Bloodhound SSC Steering Wheel

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

I was looking through all the excellent challenge entries and decided to take a different approach. I once read an article about the cockpit engineers at Embraer. Embraer are famous for their "ram's head" control yolks. They decided on this design because they found out through various studies that during a stressful situation, if your hands are tilted in at 45 degrees with thumbs up, any physical strain is virtually eliminated. Since driving a car at speeds greater than Mach 1 would be stressful to anyone, I figured a wheel that incorporated this would be appropriate. Plus, with the hands tilted in like that, you have better mechanical advantage on the wheel itself (the reason they try to teach you to keep your hands at 10 and 2 when driving a regular car).

For rocket throttle control, the right handle is used. You use your right index finger to hold down the red button to activate the rocket. You then twist the handle for throttle control much like a motorcycle, but twisting away from you will increase the thrust. Releasing the button will shut the rocket down.

The left handle has your brakes and chute control. I figured airbrakes might need variable control, so I fashioned a paddle control just behind the driver's fingers. He could reach his fingers forward for control. The paddle rotates with the wheel, so the driver would never need to remove his hand from the wheel. For the chute, a button is embedded in the left wheel handle where the rocket control is on the right, but this button would have a much heavier spring in it to safeguard against accidental deployment. I wanted to keep the button under the driver's finger at all times so that there would be an absolute minimum amount of time between notcing a problem and deploying the chute. The backup button is on top of the left handle and is protected by a chrome lever that needs to be flipped up before the deployment button is pushed. Both chute buttons can be activated without removing your hands from the wheel.

I assume the wheel would be placed similiarly to where most racecards have their wheels placed- high, and close to the driver, so I added a transparent HUD on top of the wheel to show basic turbine gauge readings. The center display shows in very big letters the rocketet percentage of thrust. The two switches on the bottom activate the electrical system (MASTER), and the arming switch for the rocket engines.

The wheel's structure is made of titanium and then wrapped in carbon fiber. I didn't include a mating device for the wheel to the steering column because, frankly, I didn't know if it were to be removable or not. I'm assuming it is fixed. I hope you like it!