The Bloodhound land speed project in the UK has been s****ped after failing to raise the £25 million (US$32 million) reportedly needed to mount an ***ault on the record. The car itself is up for sale for £2500,000, or about US$320,000. This is an absolutely fire sale price considering the m***ive sums spent to design and build it. An opportunity for some intrepid investor to buy it and flip it, perhaps? By way of comparison, when Craig Breedlove sold his Spirit of America-Sonic Arrow jet car to Steve Fossett in 2006, he got $2 million. And that was 12 years ago! Just for fun, here’s the budget Craig Breedlove drew up back in 1962 to finish his original Spirit of America jet car and run it at Bonneville for the record. The crash program to complete Spirit resulted in cost overruns, but the whole thing still only cost about $100,000. Craig, by the way, expressed misgivings to me about Bloodhound. He considers it too complex in that it uses both a jet engine and rocket engine for propulsion (stacked one on top of the other, making the profile too high) and even has a car engine too (as a fuel pump). "They have basically three powerplants in the car to coordinate and talk to each other," he says. "My experience has always been that you have to be able to not high-tech yourself out of business." Samuel Hawley, author of Ultimate Speed: The Fast Life and Extreme Cars of Racing Legend Craig Breedlove
The Jalopy Journal
