A New Dream

As I flew my holding pattern over Shoreham I remembered back 30 months when the ThrustSSC team ran for the sound barrier in Black Rock Desert. Andy Green, our totally committed F4 and Tornado pilot was behind the wheel of our 110,000hp car -the most powerful car man has ever driven. As Andy approached the measured mile at an impossibly fast speed -the media crowd fell silent. The stronger people muttered a prayer. Strangely we never got the supersonic double bang at the midpoint of the course - but 10 miles away it was like a double thunderclap. A billion people watched on television the book sold 60,000 copies in hardback and we had 58 million hits on our website. That was important because it was the web followers and the ThrustSSC Mach One Club supporters who bought enough merchandise to turn our dream into reality.

The ThrustSSC -the first car to break the sound barrier

Photo - ThrustSSC

One of the great sadnesses of record breaking is that a huge team effort is needed to make it happen.. All that effort creates a World beating car -huge global interest and a piece of paper. And then, in a second, it's all over. There is no useful purpose for anyone in the team any more and its time to move on.

This new exciting chapter in my life came from our friends at Dell Computer. I was in Barcelona to present the ThrustSSC story at their European Sales Conference. The conference had gone well and we were having dinner. They wanted to know how we were going to follow ThrustSSC. I explained that I wanted to go back into aviation but had no focus. The Dell people had the focus.

'Richard, listen to us. We manufacture in Ireland and sell in Europe. We are having real problems moving our sales and marketing people around by airline. They are never where we want them, they have to leave meetings early to catch planes -and the planes are always late. Our people came up with a cost for all this wasted time and opportunity - about $10m a year in Europe.'