Bloodhound SSC gears up for maiden runs at Newquay

The Engineer spoke to the project’s head of engineering operations, Stuart Edmondson, about how the team is testing the performance of the car ahead of what promises to be a momentous occasion for the project.

We’ve spent years building and designing and doing all the bench testing we could do in Bristol.

The next step was to do the final integration testing of the whole car: that was the static testing carried out last month (September 2017). And whilst that proved very successfully the integration of the engine and all of the systems working together, it didn’t give any understanding of the actual dynamic performance of the vehicle.

What we’re doing now is exploring and comparing the performance of the car with the modelling that we’ve done on a computer. It’s very much about the performance of the engine on the vehicle, the performance of the braking, and the directional stability.