Mark Chapman - chief engineer, Bloodhound SSC

19 April 2010 | By Stuart Nathan

Building the fastest car in the world would be a demanding job at the best of times. But taking on the role of chief engineer mid-way through the project, when you’ve never been involved in any sort of car-design project, adds new meaning to the word ’demanding’.

For Mark Chapman, the chief engineer role represents the highest point in a varied career. ’To be honest, I have a low boredom threshold. If I’d spent my whole career at Rolls-Royce I might have been very good at turbines or compressors, but the thought of sitting down for the next 20 years at the same desk doesn’t fill me with glee. I’ve had a lot of different jobs and this is the icing on the cake really.’

Most of Chapman’s experience has been in aerospace, although he started out designing weapons systems for submarines. ’I was in a special projects division of what is now Babcock and I got a lot of experience around submarines, nuclear power and aerospace. The project doing CFD analysis of sewage works was pushing the limit of what can be called fluid dynamics, though.’

“I have a low boredom threshold. I’ve had a lot of different jobs, and this one is the icing on the cake”

By 2000, Chapman had moved to Ricardo Aerospace and it was there that he first came into contact with Richard Noble, former land speed-record holder and director of both Thrust SSC, the first (and so far only) car to break the sound barrier, and of its successor, Bloodhound SSC. At the time, Noble was developing an all-carbon light aircraft that could act as a point-to-point air taxi, utilising small landing fields; this is now being flown as the Farnborough Aircraft F1 Kestrel. ’I was responsible for engine integration and cockpit ergonomics, among other things,’ Chapman said.

Several other jobs later – including spells working on the lift system for the vertical take-off variant of the Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter – Chapman found a strange phone message on his answering machine. ’It was all rather obscure, from a chap called John Piper, who I didn’t know, saying that a mutual acquaintance had suggested that I might be interested in a unique vehicle-based project and asking me to meet him in a pub in Bristol,’ explained Chapman. (Bloodhound’s headquarters, known as ’the dog house’, is just down the road.)

To unravel this cryptic invitation, Chapman googled John Piper and found he was a hugely experienced motorsport engineer and a veteran of many Formula 1 teams. Most notably, however, he had been engineering director for JCB DieselMax,a car that broke the land speed-record for diesel-powered cars while being driven by Thrust SSC pilot Andy Green – who Chapman discovered had been involved with a Richard Noble project.

That bit of deduction proved to be correct and Piper showed Chapman an initial scheme for the Bloodhound SSC car. Bloodhound was designed to shatter the world land speed-record, raising it from Thrust SSC’s 763mph (1,228km/hr) to more than 1,000mph (1,610km/hr). It has a dual engine: a jet, the prototype of the Eurofighter Typhoon engine, and a rocket. However, this wasn’t immediately clear.

’I saw that it had a jet in it and a funny tube on the top of that that I originally thought was a parachute can,’ he recalled. ’There was a funny V12 engine in it, so I asked what that was. “That’s for the rocket,” John said. “What rocket?” That’s when I realised what I was getting into.’
Piper was, until recently, engineering director for Bloodhound, but kept up his interest in F1 and has now decided to devote more of his time to motorsport while retaining a role as engineering consultant. In a reshuffle of the team, Chapman has now taken on the new role of chief engineer. It is the start of a new phase for the design of the car, he explained.

’Up until now, the car design has been split between myself and Brian Coombs; his background is in motorsport, with Red Bull racing and in Le Mans prototypes, so we’ve divvied the car up. The bits that look like a car were Brian’s: wheels, suspension, chassis, brake package, steering and so on. The bits that looked like a plane were mine: I’ve been looking at jet and rocket integration, the external shape of the car, airbrakes, fins, winglets and stability. But we are trying to be less compartmentalised. We are trying to solve everything by computational analysis, because with the way we are funded and the timescale, we are having to cut down on testing.’

“When we switched the rocket to underneath the jet, a lot of the aerodynamics we thought would work, suddenly wouldn’t. The shape of the rear of the car had to be quite different.”

The previous philosophy was to take several different solutions to each problem as far as possible before deciding on which route to take on the car itself, Chapman explained. However, this led to long development cycles. ’For example, we were trying to make the rocket housing as light as possible, because the rocket has been getting bigger. That would have meant many test firings, because we were using carbon fibre and we had to be sure it wouldn’t rupture. Instead, we’ll now use a metal housing, which may add four or five kilos to the car, but we know it won’t burst.’

The result has been a subtle repositioning of the team’s philosophy. ’We were going to make the best 1,000mph car in the world,’ Chapman said. ’And with more funding, we would have been able to. But that’s now not possible. What we are going to make is a car that will do 1,000mph and do it safely.’