Drag race!* Bloodhound vs F1 vs Bugatti Chiron

Here’s a bit of fun. The Bloodhound team has done a cheeky bit of jiggery-pokery to create a virtual drag race between their land speed record car, a Formula One car and a Bugatti Chiron. And a regular family car, but you won’t be looking at that as it barely moves. Don’t take it too seriously and bombard our comments board with thoughts on slick tyre traction in the desert, just sit back and enjoy some virtual lines spearing across the desert.

Now we’ve done a breakdown of Bloodhound’s desert acceleration stats before so I won’t rehash those again here, except to say it did 0-600mph in 45.1secs. If you want to know how its acceleration compared to everything from hot hatches to supercars and what it did the ¼ mile, just click that link.

And this was Bloodhound running at little more than half power, remember. For its desert runs last November it made do with just the Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet – delivering 90,000 newtons of thrust with the afterburner lit. When it runs again, it will also have Nammo’s monopropellant rocket attached for another 50-60,000 newtons.

The side note here is the question of when it runs again. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, Bloodhound has been put on hold with CEO Ian Warhurst saying: “Discussions with a number of global brands were looking promising when COVID-19 struck… but as a result, we are planning to go into hibernation to reduce the monthly overheads to an absolute minimum, and we’ll reboot conversations with potential sponsors later in the year. Rightfully, the world has more important things to focus on right now.”