Page 64 - MotorTrend (March 2020)

FEATURE I LAND SPEED RECORD
“ t’s a bit Everest, isn’t it?” For a brief
moment, Ian Warhurst doesn’t sound
like a mechanical engineer. Echoes of
Henry Segrave, George Eyston, John
ICobb, Malcolm and Donald Campbell,
Art Arfons, Craig Breedlove—brave, quix-
otic adventurers who dreamed of being the of London, met with chief engineer Mark
fastest ground-bound humans on earth—
reverberate through the room. “You’re
going into the unknown, doing something
that no one else has done before.” A pause.
“That’s got to be appealing, hasn’t it?”
A little over a year ago Warhurst was
wondering what he was going to do with
the rest of his life. Having sold his turbo-
charger parts manufacturing business to
an American corporation, he found himself assets and would just hang on to them for a
at the age of 49 wealthy enough never
to have to work again. But a WhatsApp
message from his eldest son, Charlie,
changed everything. “Hey Dad, have you
seen that Bloodhound’s getting sold? Why
don’t you buy it? Ha ha.”
Bloodhound. Warhurst had long known
about the British project to set a new land
speed record, not the least because he’d
followed Bloodhound founder Richard
Noble’s 1997 attempt with the Thrust SSC,
driven by RAF fighter pilot Andy Green to
a new record of 763.035 mph.
Noble’s canine-monikered follow-up to
Thrust had begun in 2008, and Warhurst
had been following its progress closely.
He’d been given a gold supporter’s
certificate by his brother in 2009 as a 40th
birthday present. He’d also seen the Blood-
hound car being used to inspire young
people to take up science and engineering,
a personal passion.
By 2018, however, the Bloodhound
project had run out of money, the car
having run just a handful of low-speed
shakedown runs, to 200 mph, on an airfield quickly decided it wasn’t something the
in Cornwall, England. “I was surprised
it was actually going to come to an end,”
Warhurst recalls. “So I thought, ‘I wonder
if I can help? I’m sitting here with a load of
money in the bank and nothing to do.’”
Barely 10 months later Warhurst was
standing on a dry lake in the Kalahari
Desert watching Bloodhound become only
the sixth car in history to top 600 mph.
64 MOTORTREND.COM MARCH 2020
When Warhurst contacted Noble, he
learned bankruptcy administrators were
off some of its military-spec hardware. He
planning to cut up Bloodhound and sell
raced to the project’s HQ in Bristol, west
Chapman, and made a quick decision.
“I realized that if I didn’t do a deal when
I left the building,” he recalls, “the person
coming in behind me would be carrying the
angle grinder.” Within a week he’d set up a
company and had become the proud owner
of a land speed record team.
“I had no idea what to do next,” Warhurst
admits. “I thought I was just buying the
while and hand them back to the team.”
But the team—the technicians, fabrica- Ian Warhurst, right, the man who saved
Bloodhound, looks on as the team
tors, and support staff—had scattered as
analyzes data before another test run.
the money had dried up. And the sponsors,
some of whom had been with the project 1,000 mph looks like, how can you budget
for a decade, had also moved on. The more for it?” he asks, pointing out that to be
Warhurst looked at what he now owned, the safe, most people would double or triple
more he became convinced that rather than their estimates and hope they had enough
sticking Bloodhound into a museum where money. “That’s not how I run a project,”
people could ponder what might have he insists. “I want to know what I’m doing,
been, he should enable it to do what it was how I’m going to do it, and what the actual
designed to do: break the land speed record. costs of that are going to be.”
“The car had been designed; it’d been The first phase of determining the
built,” he says. “All I had to do was get it cash burn involved a carefully planned
out to the desert and run it.” Bloodhound high-speed testing program across the
was given a new white paint job (“a blank Hakskeen Pan dry lake in the Northern
canvas”), the project’s name was tweaked Cape province of South Africa. “I knew
to reflect its mission statement (Blood- that if we’re going to do something
hound LSR), and a new logo was developed. with the car, it had to be straight away,”
Warhurst believed he could find new spon- Warhurst says. “We had to get to the
sors to fund the land speed record runs. But desert and actually do it; otherwise people
first, Bloodhound had to prove itself. would start losing interest.”
Bloodhound had been designed in 2008 The public target for the test program
to hit 1,000 mph—a big, sexy number well was 500 mph. “If we got to 500, we’d have
above the existing record—but Warhurst all the data we needed to go on to the next
phase, the land speed record,” Warhurst
team should initially chase. says. The team’s internal target, however,
“Nobody really knew if it was possible to was 1,000 kph (621 mph), a nice round
go 1,000 mph until we got to 850 mph,” he
says, “and I’m thinking, ‘850 is a land speed
record. That’s massive. Let’s just focus on
that.’” The businessman in Warhurst
kicks in. “If you have no idea what