Driving Bloodhound, Green, a wing commander in the Royal Air Force, will attempt to reach 1,000mph, (1,610kph). The event will take place on a specially prepared track at Hakskeen Pan, a dry lake-bed in the Northern Cape, about 200km north of Upington.
Janine Erasmus of the SA government’s sponsored website MediaClubSouthAfrica.com reports that the helmet design competition was open to children of all ages from schools, colleges and universities in the UK, as well as schools from the Northern Cape. Designs were to be compatible with the blue and orange Bloodhound colours, had to identify Green as the driver, and had to feature an Arai logo – Arai is the helmet manufacturer.
“They had to think of how their designs would look from all angles and then portray these onto the template that asked for front, rear, top and both sides to be depicted,” said Dave Rowley, director of the Bloodhound educational programme in South Africa.
Entries closed in May. Both a UK and a South African winner were selected out of the hundreds of top-quality submissions. With the project gaining momentum and visibility around the world, the helmets and their talented young designers will be seen by millions of interested viewers as the big day draws nearer.
South Africa’s winner, 17-year-old Coetzee, is a matriculant from Adamantia High School in Kimberley. His design is bold and bright and features sunrise colours of yellow and orange, with a gemsbok – an antelope found in the arid regions of Southern Africa – on left and right, and the South African and British flags on each side of the crown.
“Superbly finished and proudly South African – it is perfect!” said Green, who was one of the judges.
The other winner is 11-year-old Sam Jones, from from Winterbourne Earls School in Salisbury.
“I was looking for bold, vibrant shapes, and two distinct national designs of some sort, one UK-themed and one SouthAfrican,” said Green. “This was where the entrants could really show some flair.”
The two winning designs will now each be adapted for a real-life helmet that will be worn by the fastest man on earth – Green will wear the two helmets during his attempts to reach 1 000mph. The adaptation is being done by helmet paintwork specialists JLF Designs.
The youngsters will also receive aninvitation to a Bloodhound test run, and the Bloodhound education team willvisit their schools.
Green’s attempt will happen some time late 2014 or early 2015 depending on various factors. He knows about racing at speed. He’s the first, and so far the only person to smash through the sound barrier on land, when he attained a speed of 1 228kph in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, driving the Thrust SSC. The speed of sound on land is generally taken to be around 340 m/s or 1 236 km/h. This does vary with temperature, although not with altitude.
Over the past few years the community of Mier in the Northern Cape has been busily preparing the track for Bloodhound. They have removed some 6 000 tons of pebbles, stones and rocks from the track, whose overall dimensions are 19 km long and 1.1 km wide.
Hakskeen wasn’t the team’s first choice – it was originally Verneuk Pan, also in the Northern Cape, and the site of Sir Malcolm Campbell’s unsuccessful 1929 record attempt. Verneuk is an Afrikaans word meaning “deceive”, and it is a reference to the heat mirages found there. However, Verneuk turned out to be unsound as the shale bed itself was disintegrating, and there were huge numbers of stones on the surface.
Hakskeen (Afrikaans, meaning “heel”, probably a reference to the shape of the pan on a map), on the other hand, was long enough, wide enough, had a good surface which would be easier to clear, had a new tarmac road for easy access, communications facilities, power on site, and ideal weather – it didn’t take long to make the decision.
This has created employment opportunities for the Mier community. A team of 300 was soon established and by mid-2012 they had cleared the main track and were working on a 300m-wide safety zone up the length of one side of the track.
The team has repeatedly expressed their admiration for the hard work of the Mier community. “This is a difficult update to write because I can’t really describe in words the scale of what is happening in South Africa,” wrote Green after a site visit in July 2012.
“Think about it for a moment – 19 000 m by 500 m. That’s 9 500 000 square metres of desert surface, cleared by hand. Imagine sweeping one lane of the road you live on from end to end – if you live on a long road, this rapidly becomes a huge task. And 9 500 000 square metres is the equivalent of sweeping that lane from London to Moscow – now that they have reached Moscow, they have to turn round and sweep the other lane back to London, to complete the safety zones. It’s simply staggering,” he marvelled.
