Richard Noble

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:09

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety eight and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a champion of speed. His ambition all his life has been to enter the history books alongside the great record breakers such as Malcolm and Donald Campbell and John Cobb. In the 70s he built his first speed car and wrote it off at 200 miles an hour. In the 80s he tried again and he set a new world land speed record of 633.468 miles an hour. Then in the 90s, last October in fact he went one better again. Hearing that his record might be challenged he set about designing and building the car that would ensure it stayed with him. This time he didn't drive himself but watched as the supersonic car he'd masterminded hurtled across the Nevada desert at 763.035 miles an hour. I like to have something to fight against all the time, he says. It's very important. He is Richard Noble. Let's start with the difficult question, Richard. Why do you do it? For Britain and for the hell of it has always been your flip answer, but it must run a bit deeper than that.

Richard Noble1:30

Yes, it is the most the land speed record really is the most exciting thing you can do on God's Earth. I'm absolutely convinced about it. It seems to fit a number of things. Basically it's a wonderful teamwork thing and you build great bonds with your team and it's a terrific, terrific team effort. You get an enormous buzz from that. The second thing is that it's a funny old country this. It was once very, very successful and we're trying to do our little bit to put it back again in the in the limelight.

Presenter1:56

But you've got to enjoy danger as well, haven't you?

Richard Noble1:59

Oh, well you yes. The thing about it is, yeah, I think you've got to get this right. It's not about danger. It's avoiding danger at all costs. It's actually getting rid of the danger element by share professional.

Presenter2:09

But it's putting yourself in a jolly dangerous situation.

Richard Noble2:12

No, no, because basically if you have developed your car properly and responsibly then it's not dangerous. And for instance I driven

Presenter2:18

It is dangerous'cause you've written them off on occasion.

Richard Noble2:20

Well, that was only that was that was only the early one, and that's when I designed it myself and got it all wrong. But for instance, uh with the Thrust Two car I drove that over six hundred miles an hour eleven times, and with the supersonic car Andy Green drove that um over seven hundred miles an hour ten times, and he went supersonic five times.

Presenter2:35

So you've sat behind a wheel driving at more than 600 miles an hour. What does it feel like? Can you describe it?

Richard Noble2:41

It's an extraordinary experience. Basically what's actually happening is that the car is unstable, or thrust to this was, was unstable from naught to about 350 miles an hour, so it slides around a bit. You've got to sit there with your foot hard on the floor. You've got 35,000 horsepower. And from about 350 to about 550, it's boring, and there's not very much happens. Boring. Yes, boring, yeah, because your mental processes are working at a hell of a speed. So everything is happening in very, very slow motion. You can actually see tracks on the wheel, the wheel tracks on the desert, come up and go under the car at 650 miles an hour.

Presenter3:03

Boring.

Presenter3:17

But you must be terrified you're going to take off,'cause basically it's an aeroplane that's landing back on it.

Richard Noble3:20

No, because you've you've researched it properly, it's all properly researched, it's all properly carried out, you've following all you've um got an enormous trail of data which is which is showing you that it's predictable and it's not going to get take off.

Presenter3:31

But then the next problem is you've got to stop.

Richard Noble3:32

And then you've got to stop. And this is with the last car, that's when the fun really started. Because you've got a very light car with thrust two and you've got a big parachute on it, you've got a whacking deceleration of in excess of five G.

Presenter3:43

What does that feel like?

Richard Noble3:44

Well, it's extraordinary. You've got to think all the somatographic illusion. What actually happens is that the inner ear can't cope with this very savage deceleration. And you are absolutely, totally convinced you're driving vertically down a mineshaft. You're into a vertical drive. And then as the G comes off, everything levels off. So you're back to then 400 miles an hour, 400 miles an hour.

Presenter4:04

But how do you practise for a thing like that? I mean, how do you

Richard Noble4:05

You can't practice, you can't practice.

Presenter4:07

But the first time that happened to you you must have been terrified.

Richard Noble4:09

I was pretty upset, I can tell you. I didn't didn't know what the hell to expect.

Presenter4:14

And then suddenly you're travelling at sort of 300 miles or 200 miles.

Richard Noble4:16

Then you don't do about 400 and that's intensely boring and you want to open the lid and get out and run out alongside, you know?

Presenter4:19

Yeah.

Presenter4:21

It's a bit like coming off a motorway, I suppose. You suddenly feel you're really going very slowly.

Richard Noble4:23

Exactly.

Presenter4:27

Tell me about your first record.

Richard Noble4:29

Well, the first one is Scotland the Brave. I my father was um

Richard Noble4:33

I was in the army, had a long career in the army, and my early days were spent in Scotland. And all I can really remember of Scotland was obviously the hills and lots and lots of tattoos and marchings and military bands and so on. So this is for Father, Scotland the Brave.

Presenter5:18

Pipes and drums and military band of the king's own Scottish Borderers playing Scotland the Brave. How far back does this ambition of yours go, Richard, to be a speedster? Does it have a specific origin?

Richard Noble5:29

Yeah, it really does. Um it was extraordinary. It was one day in nineteen fifty two. Father took us for a for a drive in the in the Hillman Minx round the north side of Loch Ness. It was a sort of Sunday afternoon drive. And we came round the corner at Drummed Rocket, and there was John Cobb's jet boat Crusader.

Richard Noble5:44

And I don't know, I suppose at that age I was looking for something to get excited about. And let's say I was six. And what it was was the most extraordinary thing. It was a jet-powered boat in which a very famous man, John Cobb, was going for the water speed record. And I saw that boat and I thought, wow, this is really something. Somebody's really beaten the system to get a boat like that built.

Speaker 45:48

However.

Richard Noble6:06

Yes, unfortunately it wasn't a very good boat, sadly, and um it broke up. John Cobb went and drove it faster than he was supposed to have driven it and it it had a flaw in it and

Presenter6:16

This was just a few months later.

Richard Noble6:17

And that that didn't put you off

Presenter6:18

That that didn't put you off?

Richard Noble6:20

No, no,'cause I mean, that was the you it had seen that what was possible, you know.

Presenter6:24

But that's what you were like, I take it. I mean, your mother's been quoted as saying that you and your brothers, and there were the two others, uh w were all daredevils.

Richard Noble6:31

Yes, I I'm afraid we gave her a hell of a rough time. We really did.

Richard Noble6:35

Yeah.

Presenter6:35

So what were you like at school? You must have been a nightmare.

Richard Noble6:38

I had a lot of trouble at school, yeah. I had a lot of fun. A lot of fun. What is a lot of fun?

Presenter6:39

We had a lot of

Presenter6:41

What does a lot of trouble mean?

Richard Noble6:43

I think the classic one was when we uh when we actually tear gassed the headmaster's party.

Richard Noble6:48

This was at Winchester. And all these very exotic parents turned up and we teargassed it. And they stood there, you know.

Presenter6:55

Literally with Jake.

Richard Noble6:56

Uh yes, we we got a l hold of a of um a plain lachrymatry guest and made them all cry. And it was astonishing, it was incredibly funny. I mean, all these great and good people, cabinet ministers and bishops and so on, all crying. It was an astonishing experience. And uh they threatened to expel us, but th they got the letters in the wrong envelope, so we sent them back.

Presenter7:14

It's amazing you didn't get kicked out, isn't it? But you must have had some academic ability if you went to Winchester.

Richard Noble7:16

Yeah.

Richard Noble7:19

Yes, I sort of scraped into the bottom and but I didn't enjoy it and I didn't see it as being all that important. But what it did do was give me a tremendous breadth of life. You were suddenly very, very free after a kind of difficult childhood where everything was restrained by rules and so on. And also the wonderful thing too about those schools is that it gives you the ability to get on with people and to work with people. You are pitched together, you know, day and night and you've all got to work together. You've all got to live together.

Presenter7:49

Equip number two.

Richard Noble7:50

Well record number two is uh basically it's Winchester.

Richard Noble7:54

At home I'd had a diet of constant sort of military Scottish music and classical music and I didn't know any others. And when I arrived at Winchester there we had a library there where somebody had very kindly donated a very very exotic record player and then I suddenly realised there was some really fantastic music around. Here we've got Louis Armstrong with the All-Stars playing Tiger Ag. This is my favourite.

Presenter8:48

Louis Armstrong's All-Stars playing Tiger Rag, and that was recorded in concert in 1956. So you weren't interested, Richard Noble, in going to university. You went to work for ICI, first selling paint, and a bit later on you sold crimpline.

Richard Noble9:01

Do you know

Presenter9:02

Were you building cars? Were you doing anything about your speed ambitions at this time? Or were you

Richard Noble9:05

At this time or not at all really because uh what I was trying to do was to get started in something and um what I wanted to do was I didn't go to university, I wanted particularly just to get started, I wanted to get going, I was fed up with the academic world and I just wanted to do something.

Presenter9:18

When you say get go, you mean get make some money?

Richard Noble9:20

Well, not necessarily make some money, but get established, get, get an identity, start getting things happening, you know.

Presenter9:25

But in the end you gave it all up, and you went on a year long trip across Africa.

Richard Noble9:29

Yeah.

Presenter9:29

Yeah. And you you m met your wife in the process and then came back to work, this time for GKN, Gesskin and Nettleford.

Richard Noble9:29

Yeah.

Presenter9:35

This time for a boss I think who understood what turned you on.

Richard Noble9:39

Yes, this was an interesting situation. I'd started at that point to realise that I'd really got to do this the land speed record thing, because the bugs simply would not go away and you've got to live with yourself, you know. So I talked to them about it and they said, look, Richard, we understand you're going to have to travel all over the world and sell our merch. We understand it's pretty tough. And as far as we're concerned, when you're back in this country, you can run your project.

Presenter10:01

So Project Thrust was founded and this was to build a a jet-propelled car. This was the mid-seventies. Where did you build it and what from?

Richard Noble10:03

And this was to be

Richard Noble10:06

Uh-huh.

Richard Noble10:08

Well, I started off very, very simply. I bought an old jet engine. Um I built um a very very simple car in my garage in in Twickenham and I got most of it wrong. Um it was really a pretty appalling bit of engineering, but it worked.

Presenter10:20

But presumably you had to rev this thing up in the garage and so I mean you must have been in the the neighbor from hell.

Richard Noble10:26

Well, yes, you you have quite a problem if you've got a jet engine'cause these things are very noisy and they blow a lot of hot air around and so on, you know. No, they didn't. Um I had a lot of trouble with welding. That was always a problem, welding late at night, because of course you'd have to do your job and um then you know come back and get on with the welding.

Presenter10:32

Do they complain?

Richard Noble10:41

and enormous problems in um in in sorting out all the electrics and so on. But it it worked all right and we took it down to RAF St Athen and um we started to run it there and got some experience with it.

Presenter10:51

And then you took it down to R A F Fairford in nineteen seventy seven, and then you wrote it off?

Richard Noble10:52

No, you said

Richard Noble10:54

Yes, that all went wrong. Basically it wasn't a safe design. I did one run at somewhere around about 200 miles an hour, which is pretty exciting, and then on the return run, it all went wrong.

Presenter11:02

How close did you come to writing yourself off?

Richard Noble11:04

Uh well if the uh the engine itself was one of these old centrifugal type jet engines which has got a very broad, big, broad girth. And so when the thing went upside down for the first time and um the engine itself took the bump and not my head. But the great thing was that I got the engine shut down when I was upside down for the first time.

Presenter11:22

So you were still thinking?

Richard Noble11:23

I still think, yep, and that gave me the confidence to believe that we could go forward from that point.

Presenter11:28

Next record.

Richard Noble11:29

Well, this goes back to travelling across Africa. I left ICI because I really wanted to see the world. I was fed up with my existence. So what I did was I bought a 13-year-old Land Rover and advertised in the Times, collected a great collection of people, one of whom was Sally Bruford, and we set off to drive to Cape Town, across the Sahara, through the Congo, right down East Africa in this very ancient Land Rover. I was trained by Land Rovers, so I did know how to take it all apart and put it together again. And we set off. And in the back, we had one of those very early little tape players, and the tune that was played incessantly, and this is for Sally, was Hey Jude.

Speaker 412:07

Oh well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder.

Speaker 412:22

Um

Presenter12:27

The Beatles and Hey Jude. So Thrust One was kind of primitive, amateur, self-made. Thrust two was quite a different business, wasn't it? How did you manage to raise the game, as it were?

Richard Noble12:37

Well the reality was that as an engineer I was incompetent, not capable of doing this. And if we were going to do this, we've got to do this properly with a very high level of professionalism. And so what we did was we put out a press release, we couldn't afford an advertisement, put out a press release which said situation where a vacant wanted 650 mile-an-hour car designer. And we got an astonishing response. It went in most of the national newspapers and out of them one guy came forward who was absolutely brilliant called John Aykroyd.

Richard Noble13:07

And uh we started the Thrust 2 project together.

Presenter13:10

And you sought sponsorship. I mean, you were able to get a lot of publicity. It just really appealed, didn't it, to the that kind of British amateur thing.

Richard Noble13:18

Yes, I think there was certainly that that side of it. I mean, I I I need you to understand that this was in no way amateur. This was highly professional and a lot more professional than most of the sponsors.

Presenter13:27

Yes, but the people who would turn up to your stand at the motor show, for example, would be masses and masses of people who just thought you were doing exactly what they would love to be doing.

Richard Noble13:30

For example, we

Richard Noble13:34

Yes, indeed. And they wanted to be a part of it and they wanted to and they wanted to share it. And we realized that this was terribly important to the whole thing. You want to actually if you were going to succeed, you would succeed by sharing the project with people, not by just doing it on your own and saying, Hey, aren't we wonderful?

Presenter13:48

And the RAF were very encouraging, I think.

Richard Noble13:50

They certainly were. They certainly were because uh they were going through very difficult times at that time. There had been cuts and so on. We generated a lot of publicity for them as a result of um of the runs with this very simple Thrust One car. And they'd said and they held a a big meeting at an Astral House and said to me, What do you want, Richard? and I said, We want a lightning fighter.

Richard Noble14:09

Um it was a bit of a

Presenter14:09

It's a bit of a

Richard Noble14:10

An awful silence then, but we ended up with a jet engine and that gave us the sort of credibility, you know, to move on to the next stage.

Presenter14:16

So they and the public were the good guys. Who were the bad guys? Who discouraged you?

Richard Noble14:20

Oh, all sorts of people discourage it. I still remember um a very senior RAC man taking me on one side and saying, Richard, you know, Donald Campbell spent such a huge percentage of the country's gross domestic product with hi with his car, but industry will never, ever support this again. And I said to him, You're wrong.

Richard Noble14:36

And we had the same with the wi with the bank. I had the indignity of the bank manager telling me to go away and sell insurance, that this could never happen, and I'd got to look after my wife and family. And I said, You're wrong, and we're going to prove it.

Presenter14:49

Number four.

Richard Noble14:50

Well now at Winchester we were it was a fascinating time actually because basically this was the end of the skiffle era and really the start of of really the sort of pop era and of course the electric guitar was was was suddenly emerging and you suddenly realize the sort of music you could create with a guitar, with an electric guitar. It's absolutely astonishing and of course with the the the rather primitive electronics they had in those days. And there were and also I was fascinated by the by the instrumental bands, bands like The Ventures, also the

Richard Noble15:23

John Barry's seven and song. It was creating the most fantastic music. And of course the greatest of the lot was the shadows.

Presenter15:59

The Shadows and Wonderful Land. The history of Thrust Two over the years between'seventy seven and'eighty three' is is heart breaking, isn't it? It's a series of setbacks, awful misfortunes, bad weather, floods in the desert, wheels caked with salt from the salt flat. Crashing at Greenham Common Air Base. That was practically a disaster, actually, wasn't it? Yes, it certainly was. How did that happen?

Richard Noble16:17

Yes, it certainly was.

Presenter16:19

Yeah.

Richard Noble16:19

What had happened was that we'd built up a very, very good little team, a very tough little team. But of course, the problem was that we had absolutely no experience. And gradually we got better and better. We'd taken the car to Bonneville in 1981. We'd had enormous problems with that. We'd had team problems. We'd had directional stability problems. But we'd come out of that quite well. We'd come out with an unofficial speed of 500 and a new record of 418. So, you know, we were starting to make progress. And we fell, or I fell into the trap of just getting just that little bit too cocky. And we were running, we were doing test runs at Grin Common, and John Aykroyd and the team had spent a whole year getting the car absolutely 100% ready to go back to America.

Speaker 416:54

Hmm.

Richard Noble17:04

And we'd done one 260 mile an hour run and John said, fine, that's it. I'm happy, everything's together, the car's absolutely 100%, and we're ready to go. And I said, John, I'll tell you what, I'd like to do one more run. We're short of, you know, I'm very short of experience. Another run would do well. And it's getting late in the afternoon, four or five o'clock in the afternoon. We could get one more run in before. And so John said, yes. And I suppose I was tired and I suppose that I shouldn't have been doing it. But anyhow, I got in the car and we set off for one last run. And I had a visual marker, which was the Jaguar fartender. And something distracted my attention. I just wasn't sharp. I missed it. And instead of pulling the parachutes at 200 miles an hour, I was up to 300 miles an hour very quickly.

Presenter17:47

So you didn't break?

Richard Noble17:48

I'd yes, that's the the I'd I'd missed the point where I've got to shut the engine down and and apply the bar the the brake parachutes.

Presenter17:48

Yeah.

Presenter17:54

So were you going to run out of runway?

Richard Noble17:55

We were in terrible trouble. What happened was that we got a lot of smoke off the front wheels, which was the towers were now expanding and filing the bodywork. The end of the runway was coming up very fast, it was only a two-mile runway, we're now doing 300 miles an hour. So I put the car sideways at 200 miles an hour, around the corner at 200 miles an hour, I got it absolutely right, but what I hadn't done was research the base properly, and there was a whole lot of rough grass and mounds and bumps and which actually covered a million gallons of jet fuel which was stored underneath. We went the car went hairing straight into this, you know, it smashed the front in, a whole lot of debris went down the engine and basically we'd gone from a moment when the car was absolutely 100% to a moment when it was disaster, all through driver error.

Presenter18:41

Did you think that was the end of that?

Richard Noble18:43

No, absolutely not. No, we've got to turn around and we've got to get it right. But it knocked the hell out of the team and the whole project stopped for a week, which is unknown.

Presenter18:50

Yeah.

Richard Noble18:51

And then everybody, we pulled ourselves together and we got it built, rebuilt in 12 weeks.

Presenter18:55

What happens when you're out in the desert for markers and tracks? I mean, they wouldn't let you put dye on the desert to mark out your tracks.

Richard Noble19:01

Mark out your track. That's right. We'd found in 1982 a better desert called the Black Rock Desert and basically this had a brown surface. With the Bonneville, which was a salt surface, we marked it with a black oil mark. But the environmentalists were very concerned about the Black Rock Desert and they didn't want it marked that way. So with the Thrust 2 program we marked it using the Jaguar fire tracks.

Presenter19:25

These tracks all have to be checked, don't they, every single inch of them.

Richard Noble19:28

I see

Richard Noble19:29

Absolutely. You've got to check everything. You've got to check that there's any any kind of discrepancy in the surface. You've got to check for any kind of stones or anything that might damage the car.

Presenter19:37

So you walk the track, all of it, yes.

Richard Noble19:38

Yes, it's very pleasant. Yes, you're it's totally silent. It's like being in the middle of a sea, you know, and nobody can phone you, nobody can get at you and you're just walking along picking up stones in the sun.

Presenter19:39

Sifting and putting

Presenter19:41

Is this

Presenter19:51

But uh nineteen eighty two you got out there, you did all of that, you made your tracks and you still didn't do it. You got to five hundred and ninety miles an hour and the snow was forecast and that was it. Everybody comes home again.

Richard Noble19:59

Yes, that's it.

Richard Noble20:02

We got it up to an unofficial peak of 615 from our own instrumentation and we knew then we could do it, but unfortunately the weather broke, the the the track then became became soft and we had to go.

Presenter20:12

It's exhausting. I mean, year upon year goes by, but finally, in September 1983,

Presenter20:18

This was the moment.

Richard Noble20:19

Yeah.

Presenter20:19

Your dream had come true. You drove faster than a jumbo jet. How do you feel? I mean,.

Richard Noble20:23

How do you

Richard Noble20:24

Well, you you're not prepared for this. You've been struggling so hard for so long that you're not prepared for success at all. I mean, you know, success is illusory. It it's it you know, it's all hard, hard graft.

Richard Noble20:36

And one moment it was fantastic. We were all cheering and drinking and wow, we've done it, you know, we've beaten the system, we've beaten Britain, we've done it, you know. And then suddenly, great, great sadness, because basically the whole team had come together to do this job. There's a great collection of professionals to do this job, and now it was over and there was nothing holding us together again.

Richard Noble20:56

And that was it.

Presenter20:58

Pickled number five.

Richard Noble21:00

Well, this of course, all this was terribly tough on Sally, because Sally came out to all these record attempts and I didn't realise until this year just how tough it was, because I'd never seen a land speed record car run, I'd always been inside it. And in the dias when we could be together from time to time, which was very, very few and far between, we used to drive around the desert just to get away from it. And the local radio station in Reno there was constantly playing this one tune and this became our tune.

Speaker 421:35

In for that poor one girl

Presenter21:51

Crosbystills and Nash and Southern Cross. What does a man do, then, when he has achieved his life's ambition at the age of thirty seven?

Richard Noble21:58

It's a terrible problem.

Richard Noble21:59

It really is.

Presenter22:01

You tried all sorts of things after that.

Richard Noble22:03

Yes, yes. I mean the thing is that w w uh you know, I suppose that you've got two options, one of which is to go off and be a kind of media star and the other is to get back to work. And I decided I've got to get back to work as quickly as possible.

Presenter22:15

You tried becoming an aeroplane manufacturer, but it wasn't a huge success. You tried.

Richard Noble22:18

I think it was a success actually. I'm terribly proud of what we actually achieved because we started literally the month that we got the the land speed record with a new group and a new team. We had a new aeroplane and a new aero engine and we did both. We designed and got them both into the air in 11 months from startup with no cash.

Presenter22:38

But you didn't make any money at all.

Richard Noble22:40

We didn't make the money. That's not a measure of success. The fundamental problem was we were um seriously underfinanced. We were dealing with people in the city who didn't understand what we were trying to do. Um I was desperately, desperately disillusioned and after a bit they gave up playing. And therefore the whole project then had to collapse. And that was it.

Presenter22:57

I think that's a good idea.

Richard Noble23:00

Oh, well, basically you've you've you live by your wits in this world, don't you?

Presenter23:03

So how I mean, how how have you made it? How you've had you've got three children during the course of this time. I mean, how have you kept body and soul together?

Richard Noble23:09

Well basically I do a lot of public speaking and that helps. But then after the aircraft company then we tried to do a ship. We got becalmed in the middle of the recession which is a terrible shame because there was some really brilliant technology there. That didn't happen. That didn't happen. That was the recession.

Presenter23:22

That didn't happen. That didn't happen. That was the recession. Then you tried uh to go across land overland from London to New York, didn't you?

Richard Noble23:30

Yes, we finally came up with um a very original idea. This is with a guy called Ray Stewart, to create a new method of funding television programmes. And um one of the first successes we had with that was to fund a huge eight series um television event which was uh which is basically the first ever drive from London to uh New York.

Presenter23:50

You got by financial.

Richard Noble23:52

But you're also struggling

Presenter23:53

But you're also struggling, it seems to me, against your own uh b b nature, really. I mean, you just are naturally restless, aren't you?

Richard Noble24:00

Well, the thing about it, you see, is this that

Presenter24:02

I mean, living with you must be a hell.

Richard Noble24:04

You've got to ask Sally that.

Presenter24:06

What about living with yourself?

Richard Noble24:08

Well, the thing about it is that, you see, what really bugged me was that we had done and got this land speed record, and we were now the very, very best in the world. We've proved it.

Richard Noble24:19

And there was nowhere to go. The fundamental thing was that the sponsors threw their hands in horror at what talking about when we started talking about a new car and it just was not going to happen. So we were stuck. I mean, seriously stuck.

Speaker 224:20

Hmm.

Richard Noble24:30

And I wanted to go on and kind of finish the job.

Presenter24:34

What do you finish the job?

Richard Noble24:35

No, certainly not, because the big girl, the big one, the biggest one of all, was the supersonic car.

Presenter24:41

Number six.

Richard Noble24:42

Well number six goes back to the aircraft company and I love the the little airplane, the LV Super 2. I've still got number 12 which I fly regularly. And I remember making a video of this basically to show the banks and I needed a bit of music. I got all these lovely out air shots of the airplane flying over the needles at the Isle of Wight and diving down towards the sea. It's beautiful looking airplane.

Presenter25:04

I've seen it. It's a bea beautiful film.

Richard Noble25:06

And I needed some music to back this up and by sheer good fortune I sort of fell over Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, number two in A minor.

Presenter26:12

Part of March number two, the one in A minor, of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Groves.

Presenter26:19

So let's spool on then to last October, nineteen ninety seven. The intention was to go supersonic, to beat your existing record by more than a hundred miles an hour, something between seven hundred and fifty, seven hundred and sixty just over seven hundred and sixty miles an hour, you had to go supersonic, yeah.

Richard Noble26:33

That's correct, yes, yeah.

Presenter26:34

Describe the car. Give me its vital statistics.

Richard Noble26:36

Well, we realised that what we've got to do was something completely different. We couldn't go on producing a traditional type of land speed record car. Everything was about stability and the last car thrust two had very nearly flown. I mean, we were within six miles an hour of takeoff and it would have been a disaster. So we wanted to get this absolutely right and we spent an awful lot of time, two years in point of facts, on the research covering the aerodynamics particularly. And we came out at the other end with an amazing design. Basically, what it was is a long, thin sort of fuselage, central fuselage body in which the driver sat, and then with two huge jet engines, after burning spay, turbofan, jet engines on either side. Very long, 54 foot long, 10 tonne car with 106,000 horsepower.

Presenter27:23

And how many um man-hours did it take to design and build?

Richard Noble27:27

It took two and a half years to research, which we did in secret because we were up against the McLaren Formula One team who had got all the money and resource and published it and everything else. So we just broke ourselves down into little cells and operated like a sort of terrorist group until we got it together and then we announced it. And it took 100,000 man-hours to build it. And the whole thing has been a complete and utter nightmare because it didn't go as we hoped.

Richard Noble27:51

The principal problem was that we never got a major sponsor.

Presenter27:55

Why do you think that is?

Richard Noble27:56

I I don't know.

Presenter27:57

Because you'd done it once. You'd proved you were professional, as you said.

Richard Noble27:58

Prove to work professionally. The great story of this really was the supporters club. The supporters club, we built up an enormous supporters club, about 5,000 people. And the supporters club funded about 20% of the projects. They were far bigger than any of the sponsors.

Speaker 228:17

Yeah.

Presenter28:30

How do you communicate with them?

Richard Noble28:32

Well, we would send them newsletters on a regular basis and then we'd have open days, initially down at Fontwell where we were building the car in Sussex and then Farnborough, they'd all come to Farnborough. And then in large numbers of them would come out to Jordan where we ran the car, both Jordan 1 and Jordan 2, and also out to America. It became a tremendous bond, and the thing could not have been done without that supporters club.

Presenter28:52

Record number seven.

Richard Noble28:54

I think really on the Thrust SEC project one of the problems was there wasn't much time for music. It was all I remember is just nothing but hard grasp. There was one recurring theme which was a guy called Rob Hemper. Humpy as he's called, is a brilliant guitarist and singer. He's far, far better than Bob Dylan, but you know, he's absolutely brilliant. And every evening there he would be playing away on his guitar and he could play so well.

Speaker 429:18

Getting it ready for the run.

Speaker 429:25

When are we ever gonna have some fun?

Speaker 429:32

Getting it ready for the run.

Speaker 429:39

We know nothing's going right

Presenter29:46

Getting it ready for the Run, written and performed by Rob Hemper. So what's next, Richard? I can't believe you don't have a project in mind.

Richard Noble29:53

Yep, we've we've started on a new one. Um we've got some ideas um but I uh it we've got to go through all the research phase. It's very advanced, it's something very different.

Presenter30:03

Very different. It's not breaking an existing record.

Richard Noble30:04

No, I can't go back to the game again. The the fundamental problem is the whole sponsorship thing is is the weakness and we can't run high financial risk like that again.

Presenter30:10

And

Presenter30:13

But what is it is it speed?

Richard Noble30:16

I've got to be I n I need six months research before we can even talk about it.

Presenter30:21

Is it on land?

Richard Noble30:22

I need six months of research before I can talk about it.

Presenter30:26

And what will you say when one of your teenage daughters or your ten-year-old son, I think he is, say, says that uh she or he would

Presenter30:33

Like to be behind the wheel or at the helm or whatever it is of such a project. I mean, I don't know what this project is.

Richard Noble30:38

Well, it really scares me. I mean, Jack loves the project and has been drawing SSCs and he's got some wonderful pictures and so on. But I I'm just terrified that he might want to do that. And I I you know, I'd like to recommend that he goes for ballet dancing or something.

Presenter30:48

I am

Presenter30:54

What about you on a desert island? I mean, it's it's easy to see that you get bored out of your mind extremely quickly, but presumably you you devise a means of escape. I mean, yeah.

Richard Noble30:54

Do you know?

Richard Noble31:03

Yeah, rather. Well, the thing is that first of all, the one thing that we need, that I need more than anything else is sleep. And a desert island would be great, actually. A couple of weeks to just sleep would be wonderful. We had this problem before with the Thrust 2 project. You need two weeks of solid sleep and then you're up again. So that would be great. I'd be very worried about the family, obviously, because we live a precarious financial existence. But yeah, of course, yes. I mean, a couple of weeks and then we need to get away.

Speaker 231:19

Uh

Speaker 231:22

But

Presenter31:32

Last record.

Richard Noble31:33

It's a brilliant bit of music by Eric Coates. It comes from a film called The Dambusters.

Richard Noble31:37

And it covers the whole thing. It covers the beating the British establishment, which is Bar what Barnes Wallace did with his bouncing bomb. It covers all the teamwork, terrific teamwork of people going out to undertake this vast enterprise.

Richard Noble31:52

The detail in that form is simply fantastic. You need to see it four or five times to actually understand exactly how those people lived and how they fought in those days. That's a truly wonderful.

Speaker 432:00

How truly was it?

Richard Noble32:02

I should think over the years at least ten, I'm sure. Yeah.

Presenter33:06

Central band of the R A F playing the Dambusters March, my Castaway's favourite piece of music. Is it the very favorite? If you could only take one of those eight, which one?

Richard Noble33:14

I think it would actually, um, yeah.

Presenter33:16

What about your book?

Richard Noble33:18

Well, there are three books that I really need to study, actually. Three books. One is

Presenter33:23

You can only take one.

Richard Noble33:24

Yeah, well it's it's a question of making a decision, you know. Uh there's a wonderful series of books by a guy called Darrell Stinton on aircraft design, um which are thousands and thousands of pages of po closely packed equations and so on. I really need to get to grips with that.

Richard Noble33:37

There's another book which I love which is um uh uh the flight manual from the SR-71 which is a

Presenter33:42

Come on, it's decision time.

Richard Noble33:43

Yeah, it is. I think it would actually have to go for probably the greatest novel of all time, which is War and Peace. And your luck.

Presenter33:49

And your luxury.

Richard Noble33:50

Well, I'd like to take my aeroplane. Um, you know, I'm a bit bit lost without the old airplane. Um but

Presenter33:55

But you'd have to remain grounded.

Richard Noble33:57

Yes, that would be a problem, wouldn't it? Otherwise, um

Presenter33:59

We might escape.

Richard Noble34:00

Yeah, well yes, yeah. Uh in that case it would have to be um a good computer, a really good computer with um a satellite link so we could run the get into the internet and um find out what's going on.

Presenter34:10

No, but you can't communicate with people either. That's against the rules of solar. You can have an aeroplane sitting on the beach if that's what you'd like. Or you can have a computer with no satellite.

Richard Noble34:12

It's against the rules.

Richard Noble34:17

Well you can have a computer with no satellite. Well I'd just have to take a guitar then and um try and brush that up.

Presenter34:23

Richard Noble, thank you very much indeed for letting us see your desert island discs.

Richard Noble34:26

Thank you.

Speaker 234:34

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.