RAF Wing Commander Andy Green is a man who demands respect, the fastest in the world, with a record speed of 763 miles per hour (1,228 km/h). That's just a little over the speed of sound, which is faster than you're going in an passenger air liner.
The vast majority of people will never get to travel as fast as Andy, even in an airplane, but it's not enough for the Brit, who now wants to go 1,000 miles per hour (1,600 km/h) in a new ca called the Bloodhound SSC.
In this next video, Andy takes us around the state-of-the-art carbon fiber monocoque body which is both light (200 kilograms) and incredibly strong.
With seven layers of carbon fiber woven together over 10,000 man-hours, this tub is probably the strongest of its kind in the world, and it needs to be. The car uses a 2.3-liter V8 F1 engine from Cosworth, but that's just to pump the oxygen fuel for the jet engine from a Eurofighter Typhoon. Working with it is a 400 kg Falcon hybrid rocket which brings the total package to 133,000 horsepower.
That's 138 times the output of a LaFerrari, the most powerful Ferrari road car ever made. And what about that aluminum "goat head" front end? Even the wheels have to be fabricated from a single block of aluminum because rubber just couldn't stand that kind of speed.
The previous land speed record was set way back in 1997 by the ThrustSSC, a twin turbofan-powered vehicle which Andy piloted down the Black Rock Desert at 763 mph (1,228 km/h).
Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida. Full profile
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