Engineers designing the world's fastest car believe they now have a solution to keep the vehicle flat on the ground.

世界上最快的汽车的设计工程师确信他们已经找到使车辆与地面持平的解决方法。

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The aero solution is a major milestone in Bloodhound's design

Bloodhound SSC is being built to smash（打破，粉碎） the world land speed record by topping 1,000mph (1,610km/h).

Initial iterations（迭代次数，反复） of the car's aerodynamic（空气动力学的） shape produced dangerous amounts of lift at the vehicle's rear（背面） .

But the latest modelling work indicates the team has finally found a stable configuration², allowing the project to push ahead with other design areas.

"At Mach 1.3, we've close to zero lift which is where we wanted to be," said John Piper, Bloodhound's technical director.

"Up until this point, we've had some big issues. We've had lift as high as 12 tonnes, and when you consider the car is six-and-a-half tonnes at its heaviest - that amount of lift is enough to make the car fly," he told BBC News.

"We're very close now to fixing the exterior³ aero surface, which really opens the floodgates to the rest of the design work to really get going."

Computing⁴ power

By playing with the position and shape of key elements of the car's rear end, the design team has now found the best way to manage the shockwave passing around and under the vehicle as it goes supersonic（超音速的） .

The solution is a major milestone in Bloodhound's design.

The effort has been assisted greatly by project sponsor Intel. It brought immense computing power to bear on the lift problem.

Before Intel's intervention⁵, the design team had worked through 11 different "architectures" in 18 months. The latest modelling work run on Intel's network investigated 55 configurations⁶ in just eight weeks.

To claim the world land speed record, Bloodhound will have to better the mark of 763mph (1,228km/h) set by the Thrust SuperSonic Car in 1997.

It will be powered by a combination of a hybrid⁷ rocket and a jet engine from a Eurofighter-Typhoon.

Three who worked on Thrust are also engaged in the Bloodhound project, including driver Wing Cmdr Andy Green, project director Richard Noble and chief aerodynamicist Ron Ayres.

They plan to mount their assault on the record in late 2011, driving across a dried up lakebed known as Hakskeen Pan, in the Northern Cape⁸ of South Africa.