The Bloodhound has come a long way since they started developing it, in Britain, in 2013.

The goal then was to create a vehicle that would reach speeds of 1 610km/h. That goal has changed a little, and those involved now want to break the current land speed record of 1 228km/h.

That’s still insanely fast – not as fast as the sled that travels at 10 620km/h, but still.

The Bloodhound is a fully realised machine now and it looks quite different from the concept sketches depicting a blue and orange bullet-shaped car, with some saying it resembles a spaceship.

It’s also currently in South Africa, where the Bloodhound Land Speed Record (LSR) team began its high-speed testing programme at Hakskeen Pan in the Northern Cape last week.

Here’s TimesLIVE with what they’ve managed to achieve thus far:

The team has been working hard to evaluate how the car behaves when slowing down and stopping from a number of target speeds, building up to and beyond 800km/h.

“The video footage shows a clean release of the ‘chute behind the car, just one second after I pulled the release lever. The engineering team and I are delighted all the hard work designing the deployment system paid off first time.”

The Bloodhound managed to clock 741,908km/h with driver Andy Green at the wheel.

I’ll let the experts break it down for you:

Exciting stuff, although now the most exciting thing to happen in a meeting between those from the UK and South Africa in the last couple of days.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you even live here?

[source:timeslive]