Chinese auto giant Geely this week raced to the rescue of Bristol’s Bloodhound project and got its world land speed record challenge back on track for autumn next year.
Geely, whose parent group owns Volvo cars and the maker of London’s iconic black taxi cabs, was announced as the biggest sponsor so far for the Bloodhound Supersonic Car (SSC), which is being assembled on an industrial estate at Avonmouth. 
The project has been on the skids recently with a major funding shortfall due to a lack of financial backers. Many of its 70 engineers – who are among the best in the world – have been forced to take short-term contracts with other firms while those who stayed have worked without pay for the past 10 months.
Financial details of Geely’s sponsorship have not been made public but Bloodhound project director Richard Noble said the firm was now its largest financial backer “by some margin”.
The agreement has been a turning point for the project, he said, and now meant 70% of the target funding had been reached with the remainder expected to be in place over the coming months.
He said Bloodhound’s financial position before the Geely sponsorship had been “as tough as it gets”.
But he added: “It’s been a very trying time.The British culture is that once you’re struggling financially people tell you to pack up. We’ve been going for nine years and we had to grow at a rate of 50% per annum which is very tough for any business. But we are now back on track and on our way.”
Geely and its parent group Zhejiang Geely Holdings (ZGH), based, in Hangzhou, join a roster of global sponsors that includes aerospace giant Rolls-Royce, UWE Bristol, Lockheed Martin, Rolex and Serco.
As well as financial support, the sponsorship will also bring Geely’s automotive technical know-how to the project and introduce it to a Chinese audience. Geely has four international research and design centres with around half its 20,000 employs trained engineers. It also has universities, further education colleges and technology schools across China with around 40,000 students – 10,000 of whom enter the automotive industry ever year.
ZGH is China’s largest privately owned automotive group and is expected to sell around 700,000 vehicles in the country this year.
The Bloodhound project is being followed in more than 200 countries worldwide as well as being the UK’s largest STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) project in UK schools.
The Geely sponsorship means the Bloodhound SSC car will now undergo trials at Newquay before being shipped to its specially created 14-mile track in South Africa next year where it will attempt to beat the land speed record of 763mph – held by its driver Andy Green.
During negotiations with ZGH over the sponsorship, Bloodhound bosses were helped by Rolls-Royce, whose staff translated documents into Chinese.
