World's fastest car will break the Internet

The holder of the world land speed record, Andy Green, says he will break his 1223km/h (760mph) top speed in 2016 driving a 97,820kW (133,000hp) rocket car that will cost $30million to build.

And we can all ride shotgun.

When the new world record attempt takes place on a dry lake bed in South Africa in 2016, Green says the Bloodhound SSC, or supersonic car, will reach a speed of 1609km/h (1000mph) and the feat will be streamed live to billions of people across the planet.

The land speed record attempt in three years' time is expected to generate so much Internet traffic that new IT infrastructure is being set up to cope with demand says Andy Green, who is a mathematician by trade and currently a serving Wing Commander in the RAF.

"We've been told to expect -- the year we start running -- by Cisco, a web capacity of three billion page views," he explained in Sydney.

By contrast, Felix Baumgartner's Red Bull-sponsored tropospheric space dive attracted around nine million page views in October 2012.

The automotive action will be streamed live via 16 cameras festooned across the massive Bloodhound SSC "car" and Green plans to be talking viewers through the whole shebang, at speeds eclipsing 1600km/h.

"What we're going to do is run a live video from the car at those sorts of speeds and beyond, while I'm actually talking about what I'm seeing and feeling and doing in a car."

While Cisco is on board the project as well as Rolex, Lockheed Martin and Rolls-Royce, Green says more IT partners are needed, and that "we're talking to Google, YouTube, Microsoft."

"Getting live video from the car moving at 1000 miles per hour is technically nearly as hard as building the car in the first place," states the RAF pilot, whose call sign is 'Dead Dog'.

"The live video feed has to go offshore from South Africa into the cloud globally. If we try and run it from a South African web server, we would crash the national infrastructure of the Internet," he explains.

The record attempt will be over quickly, in a matter of minutes, and the Bloodhound SSC will cover around 20km in that short time.

"We've got a 20km track in South Africa. It's just long enough," says Green who is on a promotional tour as a Bentley ambassador. "I would love it to be 25km to give me a buffer zone but we've got 20km. That's enough."

While Andy Green drives a 147kW Volkswagen Golf GTI in the UK, the Bloodhound SSC is powered by three motors, the smallest a 588kW (800hp) Cosworth F1 engine whose sole purpose is to pump 40 litres of fuel per second to the main engines, one jet, one rocket.

The Bloodhound SSC's total power output is almost 100,000kW.

"We've got 12 tonnes of thrust for the rocket, nine tonnes of thrust for the jet. In total, 21 tonnes of thrust is 210 kiloNewtons, in equivalent horsepower terms, 133,000 horsepower, not including the 800hp from the F1 engine," he notes.

Accelerating from 0-1600km/h is no mean feat but Green says his barking-mad rocket car is unlikely to deliver any breakthroughs for regular passenger cars.

"If anything that were doing with the Bloodhound ends up in a car I'd be surprised. The world does not need to go to the shops at 1600km/h," he opines.

So why does the daredevil pilot want to break the world land speed record, which he himself set at Black Rock Desert in the USA in 1997 (driving the ThrustSSC, [last two images]), also becoming the first man to break the sound barrier in a car?

"It's an engineering adventure to capture a generation," he says. "Wherever you are in the world, you can look over my shoulder while I'm doing it," explains the passionate RAF pilot who hopes to inspire a new generation of technology scientists, something he says the world is in short supply of.

"We're actually aiming for a legacy that will make science and engineering more fun and interesting for the next generation.

"This is not an automotive challenge, it's an engineering adventure," grins Green.

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