The Assassin (Sha ren zhe Tang Zhan)

This time on "Impossible Engineering,"

a rocket-powered speed machine...

It's the pinnacle of all land-speed cars.

Supersonic engineering...

It's designed to produce 200,000 horsepower.

That's more power than the entire grid

of a formula one race.

And the pioneering historic innovations...

It's incredible to think this was once

the fastest car in the world.

Oh! My god.

Similar to what Fritz did with the rocket car.

That made the impossible possible.

captions paid for by discovery communications

The black rock desert,

a barren wilderness in Nevada...

The setting for one of the most awesome challenges

known to mankind...

The land speed record...

engineering at its most extreme...

which, in 1997, took the British Thrustssc

to a mind-blowing 763 miles per hour...

A record that has

remained untouched for over two decades.

Yeah!

But now, in Perth, Australia,

an ambitious team is building a car that they believe

will one day re-write history...

The Aussie invader.

Well, here she is,

soon to be the world's fastest car...

Aussie invader 5r.

55 feet in length, 6 1/2 ton in weight.

Very, very powerful...

200,000 horsepower, 62,000 pound of thrust.

This extraordinary machine

is the culmination of a life's work

for inventor and driver Rosco McGlashan.

Well, I believe this car is the most innovative

land-speed car ever conceived.

This baby here is a solution to going very, very fast.

This car... it's perfect.

It got everything in the right place.

It's a revelation.

To create a car as fast as a speeding bullet

requires NASA-like technology.

Keith and Jenny Lovatt are part of the team

striving to create this engineering first.

This is absolutely one of the most exciting

high-speed car projects in the world.

The dynamics of the car do share with aerospace...

The rocket engine, the wheel speeds.

Even the paint finish on the car has to be able

to cope with super-high speeds.

Aussie invader's futuristic bodywork

has just been completed.

The team is now working on its propulsion system.

But this will not only have to break the land speed record.

Incredibly, Rosco has another

audacious goal in his sights.

The next big thing that we want to achieve

in the land speed record is

what we say is the holy grail of auto racing...

1,000 mile an hour.

To achieve 1,000 mile an hour in a car,

or 1.4 mach, is impossible,

and that's why we're doing it.

We love it.

This is a one-off, absolute unique car.

Aussie invader 5r is the ultimate of cars.

Aussie invader is constructed around

a unique steel tube.

Two huge fuel tanks feed

a liquid-propellant rocket engine powerful enough

to break the sound barrier in 15 seconds...

Before state-of-the-art air brakes

and a parachute system

bring this horizontal rocket to a halt

at the end of its 15-mile run.

- That's good here. Yep. - 12-volt.

But as this pioneering team

looks to enter the unknown,

the challenges are immense.

How is it possible to create fighter-jet performance

on four wheels?

To make a car go as fast as we want to go,

which is 1.4 mach, you need a heap of power.

How do you ensure

Aussie invader won't break apart?

It has to be made

to withstand some extreme forces.

1,000 miles an hour,

with wheels turning at 10,000 R.P.M.,

strange things happen.

And how can it safely slow down

from supersonic speeds?

It has been a challenge

to develop a braking system for the car

because there is no book that tells us

what we need to do.

The fact that few have even attempted

to travel this fast on land

poses, perhaps, the biggest problem.

I think that three times as many people

have gone to the moon

than have gone 600 mile an hour in a car.

So, that's a pretty amazing thing to achieve.

So, how do you even know what shape to build?

A lot of people say to me,

"how do you make a car go 1,000 mile an hour?

What's the difference between a 1,000-mile-an-hour car

and my road car?"

Obviously, the aerodynamics,

making the car stay on the ground...

It's just got to have the right load

on the ground at all times.

And the aerodynamics are, possibly,

the major thing to get right.

For inspiration,

the team looks to an innovator of the past,

Belgian car manufacturer Camille Jenatzy.

Like Aussie invader, he had to come up

with something completely different.

Andrew Steele has come

to the Ccité de l'automobile in Mulhouse, France,

to get up to speed with Jenatzy's inspired solution...

a totally new breed of car.

This is a full-size replica

of that incredible vehicle.

It's called la jamais contente,

which means "the never satisfied."

And it was a revolution in automotive engineering.

This was the first-ever car

specifically designed to break the land speed record.

And in 1899, it did just that,

breaking the 62-mile-per-hour record.

Here we go!

The Jamais Contente's bullet-like design

broke the mold of automobile-era dynamics,

the kind of forward thinking

that Aussie invader will have to adopt.

What a machine.

In Perth, a team of engineers

is constructing a one-of-a-kind car

that they hope could reach

an earth-shattering 1,000 miles per hour.

Like Camille Jenatzy,

inventor and driver Rosco McGlashan's life

is focused on one thing.

The land-speed record has been something

that I've wanted to achieve all my life.

Quit school at 12 years of age to set the record,

and here I am, many, many years later,

still chasing that elusive goal.

Rosco's quest for speed

began with homemade go-karts.

As an adult, he upped the ante.

Raced things like rocket-powered motorcycles,

jet dragsters...

A lot of stuff.

In the 1990s,

Rosco would earn himself legendary status

as he targeted the Australian land speed record.

Initially, what we wanted to do is,

I want to claim the title of fastest Aussie on earth,

and it took us some time to do that.

- Yeah. How you doing, mate? - Good, mate.

And that looked really spectacular.

- Looked really beautiful. - It looks good, man.

Wasn't till '94 that we actually set the record

at 500 mile an hour.

The average speed for the two runs was

801.3 kilometers per hour.

We can bring the champagne.

So, we've got it, guys! We've got it!

Now he believes his new, groundbreaking design

has the potential to become the fastest car on the planet.

As with Jenatzy's bullet-like innovation,

the starting point for Rosco is creating the right shape.

I thought, "if you want to go to the moon,

you start off with a cylindrical object,

have a point at the top of it, rocket motor in the bum,

pressure vessels all the way through,

and you sit under the point at the top."

Well, obviously, in a car,

we want to be sitting on the center of gravity.

So, center of gravity is about here,

and we're sitting right behind it.

So we know what the car's doing.

So, obviously, if the front of the car's moving,

if the back's moving, we want to know about it.

Aussie invader's nose is angled down to avoid lift.

To house the rocket's huge fuel tanks,

a unique 40-foot-long steel tube

forms the car's colossal front cylinder.

What we call the mainframe is a pipe, if you like.

It's been dimpled to get

the right boundary layer, airflow over it,

and if you measure this car

from the front axle to the back axle,