Andy Green. Lunch with the fastest man alive!
Lifestyle | Interviews | crankandpiston | EVO Middle East
James speaks with World Land Speed Record holder – RAF Wing Commander – Andy Green about applying for the fastest seat on the planet, the intricacies behind a supersonic run on four wheels, the upcoming Bloodhound SSC project, and why black underwear may be the secret to breaking world records.
Originally posted – 12 December, 2013 | crankandpiston.com
“At around 1000kph I’m fighting the car directionally. On the first of the supersonic record runs we did, I finished up 15m off-line with 90-degrees of steering lock on and the car still sliding sideways!”
Proof positive if it was needed that RAF Wing Commander Andy Green is one of the coolest guys on the planet. Having joined the Royal Air Force shortly after the Cold War, he has served active duty in and over the Falkland Islands, Bosnia, southern Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. He has flown some of the fastest and most manoeuvrable fighter jets on the planet, specialising in Phantoms and Tornadoes. And in his spare time – in what he calls ‘the world’s best holiday job’ – he drives jet-engined supersonic cars up to an eye-popping 1200kph. He is the current land speed record holder and remains to this day the only man to have hit supersonic speeds on four wheels.
So it’s with some surprise that the Wing Commander informs me what his preferred mode of transport is….
“I love sailing. The ideal speed for me is four/five knots on the way to a nice harbour to stop for some lunch. And actually my favourite form of flying is gliding, because there’s something enormously satisfying about taking off on a winch launch, reading the air, following the currents, and staying airborne for five hours just by finding your own lift.”
It’s this analytical approach that gets our conversation rolling at Dubai’s Habtoor Grand Hotel: land speed record holder Andy Green on one side of the table; myself with a furiously scribbling Biro on the other. Given that it was his strongest subject in school, a degree in mathematics at Oxford University – at the behest of his headmaster and maths teacher, both ivy league alumni – was soon in his pocket. And while a career with the RAF allowed Andy’s analytical side to prosper (how a plane stays in the air, etc), it was the herculean intricacy involved in a new World Land Speed Record attempt that first drew the Wing Commander to the Thrust SSC program in the early 1990s.
Headed by Richard Noble – the then-fastest man on the planet courtesy of Thrust 2’s record 1019.468kph run in 1983 – the Thrust SSC team aimed to do the impossible: break the sound barrier, a feat experts claimed was physically impossible.
“Professors of aerodynamics who worked in the field said that this could not be done,” Andy explains. “‘If you try this, it will end catastrophically badly and probably with a massive accident’. We didn’t underestimate the size of the problem but we didn’t necessarily agree with the intuition.
“It was a 50/50 split between the fighter pilot side of me that was fascinated by the personal, physiological, emotional and technical challenges of designing and controlling a car like that; and the mathematician side focused on the technical problems. It some ways it was a sport that was made for me and I was just waiting for an opportunity to come along.”
Said opportunity however involved much more than a neatly Xeroed CV. Andy and the other 15 applicants – most with military pedigree of their own – underwent physical, mental and psychological tests across a four-stage program that whittled the contenders down to four. Even then, more was required.
“First up we did three hours of intelligence and personality tests,” Andy continues. “I think the psychologist running them was expecting a bunch of complete nutcases. What he actually found was one of the most intelligent and emotionally stable groups they’d ever tested at the Centre for Human sciences at Farnborough. They realised that breaking the land speed record isn’t something you do if you have a death wish, and they started re-structuring the test program after that.
“In the second batch, we did 24 hours in the heat chamber, testing not only control and reaction but also the ability to learn. The psychologists would measure how much we’d learnt from what you’d done 12 hours earlier, and this would be at 4am. Five of us then went on to a purely practical test in a Group 2 Volkswagen Golf rally car with ex-national rally champion Russell Brooks sitting next to us. The examiners were looking for the fastest times, but not the single fastest lap: it was the fastest cumulative total of all three laps. A single crash would take you out of the running.
“The final piece of the jigsaw was being able to work with a team: it doesn’t matter how bright you are or how quickly you learn; if you can’t work with other people, the team can’t function.”
And so it was that non-nutcase Andy was invited to join the Thrust SSC (SuperSonic Car) team in 1995 for an extensive development program before performing the run itself at Black Rock Desert, Nevada, on 15 October 1997. Even then, with hundreds of days testing on the ten-ton aerodynamic piece of art, two Rolls-Royce Spey Mk202 turbojet engines producing 25,000lb ft of thrust apiece (equivalent to 145 Formula 1 cars), and the prospect of 0-1000kph in just 16 seconds rattling round his head, the life-threatening danger was just one cause for concern. With little creditability bolstering the operation, Thrust SSC had just one attempt to break the record.
“Every single run, I was acutely aware there was 100 different ways to get this wrong. Calculations beforehand said that if I got slightly out of sync, the car would be so far off-line within two seconds that it would be unrecoverable and we would have to abort the run. Suddenly we’ve wasted ten days. Or the weather breaks and the rains come early. That’s it. You’re done. We didn’t have enough money to go back the following year nor did we have the credibility.”
Months of preparation for the critical run, one would think the cockpit would have been stuffed with lucky charms. But no…
“Not a single one. Other land speed record teams have. Donald Campbell’s team had Mr Whoppit, the little teddy bear, with the Bluebird. In fact one of the land speed record teams declared that all of their crew members had to wear black underwear any day that the car was running. I don’t know whether they actually went and inspected that!
“If we had a superstition, it was a belief in preparation. If we didn’t know what was going to happen, we didn’t do the next run until we’d figured it out. And if we couldn’t, there wasn’t a next run. It’s like testing a new aeroplane from scratch. You get airborne, fly round the airfield a couple of times, land, and do a full inspection. Next time you go a little faster and a little further. Step by step testing, and it’s exactly the same with the car. By the time we’d been supersonic, we’d already done 12 runs at over 1100kph. There is no huge jump.”
Fast forward to October 1997. A record broken and the bubbly supped copiously, it was back to the RAF day job for Andy intercut with requests to max a Bentley Mulsanne at Bonneville (see below). The Wing Commander though was far from done with life in the incredibly fast lane. Well before the official announcement was made in October 2008, planning and subsequent preparation was well underway for Bloodhound SSC, a new supersonic car project – again headed by Richard Noble – aimed at breaking the mythical 1000mph/1609kph mark and cementing yet another land speed record.
Weighing seven tonnes, measuring more than 44-feet long, and boasting a carbon fibre monocoque and metallic framework, the Bloodhound utilises an EJ200 jet engine, a hybrid rocket and an ‘auxiliary power unit’ capable of producing a combined 135,000hp: at full thrust, the Bloodhound could theoretically reach 25,000ft if fired vertically into the air. For maths nut and driver Andy, it’s a compelling – albeit monumental – undertaking.
“Technology’s come a huge way: what was a supercomputer 20 years ago is now a decent desktop. Some of the country’s biggest supercomputers are working on the Bloodhound, and they’re just light-years ahead of anything available with Thrust. So the data is so much more accurate. We can even look at unstable flow and start to solve it. That was impossible 20 years ago.
“The other thing is we have the credibility. We’ve built the only supersonic car in the word. We still hold the record. We are pushing the boundaries of human endeavour. And that’s not only a very human thing to do, it’s part of what makes life exciting and interesting. 1600kph is faster than any jet fighter has ever been in history, so we’re taking the jet engine outside its design envelope.”
Given the speeds at play, strong names like ‘Thrust’ have helped make both 2 and the SSC iconic machines. And while Bloodhound may seem an unusual choice, the name is actually derived from Chief of Aerodynamics Ron Ayers’ work on the Bloodhound 2 missile. A name that originally was just temporary.
“Before the press launch, we didn’t want anybody to know about the car. We were very cautious, so we used a codename. But when it came to announce the project we thought, ‘right, what are we actually going to call it?’ By then it had stuck in the consciousness to the extent that we just stuck with it.
“Nobody needs a supersonic car, but if you want to teach Newtonian physics, ‘here’s a 1000kph jet car, what makes that move?’ The answer is because the jet engine sucks air in, heats it up and blasts it out the back under very high pressure. There is an equal and opposite reaction with that high-pressure jet of gas, pushing the car in the opposite direction. That is Newton’s third law of physics. Why do you need a big engine to accelerate quickly? Well, for a given mass, more force is more acceleration. That’s Newton’s second law done. That’s a snapshot example of the physics behind Bloodhound. That’s our real legacy. That’s what we’re actually trying to achieve.”
One land speed record under his belt and now another as impressively complex – with full backing from Rolls-Royce for the first time in the company’s history – set to debut in the near future. But it’s all in a day’s work for RAF Wing Commander Andy Green. It is the world’s best holiday job, after all.
Images | Awesome Group, James Davison and Bloodhound LSR
In November 2012, RAF Wing Commander Andy Green took a Bentley Mulsanne to 300kph on the famous Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA. Here he explains to James just what it’s like to drive a luxury saloon on a wet surface, underneath a helicopter, 10kph faster than its claimed top speed.
Originally posted – 26 November, 2013 | crankandpiston.com
“How hard can it be to drive a car in a straight-line at Bonneville? Well last year we tried just that with a Bentley Mulsanne.
“Bonneville is a salt surface, so you get a good coefficient of friction: about the same as tarmac in the rain. So the best you can hope for at Bonneville is the equivalent of high-speed driving in the rain. During the day, because the salt crust sits on top of wet clay, the heat of the sun actually brings the moisture up to the surface. So bizarrely, the surface gets wetter during the day. Get up first thing in the morning, touch the surface and you’ll get tiny little salt crystals on your hand. At the end of the afternoon, touch it and you come away with brine and wet salt on your hand. So it gets very slippery.
“Plus, the Mulsanne is not the most aerodynamic of vehicles. It’s a stunning shape but has a fairly blunt-fronted shape, and that produces a lot of drag at the front. The car is also putting a lot of power down through the rear wheels, so you will finish up with a car oversteering.
“So I’m running a car with 290kph as the book figure for it and that’s on a perfect track with everything going for you at sea level. We’re 4000ft up at Bonneville, which doesn’t help because of the thinner air. That, plus the heat of the day and a slippery surface. I told the team, ‘anything north of 250kph, you should be reasonably comfortable with’. Everybody who goes to Bonneville drives less fast than they expect to, for all of those reasons amongst others.
“We got the Mulsanne up to 300kph.
“It was completely unexpected. That’s faster than it’s been on the test track. When you start hitting 250-300kph, the car should be oversteering, but it was still rock steady. The recommendation for cars at Bonneville, because of the slippery surface, is to turn the traction control off. On a slippery surface, you actually want a much higher level of slip angle than traction control normally gives you. I could not do better than the Bentley system was giving me, so I left it on.
“Interestingly we did all the filming of the run in one day, from dawn all the way through to… well, pretty much until it was too dark to film again. It was a tight schedule in the two days we had available, and we started off with a silver/blue Mulsanne. It was a stunning car but was the wrong colour for the surface. Of course, it was the only car we had available though, so we did a day’s filming in that. Then the next day the red one turned up. We all looked at it and thought, ‘that’s the one we should have had. Hell, let’s see if we can do it all again in one day’. And we did.
“I remember at point during the run we’re doing the world’s fastest interview, with questions and answers going back and forth at 300kph. You’ll notice in the video the mirrors are all at funny angles to hide the fact that I have a car full of people with me. I’ve got the producer sitting behind me, a soundman next to him, a cameraman in the backseat and another guy with a camera in the front seat. The sound man is not only recording what I’m saying but he has microphones hanging in the exhaust and the engine bay to record the noise of the car. He had a unique problem though and had to dub the noise on to the soundtrack rather than trying to filter it out, to make it sound like we’re moving. It was that quiet, even when we’re doing 300kph.
“For the parts where I was doing the drive past with the helicopter, there was a very good friend of mine on location called Mike Cook. He’s been racing since he was a boy at Bonneville, so he was the track manager and independent safety analyst. His job was to make sure the track was clear and what we were doing was sensible. At one point the producer said, ‘right, I want a helicopter hovering and the car to do a 300kph pass underneath it’. But Mike said, no, that’s not safe. Cars can easily be blown sideways at high speed because you get 100kph side winds coming out of a helicopter. I said, ‘well, I’m developing some confidence in this car, so can we do some slow speed test runs and just build the pace up gradually.’ Mike said, ‘well because it’s you, I’ll let you test it’.
“So we built the run up in stages from to 200kph and onto 250kph, etc, straight underneath the helicopter. The Mulsanne was still rock steady. On the 300kph run, the producer decides that he’d like a slightly different shot, so as I’m approaching in the car, he moves the helicopter off to one side. All of a sudden a 100kph headwind has turned into a side wind. I am now braced…well, I can’t brace because I’m going to have to stay fairly loose on the steering wheel to react, because the car is going to be blown sideways. It always happens. As I pass underneath the helicopter, the cars twitches, I put in a little bit of steering, and it tracks straight again. I’d predicting us finishing up sideways, in some kind of massive broad side, but that didn’t happen.
“The bit that really surprised me? People spend months race-preparing cars to drive at high speed in a straight-line. It sounds easy, and it really isn’t! Instead, Bentley drove the car from the showroom, across country to Bonneville, put an extra 0.6 of a bar of air into each tyre, and said it was ready to go. I didn’t believe them. It is not that easy to set up a car to do this, and had the car handled like a bag of nails, I wouldn’t have trusted it. So we had a long chat about tyres, speeds, temperatures, went off and did a bunch of testing, and they were exactly right.
“The Bentley Mulsanne – one of the world’s leading luxury performance cars – comes out of the showroom in 300kph capable condition! Astonishing!”
– Wing Commander Andy Green was speaking with James Gent
Images | Bentley Media
Lifestyle | Interviews | crankandpiston | EVO Middle East | James Gent