The man tapped to sit behind the wheel is Wing Commander Andy Green, who steered the 'Thrust supersonic car' across Nevada's Blackrock Desert to its record-setting success. The Royal Air Force pilot said he wasn't worried.
'The jets, the very high speeds, the complex systems, the quick responses, handling a 10-ton vehicle, that is something I'm used to,' Green said in a telephone interview. 'Mentally it doesn't phase me, physically I'm used to it.'
The car's carbon fiber-cockpit is intended to slice through the air and reduce the shock of reaching Mach 1.4, 40 percent faster than the speed of sound. The vehicle will be airtight otherwise air could be sucked out of the cabin like a vacuum cleaner. The car's wheels will be made of titanium to withstand the dizzying number of turns.
'Your regular passenger car going down the motorway will go an average 1,500 revolutions per minute,' said John Piper, the project's engineering director. 'Our wheels are going 10,500 revolutions per minute, and for that reason we aren't using pneumatic tires. They would disintegrate with the centrifugal force of it spinning at that speed.'
Aside from the vehicle's five wheels four for riding, one for steering there's very little of the regular passenger car in the planned 12.8 meter (42 foot) long 'Bloodhound supersonic car.' The vehicle will be powered by an EJ200 jet engine used to fly Eurofighter Typhoon airplanes, and come mounted with a Falcon rocket.
'Basically the jet engine is used to start the car rolling,' said Daniel Jubb, the man responsible for the rocket's design. Once the car hits around 300 miles (480 kilometers) per hour, Jubb said, the rocket would kick in, blasting it, he hopes, to a new record.
The entire run, expected to last just under a minute and a half, will burn so much fuel that the car will end up weighing two 2.2 U.S. tons less than when it started, according to Piper.
At those speeds, the engineers said the slightest gust of wind or the most minute turn of the steering wheel could send the vehicle veering dangerously off course.
Piper said the biggest challenge would be 'keeping the car stable, keeping the car on its wheel and steering straight.'
'It should come as no surprise we've got a fast jet fighter pilot to drive the car,' Piper said. ''He'll need all of his fast jet skill and reactions to drive what is a really dangerous vehicle.''
Green said the steering wheel would be specially modified to make smaller adjustments to the car's heading, nudging the vehicle's wheels left and right to 'act like tiny little rudders in the airflow.'
Stopping the vehicle is another challenge: Two parachutes will be deployed to kill its momentum, but it's only after its speed drops below 200 miles (320 kilometers) per hour that Green can hit the hydraulic brakes.