DOINGS IN THE OFF-SEASON

After an unusually mild November, when we were able to get a lot done in the workshop and the yard, the winter came in hard.

Where is Global Warming when you need it?

The off-season is the time for planning and preparation for the season to come. So we've not been idle. We've started serious design work on the new car, which we know will need outside money to get built. That means 'laffin-gas' needs to really perform for us this year. Testing on the piston accumulators is now complete, and we know that the blow-through problems are behind us. We've fired a total of five rockets with the new system and they've worked every time. High winds, and then cold weather prevented us from performing a full rolling four-rocket test, so we have to do that (hopefully at Sywell) as soon as the weather will allow. We are aiming to do this is mid-April. Then it's off to the track for a few runs to get her up to serious speed and do the testing on getting her stopped reliably.

'Laffin-gas' is more than powerful enough, and burns for long enough, to be as much car as you'd want to run on a drag-strip. So why build another car? Well, if we'd known what we know now, 'laffin-gas' would look very different. After all, she was always an experimental car. Now we want to take all that we've learned and apply that to the definitive Nitrous Hybrid Rocket Car. Brother Bob Campbell very kindly donated a pristine Reynard carbon-fibre Champ Car chassis (known in the trade as a 'Tub'. It's very very strong and makes an ideal safety-cell for a rocket-powered car. We always wanted to build in carbon-fibre, but we went for the traditional drag-racing cromolly-steel space-frame, to comply with drag racing regulations. As the new car will not be primarily designed for the drag-strip, it's time to go to carbon-fibre. The back chassis will still be of steel space frame construction, for ease of mounting rocket systems and running gear. We've put up a Facebook page called 'fans of laffin gas' so you can follow the design progress and get involved in solving the problems the project throws up.

We took a long look at what would be the realistic limit for what could be done on the possible available straight-line venues in the UK. Going fast and stopping does require a lot of room. The faster you can get up to speed, the more space you have left to get the car stopped. So to go really quick, you need big acceleration. We want the new car to go really quick. How quick? Well, getting the media interested in speed requires a number that can fire the public's imagination. That means either the speed of sound - out of our league, and out of the question in the UK. 1,000mph, which is the target for 'Bloodhound' and a couple of other builders in Australia and the USA, is the next step from a world publicity point of view. There's only a couple of places on the planet where that can be done. Trotting around the world with a rocket car is a very expensive and dodgy business. so we have to stay in the U.K.. So how fast do we need to go, to do something truly noteworthy, and not leave the UK? We reckon the answer is 400 mph. That's way faster than any wheeled vehicle has ever gone in this country. It would set a mark that would be very difficult to beat. It's also a very very difficult and potentially dangerous thing to do.

We've figured out that, with our rocket technology, we would need six rockets in a car that weighs about the same as 'laffin-gas' and a burn-duration of around twelve seconds to average that speed over a measured 1/4 mile. (That's the established distance for a British Record.) Each rocket will have to be supplied by an accumulator capable of holding enough N2O and nitrogen for the burn. The accumulators (which we will construct) will each have to be two metres long. With the piston design, they can lie horizontally in the back-chassis. With the rockets and all the systems to fit in, and a much shorter front chassis, the new car would be exactly the same length as 'laffin-gas', which is handy - because we can fit that in the bus.

It's very early days on this new project. Without serious sponsorship, we won't be able to do it, and even then it's a big and very ambitious task.. There will be many out there who will have a good laugh at us for even thinking about it - but we're going to have a go. In the meantime, 'laffin-gas' has a lot to accomplish.

In co-operation with Herts. University and Datron Technology, we'll be doing a series of single-rocket static tests with slightly varying set-ups during March. For the first time we'll be able to collect really accurate data on rocket performance, and this will allow us to select the set-up that we'll use this year.

We've been working on the transporter, doing a big re-wiring job on the old girl (which has been a real pig in the cold weather!). We are also going to put a big chiller on her, to allow us to cool the entire car down to ideal operating and fuelling temperatures.

We'll post reports on our progress as things get done.