Thrust SSC - My little pieces of history
I live just a couple of miles from the RAE at Farnborough, where Richard Noble's SSC team are based. They successfully broke the LSR and the sound barrier on 15th October 1997 by Andy Green in ThrustSSC, on the Black Rock Desert, Nevada.
The speed of sound was exceeded on land by Andy Green and ThrustSSC at 763.035mph averaged over 2 1 mile flying runs within 1 hour of each other, as decreed in the FIA rules for setting LSRs.
On the 29th November 1997, I was driving past the RAE and saw that the team were auctioning off spares and other items from the project to help pay off their debts.
I popped in and after a couple of hours, I became the proud possessor of two suspension tie rods, a 2 metre piece of fuel pipe and a box containing 'Sundry Items from the Hydraulic system'.
This latter proved a great buy at £15, as it included 3 accumulators for the active suspension (sold for around £40-50 as single lots), two interesting looking pieces of equipment from Moog instruments, a number of pieces of Aeroquip hosing (most obviously used at some time and identifiable as part of the rear suspension hydraulic system from photos on the SSC web page), some cables and a number of valves and filters.
What was particularly good was that most of this stuff was obviously used, rather than simply spare. A number of the items had a covering of sand, suggesting they'd been used in the runs in the Jordanian desert, prior to the visit to Black Rock (Hardly anything from Black Rock was auctioned, except the nose pitot).
Thrust SSC was a great achievement in terms of human ingenuity, engineering and sheer determination to get the job finished and even my eclectic collection of bits gives a sense of holding onto some small pieces of history.
