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It's difficult to imagine exactly how fast 1,000mph is.

But try this; if you were up in the stand at Wembley Stadium, and an object flew into the arena at 1,000mph before exiting at the other end, if you blinked at the wrong moment, in the 300 milliseconds it would take you to close and reopen your eyes, you would completely miss it.

The air is actually so dense at ground level that no supersonic jet fighter in the world is capable of flying as fast as 1,000mph in low altitude. If you were to fire a Magnum 357 handgun after an object travelling at this speed - 232mph faster than the speed of sound - the object would actually accelerate away from the speeding bullet.

The object we're talking about is Bloodhound SSC, the new super sonic car from the British team who back in 1997 twice broke the land speed record with the jet-powered Thrust SSC.

In the shadow of Brunel's SS Great Britain in Bristol, we visited the Bloodhound Technical Centre to find out more about the car, the tech inside it and the incredible record attempt to come.

The car

In October 1997, Thrust SSC became the first car to break the sound barrier, and achieved a record ground speed of 763mph. It increased the world land speed record by 130mph - a 20 per cent bump - the biggest step forward in land speed history.

In 2013, the same team intends to extend the record they set by a further 31 per cent all the way up to a barely-conceivable 1,000mph. So how is this going to be achieved?

The Bloodhound SSC car itself has to be seen up close to be fully appreciated.

It's 12.8 metres long, 2.8 metres tall, weighs nearly 6.5 tonnes when fully fuelled and has a turning circle of 120 metres.

Image credit: Curventa and Siemens

The 900mm-diameter wheels weigh 100Kg each, and at maximum speed will be turning 167 times per second, while undergoing forces in excess of 50,000g - or 50,000 times the force of gravity.

Image credit: Curventa and Siemens

So how exactly is this car going to reach speeds of over 1,000mph? One of Bloodhound SSC's engineering leads, James Painter, explains:

"We've essentially got two main propulsion devices on board and three engines in total. There's a rocket which is a bespoke piece of kit which was developed for this specific purpose, and we've got an EJ200 jet engine which basically comes out the back of a Eurofighter Typhoon and those two together produce something in the order of 180 F1 engines worth of power - about 133,000 horse power.

"There's also a Cosworth F1 engine in the back of the car which we use to supply the rocket with fuel at a rate of 50Kg per second. So essentially we've got a Formula One engine as a fuel pump!"

COSWORTH:The F1 engine is used only to pump rocket fuel

Together, the jet engine and the rocket provide 45,000lbs of thrust, enough to propel the car from a standing start, up to 1,000mph - possibly beyond - and back to zero again in just 100 seconds. It will take the car just 40 seconds to reach 1,000Mph, burning 1.5 tonnes of fuel in the process.

One 10-mile run of Bloodhound uses the same amount of energy as required to light the Singapore Grand Prix night-event for 20 minutes.

EJ200:The jet engine comes from a Eurofighter Typhoon

"That sounds like we're burning an awful lot of fuel," quips Painter, "but we're not doing that many runs in total, and as a complete project the calculations are that we are the equivalent of three and a half lactating cows, in terms of the amount of greenhouse gasses that we'll be releasing."

Yes, that's three and a half lactating cows. At this point, it's unclear whether Bloodhound's project managers are considering euthanising three and a half lactating cows in order to offset the project's carbon footprint, but we reckon it might be worth a punt.