Richard Noble - The Fastest Man on Earth - continues to live life at full throttle. Recently turned forty nine, he remains as addicted to speed as he was when he steered Thrust 2 to the current Land Speed Record of 633.468mph (1019.44kph) on Nevada's Black Rock Desert on October 4th 1983. Speed is his life, but since the announcement of the Thrust SSC Supersonic car project in May 1994 even he has had to gear up another notch to cope with the demanding schedule imposed by the plan to return to the desert this September.
It is fitting that Castrol will be going with him. Not just because the lubricant specialist was a partner in the Thrust 2 programme, but because it was also a sponsor of John Cobb's ill-fated attempt on the Water Speed Record in September 1952. For it was there, on the shores of Loch Ness that the six year old Noble first caught sight of Cobb's 'Crusader', and there that the seeds of his current dreams were first sown.
'My father was based in Inverness, Scotland, and one day he took the family for a drive around Loch Ness. As we were driving along I remember my father saying, "Let's see what this is all about, shall we?" I could tell that something was going on, and even now I can remember this great big black Coles crane by the waterside, and a wooden shed with weather-beaten doors and a red, white and green Castrol sign above them. But more than anything I remember Cobb's boat, this silver and goldfish red monster: My father said: "That's John Cobb's 'Crusader', " and I was just totally hooked!
'It wasn't the boat itself that was the inspiration. It was the speed element. It was just so outrageous. At that time people were playing with 15 to 20 horsepower boats, and here was one with a 3500 pound thrust de Havilland Ghost jet engine from an aeroplane!'
Today other small boys must be similarly entranced by the sight of Noble's Thrust SSC, itself as outrageous as 'Crusader' with its twin 25,000 pound thrust Rolls-Royce Spey jet engines and its sinister black shape.
Noble gathered everything he could about speed and speed record projects in the ensuing years. He built model jet engines from anything he could lay hands on, and by the time he was 10 he had read Eric Burgess's book 'Rocket Propulsion' from cover to cover.
As he grew up he indulged his adventurous nature with overland expeditions to India and Afghanistan, until one day in 1974, when he was working as a consultant writing pure management training courses, he faced a crucial question. 'When you get into something like the Land Speed Record there is The vitably a time when you have to ask yourself a two-part question. 'Am I going to do anything about it? Or shall I let it go?" And I simply decided that I wasn't going to let it go.'
The story of his first car, Thrust 1, is one of ingenuity, luck and sheer opportunism, from beating the French Air Force to the last serviceable Rolls-Royce Derwent jet engine, to discovering a suitable chassis lying in GKN's experimental department. When a triple airborne rollover at RAF Fairford destroyed the ungainly creation in 1977, he sold the remains for £175 (US$274) on the way home and immediately began planning Thrust 2.
This was an altogether more serious programme right from the start, for Noble turned professional to get it underway and soon attracted the design genius of John Ackroyd. And with one of the greatest selling jobs of the late seventies and early eighties, he persuaded British industry to support him.
He reached 418mph (673kph) at Bonneville, Utah, USA, in 1981 before being rained off, and showed his mettle the following year. When the rains came back to Bonneville he refused to give up, relocating to the Black Rock Desert in nearby Nevada and worked up to 590mph (949kph) before the snow arrived. A year later he broke Gary Gabelich's 13 year-old record by 11 mph (17.7kph).
After Thrust he moved on, first to develop the brilliant ARV Super 2 light aircraft, then to put together the Atlantic Sprinter Project to take the Blue Riband for crossing the Atlantic by sea. But the Land Speed Record remained his great fascination. When Craig Breedlove and McLaren began eyeing his record, he was stung into action and Thrust SSC was born.
For all the publicity both Thrust 2 and Thrust SSC have received, Richard Noble remains an enigma. On the one hand a brilliant public speaker with a tremendous gift for engaging his audience and infusing it with his own remarkable brand of enthusiasm and unswerving confidence: on the other, he detests the idea of becoming a media personality. Any spotlight that becomes trained upon his projects is sought not for self-aggrandisement, but for the ultimate progress further publicity can generate for his projects.
He is extraordinarily gifted at organising complex projects, and possess the boundless energy of one who thinks nothing of working 20-hour days as a matter of routine. His ability to think laterally was never better illustrated than during the initial tests on Thrust SSC. Both he and McLaren had very early on come to appreciate the benefits of computational fluid dynamics rather than conventional wind tunnel testing for their supersonic projects, but Noble came up with the quantum leap of using the Mach 1.1 rocket sled facility of the Proof and Experimental Establishment at Pendine as well as a means of obtaining computational data. When the two sets of findings matched he knew that Thrust SCC had a future.
For all that, he had to be dragged to the phone for media interviews after setting his record in 1983, and when Thrust 2 went on display at the Lord Mayor's Show in 1983, he donned the same blue overalls as his team rather than wear his own distinctive driving suit. No matter what Thrust SSC achieves, its prime mover will remain a reluctant hero.
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