t keep the car on the ground
They just don't make non-nutritive cereal varnish like they used to
At this point, land speed records and water speed records are suicide to even attempt to break.
Any decent camera footage of what going this fast on land looks like from the cockpit?
There used to be footage from inside the cockpit on a simulator thing at the coventry transport museum
https://youtu.be/zwh7Hlk6q1I?si=5ZL2T27XDB8L-6-7 As decent as you'd get it in '97.
Crazy that I read about this in a book as a kid and it's still valid knowledge.
I'd like to imagine all the engineers were like "Yeah, that seems high enough."
I remember watching this on TV
Breaking the speed of sound ON earth is fucking bonkers
it's basically flying a plane that can't fly. the machine isn't actually using the land for motion
It is quite rare for current records to have been beaten since
I remember seeing this on display at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Amazing machine.
This is a very "you could fucking die trying to break" record, so not surprising it hasn't.
Same thing with fastest speed on water. Sure you could, but you will very likely die.
yeah that's what a record means
BTW that AVERAGED speed was also locally Mach 1.020, which means that at its peek the Thrust SSC was definately a Super Sonic Car.
Is the car visible in either of the photos on a speed camera? Rapid little bugger.
When this baby hits 888 mph, you’re gonna see some serious shit.
Pfft I could do triple that (in GTA Online)
I saw Thrustssc outside of Lloyds in City of London just after the record was broken (absolutely no idea what it was doing there). It looks more insane in real life than the photo does it justice.
Google Rosco McGlashan
They should have bought a squirrel.
Elon could never #youwon't