This is a story about stubbornness and ingenuity, and yes, about speed, too. It is the story of a quest to design and build the worlds fastest car, and then to find a place flat enough, long enough, to actually drive it. There are not many spots on this particular planet suitable for racing faster than the speed of sound. You cant just pick a straight stretch of road. At 500, 700, 900 miles an hour, the wheels would rip apart mere tarmac, which is why we have come to a remote corner of south africa, close to the borders of botswana and namibia, to a place called the hakskeen pan, on the southern edge of the giant kalahari desert. So here we are, we have come to the hakskeen pan. Beautiful, flat, miles and miles of dried mud, this lake bed, surrounded by these low, dark, red brown hills. A stunningly beautiful place. We are 800 metres above sea level here, a lake bed of mud and salt that floods briefly, once every year or two, and those white tents on the lake edge, well, think of them as ground control. There is something a bit mission to mars like about this whole project. Imagine trying to do something as complicated as this in a climate like this. Today, it is about 35 degrees centigrade. Yesterday it was touching a0. But there they are. Inside the tent, a quiet frenzy. At the centre of it, the bloodhound, flown out in pieces from the uk and now being reassembled. The aim, this year, to test the car at speeds beyond 600mph. Yeah, we have got a whole range of people, and that is key, it is getting the right people, but you have got formula 1 mechanics, you have got aviation engineers, military, non military, fabrication, welding, milling, you know, all the skills we need to keep this car going. Yeah, it is satisfying to be part of a project that is this unique. You know, there is not many people on the planet doing this sort of thing. Lam in heaven, doing what i want to do. Fiddling around, trying to make things work. Yeah, fiddling around, trying to make things work, helping the lads out if things do not work, making things for them. As for the driver, if you could invent someone with the right credentials to steer the bloodhound towards 1,000mph, andy green might be what you would end up with. 0xford mathematician, raf fighter pilot, a character of almost fanatical focus. I am guessing you are not a superstitious person. You would be guessing right. You dont have any rituals . Yeah, good preparation. That is always a ritual that has worked for me in the past. But behind that cool exterior lurks a fire and a salesman. Bloodhound is the first high speed Straight Line racing car of the digital age. We can now tell a story that nobody has managed to tell before in a way that nobody has told it. The youtube generation, the power of the internet, we can actually share the engineering adventure and the fascination of the science and technology with a global audience, literally conduct an engineering experiment, how to build a supersonic car, how to try and get it up to1,000mph, and share that with the Biggest Online audience in history, and inspire generations of young people around the world about the science and technology that is going to build their low carbon world of the future. Green is not new to this unusual business. That is him, back in 1995, being selected to drive another british vehicle, the thrust supersonic car. Two years later, thrust ssc accelerated across the Black Rock Desert in nevada, usa. At the time, no one had ever broken the sound barrier in a car. 0h you could hear the teams tension. Then they listened out for the sound of success. Boom a sonic boom. Green had been clocked going 763mph, a new world record, set in 1997 and still unbeaten. But for how much longer . Today, green has what he insists is a significantly faster car. This is where i operate the carfrom. As the driver, i am looking after the steering, monitoring the engines, the electronics, the hydraulics, the brakes, the parachutes, everything is controlled from in there. That is the nerve centre of the car. When i am driving it, it feels unbelievably fast. The ground just gets faster and faster and faster through 300, 400, 500mph, and it just keeps coming. The wheels are made from solid aluminium. They are designed to rotate i70 times a second and survive forces of 50,000 times the force of gravity at the wheel rim. The reason we have to use solid wheels, there is no kind of rubber tyre ever created that will survive that kind of load. The only way to reach i,000mph is to use the best technology from everywhere we can find it, including the jet engine. The car is powered by a combination of a jet engine this year, and jet and rocket next year. The jet engine we have is the rolls royce ej 200, the Eurofighter Typhoon engine, the most high powered, sophisticated, and most importantly for me, the safestjet engine in the history of military aviation. Yes, you heard that right. Powered by a fighter planes jet engine, and next year, by a rocket, too, in the slot below, briefly providing more thrust than an aircraft carrier. So, as you get faster, the main force you are fighting against is the drag. The drag is proportional to the square of the speed, which means it gets more and more of a problem, and in order for this car to get a lot faster than the previous car that had two jet engines, you need more power, you need more thrust, and the way to get that is to add a rocket into the car. So why race it here, why africa . Well, for a start, the old salt flats in the nevada desert are getting worn out through overuse. There is a small handful of places where you can actually try and attempt the outright world land speed record. Typically, north america, the Bonneville Salt Flats and the Black Rock Desert are where it has all happened for the last four or five decades but we wanted to see if there was actually somewhere better. Now, we were very lucky, we got the support of swansea university, to actually search the whole globe, for the first time ever, to actually do a full geo Remote Sensing survey to try and find a place that was flat enough and long enough, and also flooded regularly, to actually repair and heal the surface, so it remained a smooth, dry lake bed. How many places like that were there in the world of 10 15 miles in length . And swansea produced a map of all the places that might be viable. We then spent a lot of time with google earth and a lot of time looking at notjust the surface itself, the weather factors, but also all the other bits, how do you get there, what is the geopolitical situation like . By the time we had been through all that, we finished up with a list of a couple of dozen that i went to visit. This was the best place i saw anywhere in the world. But the best place in the world still needed a little tidying up. More than a little. The flat mud of the hakskeen pan still had some rocks in it. Every single one of these has been dug out by hand by one of the local people. Every single one of these was embedded and stuck in the surface, so it is notjust a case of walking along and picking them up, they have gone along with tools, dug each bit out, put it in a bucket, which goes into a wheelbarrow, which goes out into a pile, which gets picked up by a tipper truck, which then gets brought here to one of 25, 30 different piles, all the way around hakskeen pan, of debris like this. Having measured and estimated, this is one of the small piles. There is Something Like 16,000 tonnes of stones, that is 16 million kilogrammes of this stuff, that has been picked up. Some big chunks. An awful lot of it dug out by hand, year after year, out here in the burning sun, as they prepare the worlds best ever Straight Line racing track. The sheer physical effort and the belief to keep on doing this, that one day the desert would be good enough and that bloodhound would be here, it has been a truly extraordinary thing to watch, and when bloodhound achieves the world land speed record, so much of the credit is going to go to the local communities, and to the Northern Cape government for having that belief and creating this amazing racetrack. With a clear track, the tests can finally begin. One of those who helped remove the rocks, ricardo botha, is now a safety marshal. Marshall 6 to control. I spotted something on the track. The bloodhound can cope with dust, but anything bigger, rubbish, or perhaps a dead animal, could spell disaster. Between that and that cone. What . Both sides. It is white, it looks like white paper or something. Right. It really does make me nervous because if i am making a wrong call it can mean the run can be stopped or anything could happen. One piece, two more pieces. Ricardo was right. Two pieces of paper are removed. Moments later, andy green roars past. That was awesome, mate, that was awesome, really. Just the banging sound, the parachute, the slowing down, everything is awesome. There is something bewitching about watching the bloodhound. For ricardo, being part of this project is not simply a welcome job, its changed his life. Maybe even saved it. I was involved in the gangs, drugs, theft, housebreaking, everything that is illegal, you can say. Yes, i have been injail once, yeah, for 20 months, because of some attempted theft out of a motor vehicle. Those days are gone now. Ricardo left cape town and went to live in this remote village, a slower pace of life now, except when the bloodhound is on the track. So you have been involved closely with the whole process of the bloodhound project. What do you think of the whole idea of trying to go crazily fast in a car . From my point of view, it is a mad mans work, but in reality, i think that is what pushes you, do it. It is nice to be part of a big project like that. I love to work with the guys. What have you learnt from working alongside a team like that . Commitment. Commitment, and if you put your mind to something, do it. Dont hold back. Madmans work . Perhaps. In the midday sun, the team prepares for a string of test runs, aiming to push the car over 600mph, checking the parachute that slows it down. Andy, what is going through your head . Preparation for the run. We are going to get the car ready, start the engine at the highest temperatures it has run, and then im going to do a gentle left hand turn. We are pointing exactly into wind at the moment, line up with the track, 500mph, double chute deployment. This is something that nobody has ever done on this desert, in this car before, which is why we are all concentrating to get it right. The bloodhound moves into position, half formula 1, half space shuttle. And there it goes. An extraordinary moment. Six tonnes of car, and within 30 seconds its going to be going at 500 mph. And then, of course, it has to slow down, which is why it needs such a long track. It will have to take about five miles to come to a stop. Each run is brief and dangerous. Green battles against a crosswind to keep the car on track. At the 450, 500 point there was a big gust of crosswind, ten, 15 mph and the car actually pushed off and yawed quite heavily. As large as anything weve seen so far. Even in this modern, computer driven age, theres still a lot of wind tunnel testing done and ultimately the test pilots go out and find out what the reality is, as opposed to what the computers say. So, we are still in an area where testing and development is about going out to do things rather than taking a computer prediction and building it right first time. And after every test, a postmortem. That is only about half to two thirds a degree, so its not a huge amount, but it has yawed into wind, so the car is actually tracking slightly sideways up the track, which suggests coming down this bit, i have stabilised the car in a crosswind which has appeared since further down. I corrected it, then pointed the car down the track, but of course the car is having to generate a bit of side force into the wind, so its using the aerodynamics of the body and a little bit of the wheel group, tracking sideways to actually offset the push. You can physically see that in the wheel tracks. On each round, the bloodhound follows a new line, painted on the mud, by a satellite guided tractor. Just redoing that now and then we are moving to line 18 and putting the short pits in that youre going to need along the way as well. Yep, perfect. Good. We couldnt measure the performance of the car against the 1997 Black Rock Desert line because it was hand painted. This, being gps, we can actually look at exactly what the cars doing. So from a performance point of view and a safety point of view, having lines marked like this is absolutely essential. Have you always been obsessed with speed . Do you feel that youre obsessed with speed . Im glad you came to the second part of the question. No, i dont feel im obsessed with speed. Ive been lucky enough to fly jet fighters for the Royal Air Force as a career. Best dayjob you could possibly ever have. I have loved every second of it. But the most satisfying jobs ive had in the Royal Air Force have been since i stopped flying, managing operational campaigns in the middle east, out in afghanistan, and more recently, the campaign over libya, protecting hundreds of thousands of people from being shelled by pro gaddafi forces. Also, in the time that i originally trained as a mathematician and then spent a career working as a fighter pilot, developed a fascination for the science and technology of what makes aeroplanes fly, what makes things work and what makes things like fast cars go fast. So, having something with a blank sheet of paper saying, build a car, any shape, any design you want, just needs to have four wheels, and you can go and break the land speed record. As a scientist, i find that fascinating. As a fastjet pilot, is the most intriguing challenge of how do you control the vehicle, not just fast, but safely, at these sorts of speeds and how do you manage the team and the track and Everything Else . So, building all of that environment so you can run a safe supersonic land speed record, that, as far as im concerned, as a mathematician, as a fighter pilot, is my dream job. One thing thats really struck me about this ludicrously ambitious operation is quite how precarious it feels. There is no multinational backing, no Big Government stepping in. Instead, what you basically have are private individuals, small companies, looking for sponsorship, hustling for backers. And you get the feeling that almost any day, this could collapse. And it nearly did collapse. One year ago, the bloodhound project ran out of money. The administrators were called in, and issued a final appeal for a new investor. It is that now once in a lifetime opportunity, for the right person, the right corporate to come forward and combine it with the investment, thats the key thing, the investment it needs to give it certainty, to get it over that line. It would be great for britain. When we went under, i was hopeful that something would happen, something would change and someone would come in and realise that we cant lose this project. But we got to the stage where i personally thought that was it, and it was a real shame and id even been told the administrators were looking to break the car down and sold the components just to pay some of the debt that needed to be paid. For scrap . For scrap, yeah. The project has tried to go broke so many times, where were struggling for bits of cash and then a new sponsor would come in, or wed find a different way of doing things, find some support. It has always been up and down. The trust ssc project back in the 905 was exactly the same. So, i still had my summer of 1997 head on, that if we keep going, then one thing we cant be blamed for is giving up. We will keep going and try and find a way, right down to speaking to the bbc to say, please, please get the message out. This was the start of december. I pitched this as, this is the worlds best christmas deal. For the man who has everything, here is something that money cant buy. Bloodhound land speed record car as a christmas present, and a land speed record car in a couple of years time. Why wouldnt you want to do that . But then, a yorkshire businessman, an engineer, stepped forward. Motivated, he said not so much by the land speed record but by the thought of inspiring a new generation of engineers. This is an expensive hobby. I know its not a hobby, but. yeah, so far ive been paying for this, which has got quite expensive over the last few months but yeah, my view is that im looking at it as a business. I guess im investing in the project on the basis the project has a value and therefore i can sell that value to cover the costs. I get the money back or not, i have no idea. Probably unlikely. Some sponsors . Yeah, sponsorship. People want their name on the side of that . Yeah, yeah, thats right. But to be fair, if i dont get my money back, its a great way to spend the kidss inheritance, isnt it . And is there a bit of you that can see these sort of absurdity, the monty python esque element . Every day every day i go, why are we doing this . But this is still an expensive gamble. And the tests arent going smoothly. The bloodhounds alarm system warns of a potential fire on board. And it might actually be getting very hot in there. It might be telling us the real truth of, its really hot in here, you need to look at the temperature shielding around that bit of the bodywork. Although its going off, it may be telling us a real piece of information we need to look at later on. And now, a worrying delay, as the engineers decide theyll have to remove the entire jet engine. If they cant find the fault, that could be it. Another all or nothing moment. The outside casings melted, its gone a bit crispy. Youd expect that at a lot higher temperature, so i think whats happened is, theres been a bit off gas coming through in here and thats what set this off. These systems guys are like, digging deep, doing things they are desperate to do. Theyre going to be working late tonight. They came in late this morning. Working to get this fire wire issue sorted out. Tomorrow, try and get the thing put back together again. Might creep into monday. But yeah, the good news is that we should be back on the money again, which is great. Fault isolated and fixed, the bloodhound is ready for a final speed test. After weeks of frustration, the target is still 600 mph. Success. 628 mph. 0n course for the record. Now that weve got the baseline of a great car and a great surface, its time to go faster. So, now its time to pack up, take the car back to britain, analyse the tests, fix on the rocket and then try to find enough money to come back here to south africa to push this car to its absolute limit. So, another test completed. More lessons learned. As exciting and dramatic as all this is, you do really get the sense that this is going to be very slow, this entire project. Trying to get the car and the shape for it to break the land speed record and then maybe at some point in the future, crossing the 1,000 mph mark. Realistically, world record, when . Thats an interesting question. Im reluctant to give out information in terms of where were at. I dont think we know ourselves yet, to be honest. But certainly 18 months should be possible. Theres a lot of things to consider for the next phase of the project. The main thing is funding. We need to get some more sponsors on board to take us to the next level and get some funding in place. But until we work out how much we need, then we cant really do that. Were doing all this at the same time. We need to design the rocket and get that fitted and make sure we can work out how to operate the rocket safely. The human race has always pushed the boundaries and some people argue, cars are no more but forget it is a car and we are pushing the boundaries of engineering to its absolute limits. Is there a bit of you that wonders whether its going to be worthwhile . Absolutely, yeah. And everyone says about this particular project, it may be the last land speed record as we know it, you know. And so i think thats why im also keen to get it, because were going to push it so far, it becomes out of sensible reach in the modern world, you know. And i guess thats what the ambition is of the project, that if we get that, it will stand almost forever. No White Christmas this year but perhaps a better gift is a breakfrom the rain. That is what we have for Christmas Day. A good deal of sunshine out there but i am afraid the break does not last long, here comes low pressure as it turns wet and windy again in time for boxing day. Lets look at things going into Christmas Day. This is how the rest of the night is shaping up. Showers will be fading for many of us, still some for some areas but many skies clearing, when the easing, temperatures dipping away. Close to freezing at least a growing frost in some spots, or below freezing. Maybe one or two icy sports, but remember the High Pressure . That is the settled weather for Christmas Day. A chilly start with a touch of frost but plenty of dry, sunny weather on the way and good news if you are travelling. A caveat if you are travelling after dark, i will get to that. There will be some cloud, and a few showers brushing northern scotland but fading, and high cloud beginning to push on toward South West England and Northern Ireland and wales. Ahead of the weather system it will feel cold, particularly the southern half of the uk, travelling 0k until we get after dark when we could see some fog developing, particularly through north, central and eastern parts of england, could be dense in places. A lot of that will lift going into the morning, the breeze will freshen in the west, turning wet as the atlantic weather system moves in, the band of rain. Temperatures heading up as the night goes on, still quite chilly, the further north and east you are, with frost in parts of scotland. Boxing day, a very different look to the weather, more cloud around, this area of rain moving north and east, some hill snow, a bit of breeze, for wales and South West England later in the day. Still chilly in the north east, temperatures mild in the south east, more mild going into next weekend. A lot of dry weather around, occasional rain towards scotland and Northern Ireland. The christmas forecast is shaping up and from everyone here, have a very merry christmas. This is bbc news, im clive myrie. The headlines at 8pm. Three members of the same family, reported to be british, have drowned in a Swimming Pool at a holiday resort, on the costa del sol. Prince philip has been discharged from hospital, and is now spending christmas with the queen, at sandringham. And the queen will use tomorrows Christmas Day message to say the past year has been quite bumpy adding that small steps can heal divisions. The wildlife victims of australias bushfires, that are being helped by emergency crews, working around the clock. Pilgrims from around the world are in bethlehem, for the yuletide celebrations. And coming up in half an hour on bbc news amol rajan takes a look back at a year dominated by the power of social meida in review