World's First 1,000mph Bloodhound Car One Step Closer to Completion in Bristol

The world's first 1,000mph car, the Bloodhound SSC, is a huge step closer to completion today.

RAF fighter pilot Andy Green, 51, is hoping to break the world land speed record in the £10m rocket-powered car, which is designed to travel faster than the speed of sound.

Green holds the World Land Speed Record, set in 1997 in Thrust SSC totalling 763mph.

A team of five engineers spent eight hours fitting the EJ200 jet engine to the car at the Bloodhound technical centre in Avonmouth near Bristol. The state of the art engine weighs one tonne, produces nine tonnes of thrust, and is more commonly found powering the iconic Eurofighter Typhoon.

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

During the record-chasing run, Bloodhound will cover 12 miles in two minutes, exerting an acceleration force of almost 2G and peak deceleration force of 3G on the driver.

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, 40mph 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."