it people who watch it, they love it and will probably make sure that ben ta kes and will probably make sure that ben takes the title! thank you so much for being with us. natasha henry. that's a look ahead to the bbc sports personality of the year award. let's take a look at the weather now. hello, there. for some of us, there's been a bit of snow overnight, particularly across the high ground in the north, but we've also seen a bit of snow in some of the showers, pushing right down towards the sea level in parts of north—east england. that was the scene to start the day in redcar and cleveland. today, though, is a day of sunshine and blustery showers, the showers frequent across southern coastal counties of england, wales and through scotland's central belt, where across some of the higher elevations, we could still have a bit of winteriness around. a cold day for northern areas, temperatures for most of england and wales between 7 and 9 but perhaps feeling a little bit cooler than that given the strength of the winds. overnight, showers continue to work in. again, some of them could be wintry at times, a bit of snow over the high ground.

cold enough for some frost across the north but for most of england and wales, temperatures between temperatures between 3 and 6 celsius. further showers to come, then, through monday, but bigger gaps between the showers and a bit more in the way of sunshine. the exception to that theme, western scotland, where there will be some rain and even some snow pushing into western areas. hello this is bbc news with ben brown. the headlines: now on bbc news. bloodhound and its driver andy green are hoping to smash the current land speed record. andrew harding has been given exclusive access as the car is put through its paces. well, the thing about the land speed record is it is the last of the amateur corinthian sports. it is done purely for the love, the fascination of it. some people argue, well, the old cars are no more, but forget it's a car, we are pushing the boundaries of engineering to its absolute limit.

every day i go, "why are we doing this?" it may be the last land speed record as we know it. this is a story about stubbornness and ingenuity, and, yes, about speed, too. it's the story of a quest to design and build the world's fastest car, and then to find a place flat enough, long enough, to actually drive it. there are not many spots on this particular planet suitable for racing faster than the speed of sound. you can't just pick a straight stretch of road. at 500, 700, 900 miles an hour, the wheels would rip apart mere tarmac, which is why we have come to a remote corner of south africa, close to the borders

of botswana and namibia, to a place called the hakskeen pan, on the southern edge of the giant kalahari desert. so here we are, we've come to the hakskeen pan. beautiful, flat, miles and miles of dried mud, this lake bed, surrounded by these low, dark, red—brown hills. a stunningly beautiful place. we're 800 metres above sea level here, a lake bed of mud and salt that floods briefly, once every year or two, and those white tents on the lake edge, well, think of them as ground control. there is something a bit mission—to—mars—like about this whole project. imagine trying to do something

as complicated as this in a climate like this. today, it's about 35 degrees centigrade. yesterday, it was touching a0. but there they are. at the centre of it, the bloodhound, flown out in pieces from the uk and now being reassembled. the aim, this year, to test the car at speeds beyond 600mph. yeah, we've got a whole range of people, and that's key, it's getting the right people. but you've got formula 1 mechanics, you've got aviation engineers, military, non—military, fabrication, welding, milling, you know, all the skills we need to keep this car going. yeah, it's satisfying to be part of a project that is this unique. you know, there's not many people on the planet doing this sort of thing.

i'm in heaven, doing what i want to do. fiddling around, trying to make things work? yeah, fiddling around, trying to make things work, helping the lads out if things don't work, making things for them. as for the driver, if you could invent someone with the right credentials to steer the bloodhound towards 1,000mph, andy green might be what you would end up with. 0xford mathematician, raf fighter pilot, a character of almost fanatical focus. i'm guessing you're not a superstitious person? you'd be guessing right. you don't have any rituals? yeah — good preparation. that's always a ritual that's worked for me in the past. but behind that cool exterior, lurks a fire and a salesman. bloodhound is the first high—speed straight—line racing car of the digital age. we can now tell a story that nobody has managed to tell before in a way that nobody has told it. the youtube generation, the power of the internet, we can actually share the engineering adventure and the fascination of the science and technology with a global audience, literally conduct an engineering experiment,

how to build a supersonic car, how to try and get it up to 1,000mph, and share that with the biggest online audience in history. and inspire generations of young people around the world about the science and technology that's going to build their low—carbon world of the future. green is not new to this unusual business. that's him, back in 1995, being selected to drive another british vehicle, the thrust supersonic car. two years later, thrust ssc accelerated across the black rock desert in nevada, usa. at the time, no—one had ever broken the sound barrier in a car. 0h! you could hear the team's tension. then they listened out for the sound of success.

boom. yeah! a sonic boom. green had been clocked going 763mph, a new world record, set in 1997 and still unbeaten. but for how much longer? today, green has what he insists is a significantly faster car. this is where i operate the carfrom. as the driver, i'm looking after the steering, monitoring the engines, the electronics, the hydraulics, the brakes, the parachutes, everything is controlled from in there. that is the nerve centre of the car. when i am driving it, it feels unbelievably fast. the ground just gets faster and faster and faster through 300, 400, 500mph, and itjust keeps coming. the wheels are made from solid aluminium. they're designed to rotate 170 times a second and survive forces of 50,000 times the force of gravity at the wheel rim. the reason we have to use solid

wheels, there is no kind of rubber tyre ever created that will survive that kind of load. the only way to reach 1,000mph is to use the best technology from everywhere we can find it, including the jet engine. the car is powered by a combination of a jet engine this year, and jet and rocket next year. the jet engine we have is the rolls—royce ej—200, the eurofighter typhoon engine, the most high—powered, sophisticated, and most importantly for me, the safestjet engine in the history of military aviation. yes, you heard that right. powered by a fighter plane'sjet engine, and, next year, by a rocket, too, in the slot below, briefly providing more thrust than an aircraft carrier. so, as you get faster, the main force you're fighting against is the drag. the drag is proportional to the square of the speed, which means it gets more and more of a problem, and in orderfor this

car to get a lot faster than the previous car that had two jet engines, you need more power, you need more thrust, and the way to get that is to add a rocket into the car. so why race it here, why africa? well, for a start, the old salt flats in the nevada desert are getting worn out through overuse. there is a small handful of places where you can actually try and attempt the outright world land speed record. typically, north america, the bonneville salt flats and the black rock desert are where it has all happened, for the last four or five decades. but we wanted to see if there was actually somewhere better. now, we were very lucky, we got the support of swansea university, to actually search the whole globe. for the first time ever, to actually do a full geo remote sensing survey to try and find a place that was flat enough and long enough, and also flooded regularly, to actually repair and heal the surface,

so it remained a smooth, dry lake bed. how many places like that were there in the world of 10—15 miles in length? and swansea produced a map of all the places that might be viable. we then spent a lot of time with google earth and a lot of time looking at notjust the surface itself, the weather factors, but also all the other bits, how do you get there, what is the geopolitical situation like there? by the time we had been through all that, we finished up with a list of a couple of dozen that i went to visit. this was the best place i saw anywhere in the world. but the best place in the world still needed a little tidying up. more than a little. the flat mud of the hakskeen pan still had some rocks in it. every single one of these has been dug out by hand by one of the local people. every single one of these was embedded and stuck in the surface, so it's notjust a case of walking along

and picking them up. they've gone along with tools, dug each bit out, put it in a bucket, which goes into a wheelbarrow, which goes out into a pile, which gets picked up by a tipper truck, which then gets brought here to one of 25, 30 different piles, all the way around hakskeen pan, of debris like this. having measured and estimated, this is one of the small piles, there is something like 16,000 tonnes of stones, that is 16 million kilogrammes of this stuff, that has been picked up. some big chunks, an awful lot of it dug out by hand, year after year, out here in the burning sun, as they prepare the world's best ever straight—line racing track. the sheer physical effort and the belief to keep on doing this, that one day the desert would be good enough and that bloodhound would be here, it has been a truly extraordinary thing to watch. aand when bloodhound achieves the world land speed record, so much of the credit is going to go to the local communities, and to the northern cape government for having that belief and creating this amazing racetrack.

with a clear track, the tests can finally begin. one of those who helped remove the rocks, ricardo botha, is now a safety marshal. radio: marshall six to control. i spotted some part on the track. the bloodhound can cope with dust, but anything bigger, rubbish, or perhaps a dead animal, could spell disaster. between that and that cone. what? both sides. it's white, it looks like white paper or something. right. it really does make me nervous, because if i am making a wrong call, it can mean the run can be stopped, or anything could happen. one piece, two more pieces. ricardo was right. two pieces of paper are removed. moments later, andy green roars past.

that was awesome, mate, that was awesome, really. just the banging sound, the parachute, the slowing down, everything is awesome. there is something bewitching about watching the bloodhound. for ricardo, being part of this project is not simply a welcome job, it's changed his life. maybe even saved it. i was involved in the gangs, drugs, theft, housebreaking, everything that's illegal, you can say. yes, i have been injail once, yeah, for 20 months, because of some attempted theft out of a motor vehicle. those days are gone now. ricardo left cape town and went to live in this remote village, a slower pace of life now,

except when the bloodhound is on the track. so you've been involved, closely, with the whole process of the bloodhound project. what do you think of the whole idea of trying to go crazily fast in a car? he laughs. from my point of view, it's a mad man's work, but in reality, i think if that's what pushes you, do it. it is nice to be part of a big project like that. i love to work with the guys and they're awesome. what have you learnt from working alongside a team like that? commitment. commitment, and if you put your mind to something, do it. don't hold back. "madman‘s work" ? perhaps. in the midday sun, the team prepares for a string of test runs, aiming to push the car over 600mph,

checking the parachute that slows it down. andy, what's going through your head? um, preparation for the run. we're going to get the car ready, start the engine at the highest temperatures it's run, and then i'm going to do a gentle left—hand turn. we're pointing exactly into wind at the moment, line up with the track, 500mph, double chute deployment. this is something that nobody has ever done on this desert, in this car before, which is why we're all concentrating to get it right. the bloodhound moves into position, half formula 1, half space shuttle. and it there goes. an extraordinary moment. six tonnes of car, and within 30 seconds, it's going to be going at 500 mph. and then, of course, it has to slow down, which is why it needs such a long track.

it'll have to take about five miles to come to a stop. each run is brief and dangerous. green battling against a crosswind to keep the car on track. at the 450, 500 point, there was a big gust of crosswind, ten, big being ten, 15 mph, and the car actually pushed off and yawed quite heavily, as large as anything we've seen so far. even in this modern, computer—driven age, there's still a lot of wind tunnel testing done and ultimately the test pilots go out and find out what the reality is, as opposed to what the computers say. so, we are still in an area where a testing and development so, we are still in an era where a testing and development is about going out to do things

rather than taking a computer prediction and building it right first time. and after every test, a postmortem. that is only about half to two thirds a degree, so it's not a huge amount, but it has yawed into wind, so the car is actually tracking slightly sideways up the track, which suggests coming down this bit, i have stabilised the car in a crosswind which has appeared since further down. i corrected it, then pointed the car down the track, but of course the car is having to generate a bit of side force into the wind, so it's using the aerodynamics of the body and a little bit of the wheel grip, tracking sideways to actually offset the push. you can physically see that in the wheel tracks. on each round, the bloodhound follows a new line, painted on the mud, by a satellite—guided tractor. just redoing that now and then moving to line 18 and putting the short bits in that you're

going to need along the way as well. yep, perfect. good. we couldn't measure the performance of the car against the 1997 black rock desert line because they were hand painted. this, being gps, we can actually look at exactly what the car's doing. so from a performance point of view and a safety point of view, having lines marked like this is absolutely essential. have you always been obsessed with speed? do you feel that you're obsessed with speed? i'm glad you came to the second part of the question. no, i don't feel i'm obsessed with speed. i've been lucky enough to fly jet fighters for the royal air force as a career. best dayjob you could possibly ever have. i have loved every second of it. but the most satisfying jobs i've had in the royal air force have been since i stopped flying, managing operational campaigns in the middle east, out in afghanistan, and more recently, the campaign over libya, protecting hundreds of thousands of people from being shelled by pro—gaddafi forces. also, in the time that i originally

trained as a mathematician and then spent a career working as a fighter pilot, developed a fascination for the science and technology of what makes aeroplanes fly, what makes things work and what makes things like fast cars go fast. so, having something with a blank sheet of paper saying, "build a car, any shape, any design you want, just needs to have four wheels, and you can go and break the land speed record". as a scientist, i find that fascinating. as a fastjet pilot, it's the most intriguing challenge of how do you control the vehicle, not just fast, but safely, at these sorts of speeds and how do you manage the team and the track and everything else? so, building all of that environment so you can run a safe supersonic land speed record, that, as far as i'm concerned, as a mathematician, as a fighter pilot, is my dream job. one thing that's really struck me

about this ludicrously ambitious operation is quite how precarious it feels. there's no multinational backing it for now, no big government stepping in. instead, what you basically have are private individuals, small companies, looking for sponsorship, hustling for backers. and you get the feeling that almost any day, this could collapse. and it nearly did collapse. one year ago, the bloodhound project ran out of money. the administrators were called in, and issued a final appeal for a new investor. it is that now once—in—a—lifetime opportunity, for the right person, the right corporate to come forward and combine it with the investment, that's the key thing, the investment it needs, to give it certainty, to get it over that line. it would be great for britain.

when we went under, i was hopeful that something would happen, something would change and someone would come in and realise we can't lose this project. but we got to the stage where i personally thought that was it, and it was a real shame and i'd even been told the administrators were looking to break the car down and sell the componentsjust to pay some of the debt that needed to be paid. for scrap? for scrap, yeah. the project has tried to go broke so many times, where we're struggling for bits of cash and then a new sponsor would come in, or we'd find a different way of doing things, find some support. it has always been up and down. the trust ssc programme back in the 90s was exactly the same. so, i still had my summer of 1997 head on, that if we keep going, then the one thing we can't be blamed for is giving up. we will keep going and try and find a way, right down to speaking to the bbc to say, please, please get the message out.

this was the start of december. i pitched this as, this is the world's best christmas deal. for the man who has everything, here is something that money can't buy. bloodhound land speed record car as a christmas present, and a land speed record car in a couple of years' time. why wouldn't you want to do that? but then, a yorkshire businessman, an engineer, stepped forward. motivated, he said not so much by the land speed record but by the thought of inspiring a new generation of engineers. this is an expensive hobby. i know it's not a hobby, but...! yeah, so far i've been paying for this, which has got quite expensive over the last few months! but, you know, my view is that i'm looking at it as a business. i guess i'm investing in the project on the basis the project has a value and therefore i can sell that value to cover the costs. and bring the money back in to cover the costs. if i get the money back

or not, i have no idea. probably unlikely. some sponsors? yeah, sponsorship. people want their name on the side of that? yeah, yeah, that's right. but to be fair, if i don't get my money back, it's a great and is there a bit of you that can see these sort of absurdity, the monty python—esque element? every day! every day i go, "why are we doing this?" but this is still an expensive gamble. and the tests aren't going smoothly. the bloodhound's alarm system warns of a potential fire on board. and it might actually be getting very hot in there. yeah, it is. it might be telling us the real truth of, it's really hot in here, you need to look at the temperature shielding around that bit of the bodywork. although it's going off, it may be telling us a real piece of information we need to look at before the next run. and now, a worrying delay,

as the engineers decide they'll have to remove the entire jet engine. if they can't find the fault, that could be it. another all—or—nothing moment. the outside casing's melted, it's gone a bit crispy. you'd expect that at a lot higher temperature, so i think what's happened is, there's been a bit off gas coming through in here and that's what set this off. these systems guys are like, digging deep, doing things they are desperate to do. they're going to be working late tonight. they came in late this morning. working to get this fire wire issue sorted out. tomorrow, try and get the thing put back together again. might creep into monday. but, yeah, the good news is that we should be back up and running again, which is great. fault isolated and fixed, the bloodhound is ready for a final speed test. after weeks of frustration, the target is still 600 mph.

success. 628 mph. on course for the record. now that we've got the baseline of a great car and a great surface, it's time to go faster. so, now it's time to pack up, take the car back to britain, analyse the tests, fix on the rocket and then try to find enough money to come back here to south africa to push this car to its absolute limit.

so, another test completed. more lessons learned. as exciting and dramatic as all this is, you do really get the sense that this is going to be very slow, this entire project. trying to get the car and the shape for it to break the land speed record and then maybe at some point in the future, crossing the 1,000 mph mark. realistically, world record, when? that's an interesting question. i'm reluctant to give out information in terms of where we're at. i don't think we know ourselves yet, to be honest. but certainly 18 months should be possible. there's a lot of things to consider for the next phase of the project. the main thing is funding. we need to get some more sponsors on board to take us to the next level and get some funding in place.

but until we work out how much we need, then we can't really do that. we're doing all this at the same time. we need to design the rocket and get that fitted and make sure we can work out how to operate the rocket safely. the human race has always pushed the boundaries and some people argue, cars are no more but forget it's a car — we are pushing the boundaries of engineering to its absolute limits. is there a bit of you that wonders whether it's going to be worthwhile? absolutely, yeah. it may be the last land speed record as we know it, you know. and so i think that's why i'm also keen to get it, because we're going to push it so far, it becomes out of sensible reach in the modern world, you know. and i guess that's what the ambition is of the project, that if we get that, it will stand almost forever.

hello there. for some of us, a bit of snow overnight, particularly over high ground in the north but we have also seen snow and showers pushing down right toward sea level across parts of north—east england. this was the scene as we started the day in redcar, in cleveland. today there was a day of sunshine and blustery showers. these showers are frequent across southern coastal counties of england, wales and through scotland's central belt where, across higher elevations, we could still have winteriness around. a cold day for northern areas. temperatures for most of england

and wales between seven and nine. perhaps feeling cooler given the strength of winds. overnight, showers continue to work in. again, some of them could be wintry at times. a bit of snow over high ground. cold enough for some frost in the north but for most of england and wales, temperatures between 3 and 6 degrees. showers to come through monday. but bigger gaps between those showers means more in the way of sunshine. the exception to that theme, western scotland, where there will be some rain and even snow pushing into western areas.

this is bbc news. i'm ben brown. the headlines at 11am... jeremy corbyn apologises for his part in labour's performance at the general election — as wigan mp, lisa nandy — becomes one of those hoping to succeed him as party leader. the reason that i'm thinking about it is because we just had the most shattering defeat where you really felt, in towns like mine, like the earth was quaking and we've watched the entire labour base just crumble beneath our feet. as boris johnson prepares for thurday‘s queen speech, the government is to enshrine in law, a commitment to raise spending on the nhs in england. the national health service is the number one focus of this government when it comes to domestic policy.