August 9th, 2008

About

Welcome to theBloomingPoint.com

The technical info section for theBloomingPoint challenge.

First off, in case you were wondering what theBloomingPoint challenge is, well it’s a project to realise a 25+ year desire to design, build and race a HPV, or Human Powered Vehicle, and to try and break a number of World Records.

The three main World Records we will be aiming to break are the Land Speed Record for HPV’s, measured over 200 meters from a flying start. Plus two endurance based records, one for the further distance travelled in 1 hour, the other is the further distance travelled in 24 hour by a single person.

The first target to try and break, after designing and building the vehicle, will be the UK Land Speed Record. This is due to basic physics and the rate at which a human can produce enough energy per minute to accelerate both themselves and the vehicle to its maximum speed, plus the limited length of run up available in the UK as the runway at RAF Bentwater is only 1.3 miles long. The actually World Land Speed Record will have to be broken at a place called Battle Mountain in Nevada, USA, which has a run up which is nearly 6 miles long.

Hopefully the two endurance World Records will be able to be broken at either 1.47 mile oval at Rockingham Speedway, Northamptonshire or the 2 mile bowl at Millbrook Proving Ground, Bedfordshire. Also, as the current World 24 hours record is 647 miles or 1041.25km, the attempt at the 24 hours World Record will also mean having to break the 1 Mega Meter (1,000,000) World Record, which currently stands at 23 hours 2 minutes.

The challenge is to have the vehicle ready for its first attempt on the UK Land Speed Record in the summer of 2009, with its first trip, and attempt on the World Land Speed Record, to Battle Mountain in September 2010, although if we can get enough funding together it time we will try to get to Battle Mountain in time for the 2009 event.

We will also be using this project to raise money for 3 or 4 charities. The main one of which will be the British Heart Foundation, which in 2007 raised over £117 million to help fund both research into heart disease and to fund specialist heart nurses who proved care and support to heart patients and their families.

During the design and build process 10% of any money donated to help fund this project will go to the charities, but during the actually record attempts we will be asking for sponsorship, the faster, or further, we go the more we will raise.

100% of the money raised via the record attempt sponsorships will go to the charities.

So keep checking back on this site to see how we are getting on, and also check out Gareth’s posts for more info on the environmental issues that we will be using this project to promote.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and hope you find this site useful.

Steve