Richard Noble OBE is a World Speed Record Breaker and Motivational Business Speaker
Against a background of today’s low-risk culture, Richard Noble specialises in developing high-risk ventures.
Not all of them can be successful, but the Thrust2 programme which brought the World Land Speed Record back to Britain in 1983 and the ThrustSSC first-ever supersonic land speed record programme are the best known.
Richard Noble’s other projects include the ARV Super2 light aircraft, the Atlantic Sprinter Blue Riband Contender, the Farnborough F1 Aircraft – the first point to point taxi aircraft and the JCB DieselMax Diesel Streamliner.
At a very young age, Noble was inspired by John Cobb whom he had seen racing his boat Crusader on Loch Ness only weeks before he died during an attempt on the water speed record.
Richard set to work to build his own series of jet-propelled cars to break speed records.
Project Thrust
Richard Noble founded Project Thrust in 1974.
Working entirely alone and self-taught, he assembled Thrust 1 in the garage of his home in Surrey.
Unfortunately, Thrust 1 came to a sticky end in 1977 when a wheel bearing failed as Richard was roaring up the runway of RAF Fairford at 200mph. The car flipped over three times and was a right-off, but Richard himself was unhurt.
Richard brought in outside help to construct Thrust 2. Funding was, however, more difficult.
His determination and various tactics paid off, and he managed to secure £1.7m worth of sponsorship from 200 British companies.
During 1980, Noble took the British record at RAF Greenham Common.
Richard then travelled to Bonneville Salt Flats in an attempt to capture the world record. But there was a series of setbacks. Back in Britain, Richard crashed Thrust 2, once again at 200mph, during a test run. It was not until 1983 that the car was ready again and a site was located that was not prone to flooding. On the vast expanse of the Black Rock desert, Richard took the world record reaching 633mph.
To achieve the supersonic record, Richard handed over responsibility for driving the new ThrustSSC to Squadron Leader Andy Green.
On 15th October 1997 in ThrustSSC, Andy Green reached 763.035 miles per hour – the first supersonic record.
Bloodhound SCC and Bloodhound LSR
Over twenty years on, the ThrustSSC record remains unchallenged.
Born in 2008, originally named the Bloodhound SCC project, the Bloodhound LSR is a British land vehicle intended to travel at supersonic speeds. Its goal is to match or exceed 1,000 miles per hour, achieving a new world land speed record.
With advances in engineering design, materials and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) since the last record was broken, mean the Bloodhound team can be confident of breaking the record.
The project is helping to push boundaries and demonstrate pioneering new technologies.
Take Risk!
Noble has had the ambition all his adult life to see Britain excel in engineering on the world stage. He has sought to play his part in this not just with spectacular efforts in the highly insecure world of record-breaking on land and on water but also in creating innovative new aircraft.
In Richard’s book – Take Risk! he tells the extraordinary stories of his 11 projects in record-breaking and aviation that all saw people and companies go out of their way to join him in his exciting endeavours – and take risk!
Richard Noble Motivational Speaker:
Richard Noble has been a regular speaker at corporate conferences across the globe with over 650 appearances in the last 25 years.
Because of the wide range of activities involved in the projects and the extraordinary approaches needed to overcome the sceptics and cynics, Richard can speak on a vast array of business-related topics.
Key to the presentations is the essential will to win through to success and the extraordinary levels of risk, stress pressure and struggle of the latest counter-culture programmes.
Richard Noble’s presentations are deeply thought-provoking, are presented at a fast pace and can feature amazing video inserts.
The idea is to inspire the audience to realise that their true potential is likely to be way ahead of their current levels of personal ambition and to encourage original thought, action and to understand true teamwork.
