Richard Noble OBE

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.

Obviously 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 2004-2006

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 with the aim of breaking 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.

He took the British record in 1980 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

Over twenty years on, the ThrustSSC record remains unchallenged.

In October 2017, Green, Noble and their team hope to beat the current record in the Bloodhound Supersonic Car.

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 is able to speak on a very wide range of business related topics.

Key to the presentations are 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.