A plumber’s apprentice from Birtle has utterly smashed the world land speed record on the M66 in a white Peugeot van.
The news that Jamie McIntosh, 19 and three quarters, was clocked doing 1,213mph in the outside lane of the M66 on Thursday afternoon has sent the British engineers at the Bloodhound SSC land speed project reeling.
“We’ve spent millions of pounds and a decade designing a car that can break the sound barrier.” Said Bloodhound Technical Director, Mark Chapman. “We’ve stuck a massive jet engine on the car and were also going to put a rocket in it.”
“And all this time we should have been designing a van. This is going to set us back years, it’s really back to the drawing board for everybody.”
The engineers at Bloodhound have subsequently bought their own Peugeot Expert Standard BlueHDi and are trying to reverse engineer at least some of the technology from the 1.6 diesel engine in an attempt to get their own record breaking efforts back on track.
“We really need to know whether or not the secret lies in the engineering of the van itself or whether or not we just need to replace the former Tornado pilot Wing Commander Andy Green with a plumber’s apprentice to get the bloody thing to go a bit quicker.”
Jamie McIntosh from Speedy Plumbers told us: “I didn’t think I was going that fast. I was eating a sandwich and doing some stuff on Snapchat at the time so I wasn’t really paying that much attention to how fast I was going.”
“It’s nice to have achieved something I suppose.”
Andy Green is said to be furious to have been knocked out of the record books.
