The remarkable story of one man's quest for speed.
They said it couldn't be done. Sceptics warned that as a car approached 750 mph, the shock waves generated when it hit the sound barrier would either force it off the ground like an aeroplane or tear it apart.
Richard Noble, the modern embodiment of the swash-buckling British speed-seeker of yesteryear, was used to that kind of blinkered thinking. He had held the title of the Fastest Man on Earth since 1983, when his "Thrust2" car set a new world land-speed record at 633 mph. Critics had argued that he would fail then, too. Noble likes nothing better than a fight and in the late 1990s, as a gripping Anglo-American race began to create the world's first supersonic car, he was determined to risk everything to achieve this world first for Britain.
On 15 October 1997, Noble's "Thrust SSC", driven by the ice-cool RAF Squadron Leader Andy Green, smashed through the sound barrier to create the first supersonic land-speed record at 763 mph. The "Thrust SSC" team had beaten the Americans, thumbed its nose at the sceptics, and realized what seemed an impossible dream. It was a triumph for British engineering, technology and derring-do.
This is not a tale of unbroken success, but a story of disappointment and struggle, and of the entangled emotions behind one of the greatest engineering achievements of the twentieth century.
Contains colour photographs
