Nothing in Richard Noble’s life has been slow or ordinary – Thank Frankel it’s Friday

When I think of Richard I, like you I expect, think primarily of him breaking the Land Speed Record in Thrust 2 in 1983, with the Thrust SSC supersonic car whose team he led to a successful attempt to break the sound barrier in 1997. And of course there was Bloodhound SSC, now renamed Bloodhound LSR whose story is not yet fully told. What we do know is that whatever it does or does not go on to achieve, it will be without Richard.

I spoke to him about it last week, about how he felt when he was told he was not wanted by the new management that bought Bloodhound out of administration. And he was sad, but remarkably sanguine. ‘Do you know, it was fine. I’d been at war with the bloody thing for 11 years. I didn’t realise how utterly exhausted I was. It took three months to me to recover’.

And while all these stories are within its covers, the book is perhaps most interesting for those tales that are not part of well-known Land Speed Record breaking lore. I knew, for instance, that there had been a Thrust 1 before Thrust 2 (and, yes, it was always called Thrust 1 rather than just Thrust as it was part of a calculated strategy), but not just what a bucket of bits it really was. The chassis was found covered in dust on the floor of GKN’s R&D department. A bloke with a blow torch reduced its length by 18 inches to which was then strapped a spare Rolls-Royce Derwent jet engine from an even then very elderly Gloster Meteor. And that was it. If you don’t know how Thrust 1 met its end you’ll have to look it up or buy the book, but suffice to say here Richard was bloody lucky to survive the experience, let alone emerge unscathed.

No less hair-raising was his experience in the ARV Super 2 light aircraft he had helped create and bring to market. A keen flyer, he kept his own aircraft in which in July 2006 he clocked up its 1,000^th flight. But the very next month he was flying it when the engine packed up. He tried to glide it to an airfield but soon realised he wasn’t going to make it, electing to put it down in a freshly harrowed field instead. It was never going to be an easy manoeuvre and, as Richard says himself, ‘I got it wrong’. The aircraft nose-dived into ground and somersaulted. Richard describes the destruction that resulted. ‘…everything was broken. The battery, for instance, broke its mountings and catapulted through the aluminium upper fuselage as if it was paper and landed some 20 feet away.’ Incredibly all Richard suffered was a hole in the head caused by altimeter adjustment knob.

There are other stories too: the boat that was going to break the record for crossing the Atlantic, and then crossing the Atlantic four times in less than 12 hours to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of Concorde’s first scheduled flight to New York.

Richard is a fascinating man and having recovered from his Bloodhound travails is in no mood to settle down. Aged 74, he is now working with a new team to break the world Water Speed Record, which has been held at 317mph since 1978. It’s very early days and they’re still building the model that will prove the concept to allow work to start on the real thing, but you can be sure he will go about it with the same grit, determination and humour with which he has always approached his challenges.

Richard’s book, ‘Take Risk!’ is published by EVRO Publishing as a hardback, ebook and audiobook, and is available from all usual outlets priced at £19.99.

Images courtesy of Richard Noble.