Cockpit Instruments Part 1 - The Analogue Age

by Andy Green

What Cockpit Instruments do you need in a Land Speed Record car, and why?  What information do you need to drive in a straight line? (after all, how hard can it be?  Have look at the challenges of steering for part of the answer).  It’s a question that we get asked a fair bit – and it’s a good question. 

Line painting for Thrust SSC in 1997 – the best and most reliable instrument in the world.

First, you need to keep the Car straight – but how?  A GPS-based instrument?  A laser line?  Head-up display?  In fact, it’s none of the above – nothing can beat the simplicity of painting a line down the desert and then driving along it.  One of the secrets to breaking a Land Speed Record is to keep everything as simple as possible.  Building a 1000 mph Car with a jet, rocket and 800 hp pump engine will be complicated enough, so we want to keep the operation of the Car simple if we can – hence a painted line, the simplest directional guidance known to man. 

As well as pointing the Car in the right direction, the driver needs to control the speed.  We will be building up the speed gradually, run by run (just as we did with Thrust SSC), to validate all of the research and to check everything is working properly.  So I need a speedo, plus engine instruments to help in controlling the power (and there’s a lot to control!) as accurately as possible.  Add a few switches and, in theory, that’s all I need in the cockpit to drive the Car.  This minimalist approach has been good enough to set records in the past:

Art Arfons’ cockpit in his ‘Green Monster’ car, circa 1965 (courtesy of STP).

Art Arfons’ approach in the 1960s had exactly the minimum requirement – speedo (the big gauge on the left), engine instruments, a few switches.

Compare this with Thrust SSC’s cockpit from 1997.  The speed (2 gauges this time – mph and Mach Number!) and engine instruments (for 2 engines) are still the key instruments, in the centre of the panel, but there is a lot of other information there as well. 

Thrust SSC’s Cockpit.

So if we want to keep things simple, why were there so many extra instruments in Thrust SSC’s cockpit?  It’s because just pointing the Car and controlling the speed is only part of my job as driver.  A Land Speed Record Car is a hugely complex piece of prototype machinery – which means that we’re testing and developing it on every run.  In Thrust SSC’s case, it had 2 engines, a fuel system, 2 electrical systems, a hydraulic system, active hydraulic suspension, passive hydraulic suspension, dual-circuit wheel brakes, brake parachutes, fire systems – the list goes on.  To run this Car safely, I need to check that all of this is working, not only before each run but sometimes during a run as well.  The cockpit is as simple as it can be, but being a development driver at over 700 mph can be a complicated job!

Tornado F3 Cockpit

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the cockpit is designed to suit the driver.  As a Royal Air Force fighter pilot, I’m used to going to work in a fairly complicated sort of office (if I came from a car-racing background, I’d have a much simpler cockpit).  With fast-jet experience to call on, I can use the extra information to good effect –  I can monitor and (if necessary) control things in real time, rather than try to work out what happened after the Car has stopped.

One thing that all of the above examples have in common is that they are all based on analogue instruments – gauges with needles.  While analogue instruments are very easy to read (which is why nearly everyone has a watch with hands), they are limited in what they can display.  To get the best out of BLOODHOUND SSC, we will be using electronic flat-screen displays to get the best of both worlds – easy-to-read analogue displays that can be designed to suit the driver’s needs. 

This article continues with  ‘Cockpit Instruments Part 2 – the Digital Age’