For a man whose professional life revolves around speed, Andy Green is a relatively relaxed individual. His two great passions are sailing and gliding; two activities that rely on skill to extract the most out of natural conditions.
"You ask me how I get my thrills outside work? I'm not sure I need to. There's something enormously satisfying about working with the elements. It's also a great teaching environment because when you take a small boat and a small team of people, there's the discipline, there's the technical judgement and the background skills of taking a group of people across the Channel and back.
"A lot of bits need to happen to do that safely, and a lot of people learn a lot about themselves and each other when they work together as a small team in a cramped environment while they're doing that."
He also has a different relationship with speed when it comes to driving on the road. His licence is clean, and he drives a 2005 Volkswagen Golf with an astronomical number of miles on the clock.
"First of all, driving fast for me doesn't feel very fast. Second of all, everyone I meet asks if I have any points on my licence, so it's just my own personal satisfaction of being able to say 'no' that makes me very careful about it.
"It really comes down to whether speed is appropriate for the conditions. If you're on a 20km-long, 1.1km-wide surface that 300 people have spent three years clearing, then 100mph feels like you're standing still. That's a tenth of the speed we intend going there, and providing you've done all the sensible things like make sure the car is ready for it, make sure the track is clear. Taking all of that as acceptable, boy does it feel sensible. Having said that, 30mph in heavy traffic would be stupid."
This past year, Green was invited by Bentley to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah in the United States to put the Mulsanne through its paces.
"The Bentley plan was to take this out to maximum speed. The book speed of this car on the test track, flat out, is 290kph. Bonneville is 1,200m above sea level, so it's very thin air. It was also very hot, so you lose a lot of power. It's also a salt flat: the salt is a crust sitting on a wet clay surface, so in the afternoon it gets very damp.
"I told the guys to not expect 290kph and that if we got 250 we'd have done well. What we actually did was get to 300. The car coped so well with the environment. I was enormously surprised.
"I was also quite nervous. One of the key things when you're running at very high speeds is the tyres. If a tyre bursts at 300kph, you're in a very bad place. People spend months preparing their cars to run at these speeds. Bentley drove the car from the showroom, across the States, to the salt flats – and when they got there, they increase the tyre pressures by 0.6 of a bar and said that the car was ready to go.
"I thought: they clearly don't know what it takes, they don't understand why this is difficult. So we did some slow speed tests. I was wrong, and the engineers were right. We had the live tyre pressures up all the time, because tyres fail when they overheat. When they overheat, the pressures go up. I was watching them all the time and almost no response, not even at 300kph. It's an astonishing car."
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