In 1905, a man named Arthur MacDonald walked across the sand of Ormond Beach, FL, climbed behind the wheel of a barrel-shaped car known as a Napier, fired up the 90HP engine and became the first person to drive a car over 100MPH. This year, a man named Andy Green wants to go ten times faster than that.
One thousand miles per hour. On land.
Andy doesn’t need to go 1,000MPH. The current land speed record is 763MPH. Andy knows this because he set it. In 1997, 50 years after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in an aircraft, Andy broke it on land. His jet-powered Thrust SSC cut across the desert like a scalpel, separating Earth from sky, at an average speed of 763.035MPH.
Why go faster? Is Andy an adrenaline junkie? Cliff diving would be cheaper. The Bloodhound LSR has cost tens of millions of dollars to build and operate. As Andy explained to Forbes’ Jim Clash, the LSR team is motivated by something far more selfless:
“We need to inspire the next generation, kids in particular, with science and technology. We’re doing this as a technology demonstration of what is possible — that we can build a 1,000-mph car. Exactly how that works out, we don’t know, which is why we’re promoting it as an engineering adventure…” (Forbes)
That’s a mission we support. The only question left is: how? Click play to find out.