Aero engines have featured quite heavily in LSR vehicles. The Liberty engine was used in aircraft cars and boats. An interesting story is that of ‘Triplex’, a vehicle powered by no less than three Liberty engines. The car was incredibly dangerous and killed its driver, Lee Bible. The first person on the scene of the accident was Henry Seagrave, who vowed to never attempt the Land Speed Record again. Instead, he concentrated on the Water Speed Record. It was when attempting the WSR record that Seagrave had the accident that which resulted in his death.

From what I have been told, I would be most surprised if the Quicksilver Project ever comes to fruition. I do hope that Bloodhound is a winner, I just hope that it doesn’t end in a fashion similar to Parry Thomas, who met his end on Pendine Sands. It is encouraging to see that Britain still has the will to carry on with projects such as LSR, harking back to the early days of LSR and WSR (not to mention the Air Speed Record, I highly recommend Faster Than The Sun by Peter Twiss, a great read) when men took on these challenges just because somebody said it couldn’t be done. If only we could foster this spirit more in modern britain, an admirable aspect of the Bloodhound Project is its education prorgramme, bringing young and old alike into engineering.

Waffle over.

Dean