British Designers Reveal Cockpit for 1000 mph Super Sonic Racing Car

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but a supersonic racing car, designed to travel faster than the speed of sound, could well be a reality very soon.

A British racing team have unveiled a state of the art cockpit for The Bloodhound SSC.

The cockpit took more than 10,000 hours to make and is designed to protect the driver from the effects of travelling at very high speed.

Describing the impact of travelling at 1000mph, Wing Commander Andy Green said: "It's going to be a fairly extreme set of physical sensations, we've got a huge amount of power in this car - 135 thrust horsepower, accelerating at over 2G, 40 mph per second - the energy that's going on over the cockpit and the noise that comes through is going to be quite hard physically for me."

The £10m rocket-powered car has three engines with the combined power of 95 Formula 1 cars.

While such feats of engineering are normally a closely guarded secret, in a change in protocol, the complete details of the design and structure of the supercar are available online for anyone to see.

Engineer Sarah Covell explained: "Normally if you are in F1, you don't want to give away your competitive advantage, you don't want to share the drawings or the images of the cars.

"We are designing a one-in-a-million car. We are the only ones with a typhoon jet engine, you can't really steal the drawings so we are able to share everything we are doing."

RAF fighter pilot Andy Green will drive The Bloodhound next year as he attempts to break his land speed world record of 760mph, set in 1997.

The record attempt will take place in the South African desert around a specially-built 12 mile track.