This time on "Impossible Engineering,"
a rocket-powered speed machine...
It's the pinnacle of all land-speed cars.
Supersonic engineering...
It's designed to produce 200,000 horsepower.
That's more power than the entire grid
of a formula one race.
And the pioneering historic innovations...
It's incredible to think this was once
the fastest car in the world.
Oh! My god.
Similar to what Fritz did with the rocket car.
That made the impossible possible.
Captions by vitac... www.vitac.com
captions paid for by discovery communications
The black rock desert,
a barren wilderness in Nevada...
The setting for one of the most awesome challenges
known to mankind...
The land speed record...
engineering at its most extreme...
which, in 1997, took the British Thrustssc
to a mind-blowing 763 miles per hour...
A record that has
remained untouched for over two decades.
Yeah!
But now, in Perth, Australia,
an ambitious team is building a car that they believe
will one day re-write history...
The Aussie invader.
Well, here she is,
soon to be the world's fastest car...
Aussie invader 5r.
55 feet in length, 6 1/2 ton in weight.
Very, very powerful...
200,000 horsepower, 62,000 pound of thrust.
This extraordinary machine
is the culmination of a life's work
for inventor and driver Rosco McGlashan.
Well, I believe this car is the most innovative
land-speed car ever conceived.
This baby here is a solution to going very, very fast.
This car... it's perfect.
It got everything in the right place.
It's a revelation.
To create a car as fast as a speeding bullet
requires NASA-like technology.
Keith and Jenny Lovatt are part of the team
striving to create this engineering first.
This is absolutely one of the most exciting
high-speed car projects in the world.
The dynamics of the car do share with aerospace...
The rocket engine, the wheel speeds.
Even the paint finish on the car has to be able
to cope with super-high speeds.
Aussie invader's futuristic bodywork
has just been completed.
The team is now working on its propulsion system.
But this will not only have to break the land speed record.
Incredibly, Rosco has another
audacious goal in his sights.
The next big thing that we want to achieve
in the land speed record is
what we say is the holy grail of auto racing...
1,000 mile an hour.
To achieve 1,000 mile an hour in a car,
or 1.4 mach, is impossible,
and that's why we're doing it.
We love it.
This is a one-off, absolute unique car.
Aussie invader 5r is the ultimate of cars.
Aussie invader is constructed around
a unique steel tube.
Two huge fuel tanks feed
a liquid-propellant rocket engine powerful enough
to break the sound barrier in 15 seconds...
Before state-of-the-art air brakes
and a parachute system
bring this horizontal rocket to a halt
at the end of its 15-mile run.
- That's good here. Yep. - 12-volt.
But as this pioneering team
looks to enter the unknown,
the challenges are immense.
How is it possible to create fighter-jet performance
on four wheels?
To make a car go as fast as we want to go,
which is 1.4 mach, you need a heap of power.
How do you ensure
Aussie invader won't break apart?
It has to be made
to withstand some extreme forces.
1,000 miles an hour,
with wheels turning at 10,000 R.P.M.,
strange things happen.
And how can it safely slow down
from supersonic speeds?
It has been a challenge
to develop a braking system for the car
because there is no book that tells us
what we need to do.
The fact that few have even attempted
to travel this fast on land
poses, perhaps, the biggest problem.
I think that three times as many people
have gone to the moon
than have gone 600 mile an hour in a car.
So, that's a pretty amazing thing to achieve.
So, how do you even know what shape to build?
A lot of people say to me,
"how do you make a car go 1,000 mile an hour?
What's the difference between a 1,000-mile-an-hour car
and my road car?"
Obviously, the aerodynamics,
making the car stay on the ground...
It's just got to have the right load
on the ground at all times.
And the aerodynamics are, possibly,
the major thing to get right.
For inspiration,
the team looks to an innovator of the past,
Belgian car manufacturer Camille Jenatzy.
Like Aussie invader, he had to come up
with something completely different.
Andrew Steele has come
to the Ccité de l'automobile in Mulhouse, France,
to get up to speed with Jenatzy's inspired solution...
a totally new breed of car.
This is a full-size replica
of that incredible vehicle.
It's called la jamais contente,
which means "the never satisfied."
And it was a revolution in automotive engineering.
This was the first-ever car
specifically designed to break the land speed record.
And in 1899, it did just that,
breaking the 62-mile-per-hour record.
Here we go!
The Jamais Contente's bullet-like design
broke the mold of automobile-era dynamics,
the kind of forward thinking
that Aussie invader will have to adopt.
What a machine.
In Perth, a team of engineers
is constructing a one-of-a-kind car
that they hope could reach
an earth-shattering 1,000 miles per hour.
Like Camille Jenatzy,
inventor and driver Rosco McGlashan's life
is focused on one thing.
The land-speed record has been something
that I've wanted to achieve all my life.
Quit school at 12 years of age to set the record,
and here I am, many, many years later,
still chasing that elusive goal.
Rosco's quest for speed
began with homemade go-karts.
As an adult, he upped the ante.
Raced things like rocket-powered motorcycles,
jet dragsters...
A lot of stuff.
In the 1990s,
Rosco would earn himself legendary status
as he targeted the Australian land speed record.
Initially, what we wanted to do is,
I want to claim the title of fastest Aussie on earth,
and it took us some time to do that.
- Yeah. How you doing, mate? - Good, mate.
And that looked really spectacular.
- Looked really beautiful. - It looks good, man.
Wasn't till '94 that we actually set the record
at 500 mile an hour.
The average speed for the two runs was
801.3 kilometers per hour.
We can bring the champagne.
So, we've got it, guys! We've got it!
Now he believes his new, groundbreaking design
has the potential to become the fastest car on the planet.
As with Jenatzy's bullet-like innovation,
the starting point for Rosco is creating the right shape.
I thought, "if you want to go to the moon,
you start off with a cylindrical object,
have a point at the top of it, rocket motor in the bum,
pressure vessels all the way through,
and you sit under the point at the top."
Well, obviously, in a car,
we want to be sitting on the center of gravity.
So, center of gravity is about here,
and we're sitting right behind it.
So we know what the car's doing.
So, obviously, if the front of the car's moving,
if the back's moving, we want to know about it.
Aussie invader's nose is angled down to avoid lift.
To house the rocket's huge fuel tanks,
a unique 40-foot-long steel tube
forms the car's colossal front cylinder.
What we call the mainframe is a pipe, if you like.
It's been dimpled to get
the right boundary layer, airflow over it,
and if you measure this car
from the front axle to the back axle,
it's possibly 2-mil difference.
So, it's strong there.
I think it's the perfect solution.
To reach 1,000 miles an hour,
Aussie invader's cylindrical body
would have to cope with some extreme forces.
Approaching the sound barrier, or supersonic travel,
would disrupt the airflow,
causing a potentially devastating problem
underneath the car.
To keep the car on track to break the land speed record,
engineers will have to get creative
and make the impossible possible.
Taking a car to a record-breaking
1,000 miles per hour
comes with some unique challenges.
For example, the intense airflow disruption at that speed
could be enough to throw the Aussie invader
dangerously off course.
Just before it's approaching supersonic,
there's a shock wave that forms on the car.
The problem with the car is,
it cannot dissipate that shock wave downwards
because it hits the ground.
And if you've got a flat belly underneath the car,
it'll go "bang, bang, bang, bang," all the way down.
These trapped shock waves
could throw Aussie invader dangerously off course,
so the team came up with an ingenious solution.
We made a "V" underbelly on the car.
The further back it goes, the sharper it gets.
So, as that shock wave moves backwards,
the shock wave then dissipates off the side of the car
and go outwards instead of hitting the ground
and bouncing back on the car.
Aussie invader is aiming to travel
five-times faster than a crossbow bolt,
four-times quicker than an Indy 500 racing car,
and double the cruising speed of an airbus A330.
But to achieve this, it will have to generate
more thrust than any other car,
creating a massive problem
for inventor and driver Rosco McGlashan.
I'm in the speed business,
so we want to go really, really fast.
We believe we need 62,000 pounds of thrust
to get us to where we want to go,
to the 1,000 mile an hour,
and there's not many ways to get that.
Land speed records have been set
with a wide range of power sources.
In the '60s, the American goldenrod
was fitted with four combustion engines.
But its piston-powered record
was 600 miles per hour short
of Aussie invader's 1,000-per-hour target.
Engineering greats, like spirit of America,
were fitted with turbo jets.
But these are not the ideal solution for Rosco.
The things that scare us with jets
is where the engines will suck in like a big...
Or a stone or a rock or a wrench into the engine,
kill the engine, you lose the record.
So we're done with jets.
So, what could propel Aussie invader
to its impossible dream?
Can the pioneers of the past help out?
In Dudenhofen, Bavaria,
a test track is playing host
to an engineering masterpiece that could help Aussie invader.
Behind the wheel is vintage car specialist
Uwe Mertin.
This car was originally driven in 1928,
and to drive it here now, 90 years later,
it's just amazing to have this chance
to be here and to drive this car.
This is a replica of the legendary Opel Rak 2.
Its extraordinary wings give a clue
that this was no ordinary car.
The original car had a kind of a different...
You can't really say engine.
It was just powered in a different way.
With the sole goal of out-and-out speed,
the car maker's director of testing,
Fritz Von Opel, replaced the combustion engine
with something quite incredible.
What you see here are 24 rockets.
And imagine... There was no engine inside,
no transmission, just the rockets
and the driver at the steering wheel.
That was it.
And then bringing up this car
to a speed of 238 kilometers per hour,
it's just amazing.
Von Opel used solid fuel rockets.
Once lit, their powdered propellant burnt outwards,
releasing high-speed gases,
propelling the car with 6.6 tons of thrust.
Whenever they were ignited, it was like fireworks.
The driver ignited, with a pedal,
always four rockets at a time.
So, 24 rockets, he had to do it 6 times,
and the car went faster and faster and faster,
up to the end speed.
To appreciate the rocket's phenomenal performance,
Uwe has a scaled-down demonstration.
So, in my hands, I have three solid fuel rockets.
Put the rockets on here.
Let me see.
And when three fuses are slotted into place,
today's mini rocket car is ready for launch.
So, I'm gonna light the fuse now.
Whoa!
My god.
Similar to what Fritz did with the rocket car.
In 1928, at a Berlin racing circuit,
these awesome rockets would launch the Rak 2
into the record books with its 148-mile-per-hour top speed.
There was tons of smoke.
There was a big, like, fire wall coming towards you.
It was really the first time
that people had seen something like this.
Fritz Von Opel is, for sure,
a pioneer and a German hero.
Aussie invader is following in the footsteps
of the remarkable Rak 2.
But it's single rocket is being built to drive it
almost seven times faster than its land-speed predecessor.
So, this is the solution to all our power problems.
It's a bipropellant rocket motor,
and it's designed to produce around 200,000 horsepower.
That's more power
than the entire grid of a formula one race.
This bipropellant rocket is engineered
around two liquids...
An oxidizer, white fuming nitric acid,
and turpentine, which acts as its fuel.
Nitrogen gas stored in three giant tanks
pressurizes the two liquids at 600 psi.
When the throttle's opened,
the liquids are released into the combustion chamber.
Soon as they see each other, it's instant oomph.
There's a massive
controlled explosion inside there.
It gets squeezed through here,
which puts a massive amount of pressure through the throat
and then out through the nozzle.
The same scenario is when you're watering the garden,
you put your finger over there,
you restrict the flow at the end of the hose,
and, obviously, the pressure goes up massively.
Testing of the rocket's cutting-edge fuel is
currently underway at a facility in the Mojave desert.
When white fuming nitric acid and turpentine
are injected together, the result is spectacular.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
On land, it's hoped this extraordinary thrust
will allow Aussie invader
to cover over 1,400 feet in just one second.
When I hit the gas pedal on this car,
the two mixtures go into the combustion chamber.
The two mixtures puts out a plume 300 foot out behind it,
makes full power in 3 milliseconds.
And the temperature inside there
gets close to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit
Within seconds.
That's space technology.
Rockets are the only way to go.
Rocket engineering could one day fire
Aussie invader into the land-speed history books,
but it's fuel-guzzling performance
creates a major problem.
With the propellent usage on the car,
the car's getting 2 1/2 ton lighter in 21 seconds.
This could make the Aussie invader
dangerously unstable.
What can actually happen is, the car can just lose
its directional control and spin like a top,
either way sideways.
Australian inventor and racing legend
Rosco McGlashan is on a mission impossible...
to create the world's fastest car ever.
I'm no rocket scientist,
but I've got rocket scientists that help me.
I've got engineers.
I've got welders. I've got fabricators.
I've got the best you can possibly get.
There's a steering tunnel
that mounts off a rock on the inside here,
which gives us five degrees here.
Just give her a turn.
Would you like?
Just... so, it puts it actually
through a five-degree plane either way.
And that's the best available steering we have.
To date, Aussie invader has been
15 years in the making.
Its designers hope it will one day reach a mind-blowing
1,000 miles per hour in just 20 seconds,
making it an engineering first.
There's not a lot of people that can tell you
how to do this or work it.
There's no land-speed book.
There's no rocket car building project kit.
You have to start from scratch and work forward.
The 10.4-ton Aussie invader will
be rocket-propelled, capable of creating more power
than two hornet fighter aircraft.
Its engine is 1,300 times more powerful than a family car,
engineered to travel one mile
in an astonishing 4 seconds.
I think the greatest thing about
what I'm doing is, no one else is doing it.
It's too hard.
It's the most impossible thing you could attempt to do.
Aussie invader's projected speeds are staggering,
but driving this fast would create an immense problem
for a crucial part of the car.
So, 1,000 mile an hour,
our wheels are gonna turn at 10,000 R.P.M.
So we cannot run tires.
It'd just explode.
So, one of the biggest obstacles we've had to overcome is
having wheels that would turn at that R.P.M.
The space-age solution
is a set of super-strong aluminum wheels.
Engineer Mal Austin is overseeing their development.
Essentially, it's one of a kind,
so you're not going into production
with these type of wheels.
You have a 900-diameter piece of solid aluminium
turning at 10,000-plus R.P.M.
The forces at play are astronomical...
Hence, being the toughest grade of aluminium
we could possibly find.
Any slight stone or anything it may hit upon the track,
it puts an immense lot of force onto the wheel.
It's got to relatively stand a lot of load.
These unique wheels are built to withstand
an unbelievable 50,000-G.
Being machined out of one solid piece
is the only way to go.
It provides with the right tensile strength.
This weighs approximately 140 kilos.
There's no ring to that.
So, it's pretty solid.
But if Aussie invader
is ever to achieve a safe supersonic run,
it will have to overcome another huge challenge,
a problem that nearly killed
the pioneering record holder Donald Campbell
in the legendary bluebird.
Donald Campbell, back in about 1960,
ran his bluebird racer, and he found that
the back of the car came 'round past the front.
So, the car couldn't run like an arrow.
It's thought that instability at high speed
caused the catastrophic crash.
Unwanted lift had nearly cost Campbell his life.
Now Rosco McGlashan faces the same danger.
To keep Aussie invader safely on the ground,
its center of gravity must be perfectly positioned.
Achieving this with a rocket-powered car
is far from easy.
With the propellant usage on the car,
the car's getting 2-1/2 ton lighter in 21 seconds.
What happens... The center of gravity on the car
is moving rearwards.
And what can actually happen is,
the car can just lose its directional control
and spin like a top either way sideways.
Can an innovation from the past
offer a solution to avoid disaster?
Formula one pit engineer Michelle Creighton
is used to life in the fast Lane.
Today, she's at the British motor museum,
discovering a racing icon
that could provide an answer for Aussie invader.
Wow. This is the beautiful, stunning Jaguar d-type.
This is the car that raced at Le mans in 1954.
It's engineering at its finest.
It's so smooth.
It's made out of one piece of lightweight aluminium.
It is all handcrafted,
and it is absolutely beautifully finished.
Absolutely stunning.
Despite its slick lines, to beat the world's best
at the grueling 24 hours of Le mans,
the Jaguar team needed all-round super-fast performance.
But high-speed sections,
like the nearly four-mile Mulsanne straight,
were posing a problem.
When traveling over 170 miles per hour,
the D-type's lightweight body was becoming unstable.
Jaguar knew, to compete,
their engineers have to come up
with something game-changing
and iconic to stand a chance.
Aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer had
a simple solution to help the d-type reach the checkered flag,
an invention that could also assist Aussie invader.
Formula one pit engineer Michelle Creighton
is at the British motor museum
to see how the pioneering Jaguar d-type design
could help the engineers behind Aussie invader.
This is what this car so iconic...
The tail fin just behind the driver's head.
Aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer
was the innovative mind behind
this revolutionary addition to automotive design.
The tail fin is designed specifically
for high speeds.
Going down the Mulsanne straight,
you're doing 170 miles an hour.
You don't want any crosswinds to knock this car.
The tail fin is just like a fin on the plane.
It's gonna help the stability of the car.
Wow, the feeling of this car is unbelievable!
The sheer speed and the power, it's just phenomenal.
This brilliant innovation
made the d-type rock-solid on the high-speed straights.
Its impact is down to the relationship between
the car's center of gravity
and center of pressure, the point where lift acts.
With no ring, the two are roughly centered,
creating instability.
By increasing the car's surface area with a fin,
the center of pressure moves further back,
controlling lift and creating stability,
science that can also be seen through a demonstration
by world-class Archer Caitlin McCarthy,
first with a feathered arrow.
When you're ready, Caitlin.
Oh! Nailed it. That was a wicked shot.
But when the crucial surface area of the feathers
is removed...
Wow!
It's a different story.
With the feathers or the fletchings on the back,
the arrow has completely gone off course.
Just proves how vital those feathers are
and the fin on the back of the d-type.
In the '50s, the Jaguar's game-changing fin
helped to increase the D-type's top speeD
from 172 to 192 miles per hour on the straight,
powering it to a historic hat trick
of Le mans wins.
This kind of success back in its day and age
was unheard of.
It absolutely dominated Le mans.
The fin is a great achievement.
Aussie invader's team
is building on the D-type's ingenious concept.
After months of prototype testing...
So, that man there is responsible for that.
Look at that. Whoo-hoo.
The final result is a state-of-the-art tail fin
that they hope will one day keep Aussie invader stable
at five times the speed of the historic Jaguar.
So, here she is.
Here's our vertical stabilizer mounted on top.
Without this component on the car,
this car could not run straight.
Sort of a bit like the rocket,
the back end would want to pass the front
and turn around itself.
As with the Jaguar, the tail fin's surface area
keeps the crucial center of pressure
to the supercar's rear.
At around 400 miles per hour,
aerodynamic loads will want to spin Aussie invader around,
but the tail fin's intricate profile
creates an opposing force
to this immense sideways pressure...
while a new innovation on the top of the tail fin
will counteract lift.
The horizontal stabilizer works,
basically, opposite to an aeroplane wing.
When it's going through the air, it's creating a downforce
of pushing them back down.
And the beauty of this one is that
if we have too much downforce on the back of the car,
we can actually change the pitch on that horizontal stabilizer
to the desired loading on the back axle.
But at super-high speeds,
Aussie invader's front end
will also face a major aerodynamic challenge.
With 2 1/2 tons of propellant burnt in just over 20 seconds,
the front's balance will continually change,
making it potentially unstable.
So, to compensate for that...
The front getting lighter... What we've got are canards
on the front that are computer-controlled.
The canards are small, pitchable wings
positioned behind the wheels.
As the weight comes off the front wheels,
we get more wing put into it.
The wing cranks down
and pulls the nose down a bit harder.
The canards at the front help us with that.
That's a fine balancing act
to get the car to run perfectly straight.
And all I can say about that is,
this is the slickest land-speed car
that's ever been built.
And Rosco thinks it's capable
of going the distance,
but it will take groundbreaking engineering
to make his dream a reality.
Inventor and driver Rosco McGlashan has assembled
an ambitious team of engineers
to pursue his dream of driving the first car
to break 1,000 miles per hour.
Rosco is probably a pioneer
in the idea that a car can go 1,000 miles an hour.
He's dedicated to the point where he's willing
to put his life on the line for it.
Over a decade of development has
gone into Aussie invader.
When construction is complete, Rosco will be more than ready
for his attempt at the impossible.
62,000 pounds of thrust could launch this supercar
to the magical 1,000-miles-per-hour Mark
in just over 20 seconds.
But then the engineers will face their final problem.
With the development of the car,
the slowing of the car has to be a critical area of it.
From 1,000 mile an hour, to keep it in a straight line
once the engine power goes off will be a challenge.
The distance is critical.
He needs to allow himself
plenty of distance or time to stop.
If they brake this 10 1/2-ton machine too suddenly,
Rosco will experience up to -16 "G"
and could simply black out.
The difference between stopping a fast light car
as opposed to a fast heavy car is a world of difference.
Conventional brakes are out of the question.
Everything's got to happen in the right sequence,
going down from 1,000 mile an hour back to zero.
That's a major job.
Surprisingly, it's an aeronautical innovation
from the past that could provide a solution.
One last check of the controls.
And we got full throttle.
In Idaho, former U.S. Navy flight surgeon
Dr. Rich Sugden is taking control of the FJ-4b fury...
Gears coming up.
A 1950s trailblazer that holds a key
to solving Aussie invader's problem.
Astonishingly, this 60-year-old jet
can virtually reach mach 1.
But for the engineers who built it,
slowing it from these speeds
was perhaps their biggest challenge.
Jet aircrafts need to be slowed down for two reasons...
First, to land, and then secondly,
they have to be slowed down
in certain phases of maneuvering.
The FJ-4b was designed to be a nuclear bomber,
and part of that design required
that it make a very steep dive from fairly high altitude.
Okay. We'll be taking it all the way to the end.
This high-speed maneuver hurtled the jet
towards the ground at around 460 miles per hour.
Controlling this dive posed a major problem.
You need some way to slow down quickly
in an airplane that's going fast and is very slick,
has very little drag.
And you have to have something
that can withstand high stresses.
This seemingly impossible problem taxed
the greatest aeronautical minds.
But Edgar Schmued and his team of design engineers
at north American aviation
equipped the FJ-4b with a brilliant solution.
They're known as air or speed brakes.
So, these are the outboard speed brakes
that come out when the gear is down.
And in addition, there are ventral speed brakes
that come out on both sides, that stick down.
When diving on a target,
all four air brakes were engaged,
greatly increasing drag resistance.
This allowed the plane to slow
from around 500 to 200 miles per hour
in a matter of seconds.
So, the speed brakes are electrically controlled,
which means it's just a switch that opens a valve.
And then 3,000 pounds of hydraulic pressure is used
to force these speed brakes out against the air.
And doing 600 miles an hour through the air,
there's a lot of force against these things,
so there'd be no way to do this whole thing mechanically.
These robust engineering marvels
helped transform high-speed jet performance
and still play a crucial role in the world of aviation.
So, how can the engineering behind this 1950s plane
help Rosco's team bring Aussie invader
to a controlled stop?
Rosco McGlashan and his innovative team think
they've found a way to get Aussie invader
up to speeds of 1,000 miles per hour,
but they also have to bring it back down to a standstill,
and they're turning to Edgar Schmued's
groundbreaking 1950s air-brake design to do it.
So, at 1,000 mile an hour,
I pull both throttles back,
and the car will go from 1,000 mile an hour
back to around 850 mile an hour.
At this critical point, Rosco will gradually engage
his unique air-brake system...
The first phase of slowing Aussie invader down.
Then I start inching the air brakes.
I hit the button... One, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, and then fully open.
Electrical engineer Barry Fitzsimmons was
involved in constructing these engineering marvels.
The air brakes are extremely important.
They allow us to get away with about a 27-kilometer-long track.
Without them, yes, it would slow down,
but it would take an awful lot longer.
A series of small holes stops the air
from easily sliding over the air brake
by firing the airflow in different directions,
increasing braking efficiency by 30%.
The air doors themselves are extremely robust
because they're gonna be deployed into an airstream
at very high speed.
If one of these air brakes opened without the other,
it would slue the front around dramatically.
So they have to both open in sequence,
and that's achieved by having a single hydraulic ram
connected to the two hinges.
They either both work,
or they both don't work, which is great.
So, that took about a year to design.
Getting these made was...
A beautiful piece of engineering.
Keith and Jenny Lovatt are responsible
for Aussie invader's second phase of braking...
The parachutes.
So, we would initially expect to drop the main high-speed chute
out at around 800 mile an hour.
It'll probably work all the way down to 600 mile an hour.
You'll see that the top is vented,
where it's allowing the air to go through.
This is very similar to what you see
in a space shuttle landing or a space capsule coming down.
The chute not only acts as a brake.
Its length also helps maintain a straight course.
If the car started, at high speed,
to get sideways, pull the chute out,
and this will suddenly give it greater stability,
because it, effectively, makes the car
from its 40-odd feet now to over 120 feet,
because the parachute will be well back there.
It's like a sea anchor.
It'll help pull things into line.
Three, two, one. Fire.
Drogue guns have been developed
to launch the chutes.
Deployment takes just a quarter of a second.
Following the high-speed chute,
a second, low-speed parachute is triggered
at around 400 miles per hour,
further decelerating Aussie invader.
With the end of its 15-mile run in sight,
the final system,
a set of rear-mounted disc brakes,
can then be engaged.
If he can get the car down to 250 mile an hour
before he uses the wheel brakes,
that would be best simply because
it's wear and tear on the car.
We expect to run it a number of times
to get up to a speed record.
Through ambitious design
and innovative engineering,
Aussie invader may one day change land-speed history...
The whole car makes me very, very proud
because is like a 10-years accumulation
of seeing it all come together.
You stand back and think, "god, did we really do that?"
Overcoming extreme challenges
to take on the seemingly impossible.
I've spent my lifetime putting it all together,
and I can't wait to sit my bum in that car
and light the wick.
By building on the work of the pioneers of the past...
Whoa!
Adapting and breaking the mold themselves...
The car has come of age.
I believe it's gonna set the world on fire,
gonna be the first car in the world history
to go 1,000 miles an hour.
The engineers are succeeding
in making the impossible possible.