AS A young boy Ian Warhurst was never happier than when he was taking engines apart and putting them back together again. At the University of Huddersfield he studied mechanical engineering design and then he bought a firm which made turbochargers for cars. Ian seemed, therefore, to be the natural choice to step in to save an ailing supersonic car called Bloodhound which was days away from being cut up for scrap metal. His son, Charlie, certainly thought so. "I got a text from him saying, 'Hey dad, Bloodhound is for sale. Why don't you buy it?'" says Ian, 49, who was just five days into his richly-deserved early retirement.
It was December 5 last year and Ian was busy preparing for Christmas with his wife Nicola and their three sons at their home in Sheffield.
The engineering tycoon certainly wasn't planning on buying a car, which had been built some 10 years earlier to smash the land speed record.
"Once I got Charlie's text I realised I had move quickly," Ian says. "So I went to see the car, liked what I saw and within a few days I did a deal with the administrators to save Bloodhound.
"The project was close to collapse and couldn't let that happen. If I hadn't had that text, then we wouldn't be where we are today."
Ian's 11th-hour bailout has re-awakened the dream of turning Bloodhound into the fastest car in the world.
Now the project consumes his life as he and his team work tirelessly towards beating the 763mph land speed record set by Andy Green in 1997 in the Thrust SSC car, which was powered by two jet engines and partly developed by Richard Noble.
Andy, a former RAF Wing Commander, now on board with Ian and will be Bloodhound's driver.
The car is powered by one Rolls Royce jet engine but secret work is going on in Norway on a rocket which, it's hoped, will take it soaring into the record books.
The Bloodhound car was built to break the land-speed record (Image: Jay Haysey)
"The development of the rocket is coming on brilliantly," says Ian with boyish enthusiasm.
"It is being developed by a company which makes rockets to send satellites into space and so it is very powerful and it will sit underneath the Rolls Royce engine.
"Andy will use the jet engine to get to around 300mph and then press a button on the dashboard to bring in the rocket for the extra power."
The car weighs about 7.5 tonnes and will have 135,000 horsepower, six times the power of all Formula 1 racing cars on a Grand Prix racing day.
When Bloodhound was first developed, there was rash talk that it would reach 1,000mph but Halifax-born Ian is not making any such boasts.
Experts at Swansea University have been working with the team on sleeker aerodynamics and trying to assess the potential of so fast.
"There are computer models about how the car should react at such speeds but the reality is we are entering new territory and we don't know what will happen," says Ian. "We are going into the unknown."
Paramount in everyone's mind is Andy's safety. No ejector seat can be fitted to the Bloodhound because hurling a driver into the air at such speeds would be instantly fatal.
So Andy will have to pay very close attention to his spaceship-style dashboard where computers will let him see how the vehicle is responding to the massive force of air pressure.
If there is the slightest hint that the car can't handle the phenomenal speeds, Andy can press a button to abort which would then slow the rocket and the engine. The car will undergo speed tests using the jet engine to see how it fares at 400mph or so.
Once all that data is analysed, the next stage is to attach the rocket.
Despite Ian's caution, Andy Green hopes that the new Bloodhound car will be able to smash through the 1,000mph barrier, making him the fastest man on earth. "That will be the capability of the new Bloodhound car when the work is complete," says Andy, 56, a retired RAF serviceman whose job as a jet fighter pilot has given him the perfect experience for such a
