Bloodhound supersonic car Archives

Selling personal registration plates for cars is big business here in the UK with the DVLA raising many millions of pounds each year by auctioning cherished plates as they are also sometimes referred to. Yes, of course you can buy such number plates for a few hundred pounds but equally the most sought after combinations of letters and numbers can fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds and can often be seen on the front and reverse of expensive, executive cars.

So, let’s have a look at the ten most expensive personal number plates that have been sold in the UK but in reverse order: –

10th – Registration Number “1 O” – Sale Price £210,242

In 2009 this number plate was sold at a Northampton auction for the above price to an anonymous buyer. It would be interesting to get an estimate as to how much such a plate would fetch today as it would appear to be a desirable one as it has so few characters.

9th – Registration Number “K1 NGS” – Sale Price £231,000

This was sold way back in 1993 when even then it went for a considerable sum of money. It would appear to be fit for a car driven by royalty and is believed to have been bought by an Arabian Sultan.

8th – Registration Number “1 RH” – Sale Price £247,000

Back in 2006 this sought after plate achieved an excellent sale price being purchased by Robert Harverson who is a retired businessman.

7th – Registration Number “5I NGH” – Sale Price £254,000

This plate was bought in 2006 by a Sikh gentleman. This is no doubt an extremely desirable plate and ten years later who knows what it might fetch if it were to be auctioned now.

6th – Registration Number “VIP 1” – Sale Price £285,000

If you are a football fan then you will have heard of Roman Abramovich. He is the owner of Chelsea Football Club that play in the Premiership and he is believed to be a Russian multi-billionaire. So, when he purchased the above plate in 2006 it may have been a modest investment on his part.

5th – Registration Number “M 1” – Sale Price £331,500

In 2006, this plate was purchased by a businessman called Mike McComb who sold a mobile phone business for many millions of pounds.

4th – Registration Number “1 D” – Sale Price £352,000

Now you may think this plate was owned by a member of the pop group One Direction but this is not the case. In 2009, the purchaser was a businessman from Lebanon.

3rd – Registration Number “S 1” – Sale Price £404,000

The above plate is thought to be the first one ever registered to someone from Scotland. It was purchased anonymously in 2008 by a person who, apparently, had claimed that he or she was going to put it on their Skoda.

2nd – Registration Number “F 1” –Sale Price £440,000

No, this plate is not owned by Lewis Hamilton, any other Formula 1 racing driver or Bernie Eccleston for that matter. It was purchased in 2008 by a businessman from Bradford in West Yorkshire who has it on his extremely powerful and expensive motor vehicle – a Mercedes-Benz SLR Mclaren.

1st – Registration Number “25 O” –Sale Price £518,000

In 2014, the above cherished number plate was purchased by John Collins who deals in Ferraris. The plate adorns a Ferrari 250 SWB, a beautiful classic sports car, that was once owned by Eric Clapton.

So, as you can see, the £500,000 figure that someone has been prepared to pay for a personal number plate for a car has been exceeded here in the UK. How long will it be before we see a personalized number plate sell for £1 million in this country?

The Bloodhound supersonic car, that has taken around eight years to design and build, is being put on show for a few days in London. It has been manufactured in Bristol with a view to breaking the land speed record in 2017 and hopes to achieve a speed of over 1,000mph over a dry lakebed track that is twelve miles in length and two miles wide in South Africa at Hakskeen Pan.

The current land speed record was set back on the 15th October 1997 by Thrust SSC when a speed of 763mph was achieved in Nevada at the Black Rock Desert. The driver of the vehicle at that time was Wing Commander Andy Green and he is expected to be in the seat of the Bloodhound when it attempts to break the record.

In 2016, it is to start testing runs at Newquay Cornwall Airport at speeds of around 200mph to make sure that the software and electrical systems are all functioning correctly. It will then be taken to South Africa for further testing where it is hoped that it will get up to 800mph.

To help this supersonic car reach a record breaking speed it will use a combination of a Rolls-Royce Eurofighter Typhoon EJ200 jet engine, a Jaguar V8 engine and a rocket motor from Nammo of Norway to achieve 135,000 thrust horsepower. It should be capable of covering one mile in a mere 3.6 seconds and hopes to reach 1,000mph in just 55 seconds.

Bloodhound is 44 feet long, 8.2 feet wide and 9.8 feet high. The cockpit has been manufactured incorporating layers of carbon fibre to provide as safe an environment for Andy Green as possible. It has a 6.5 feet high tail fin to give it added stability. It has three separate braking systems and hundreds of sensors that will enable the technicians to monitor its performance. The solid wheels are made of aluminum revolving at 4 x quicker than those on a Formula One racing car. The floor has been made with steel to cope with the dust from the ground that could be travelling at 1,000mph as the particles hit the underneath of the vehicle.

The car is being displayed at London’s Canary Wharf. However, tickets to view the Bloodhound have been sold out well in advance.

AIB Insurance wishes those involved in the project every success in their endeavour to break the land speed record in 2017.