In the Middle of Nowhere, South Africa Built a Racetrack for 1,000 km/h

There’s a huge stretch of dry, cracked earth in the Northern Cape that, at first glance, doesn’t look particularly remarkable.

No grandstands. No pit buildings. No barriers. No obvious sign that anything important ever happened there.

Just Hakskeen Pan, stretching out towards the horizon near the Namibian border.

But in 2019, this quiet piece of the Kalahari became the testing ground for one of the most ambitious land-speed projects ever attempted.

And a car travelled across it at 1,010 km/h.

Why Hakskeen Pan?

Land-speed racing is a very different thing to normal motorsport.

There are no corners to get right and no lap times to chase. The goal is simply to see how fast a car can go in a straight line.

The current outright land-speed record is 763.035 mph, or 1,227.985 km/h, set by British RAF pilot Andy Green in ThrustSSC at Black Rock Desert in Nevada in 1997.

It was the first car to officially break the sound barrier.

The Bloodhound project wanted to go even further.

The long-term aim was to build a car capable of reaching 1,000 mph — around 1,609 km/h.

To even attempt something like that, you need an enormous amount of open space. It has to be flat, straight and clear for many kilometres, with enough distance for the car to accelerate and, just as importantly, slow down again.

Hakskeen Pan had exactly that.

There was just one problem: the surface needed a lot of work.

Building a racetrack without building a racetrack

The Bloodhound team needed the pan to be as clean and predictable as possible, because at those speeds even relatively small rocks could become a serious problem.

Members of the local Mier community spent years helping prepare the surface by hand.

Around 16,500 tons of stone were removed from an area of roughly 22 million square metres.

There was no asphalt laid and no conventional track was built. The pan itself became the track.

The result was a long, flat strip of natural earth suitable for high-speed testing.

It is probably one of the least conventional racetracks you’ll ever visit.

The Bloodhound arrives

Calling Bloodhound LSR a car doesn’t quite explain what you’re looking at.

It was powered by a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine, the same type of engine used in the Eurofighter Typhoon, and was designed from the beginning for extreme speed.

In October and November 2019, the Bloodhound team arrived at Hakskeen Pan for a series of high-speed tests.

This wasn’t yet the world-record attempt.

The team first needed to understand how the car behaved at very high speed, how the wheels interacted with the surface and how stable the car would remain as it approached the transonic speed range.

The speeds increased gradually over a number of runs.

Then, on 16 November 2019, Andy Green took Bloodhound to 628 mph — 1,010 km/h.

It reached that speed in around 50 seconds.

At 1,010 km/h, the car was travelling at roughly 280 metres every second.

A kilometre passed in a little over three and a half seconds.

And all of it happened on a dry lake bed in the Northern Cape.

It wasn’t a new world record

This part is worth clearing up because Hakskeen Pan is sometimes mentioned as though Bloodhound set a new land-speed record there.

It didn’t.

Andy Green’s 1997 record of 1,227.985 km/h remained intact.

The 2019 runs were testing for the much bigger attempt that was supposed to follow.

Bloodhound had been designed to eventually combine its jet engine with additional rocket power, giving it enough thrust to challenge the record and potentially continue towards the project’s headline target of 1,000 mph.

The Hakskeen testing showed that the car and the surface could operate at extraordinary speeds, and the team gathered the data needed to prepare for the next stage.

The problem was funding.

Projects like Bloodhound are extremely expensive, and the full record attempt never happened as originally planned.

So Hakskeen Pan never got to see Bloodhound at 1,000 mph.

Visiting Hakskeen Pan today

What makes the place interesting now is how little it has changed.

You don’t arrive to find a huge visitor centre or some polished motorsport attraction.

It still looks like a massive, mostly empty pan.

If you didn’t know the story, you could easily drive past without realising that one of the fastest cars ever built had been tested there.

There are, however, a few signs that car people have continued to make the trip.

Stickers from clubs, groups and travellers have appeared around the area over the years, small reminders that people have driven a very long way just to stand where it happened.

And that’s probably why Hakskeen Pan is such a great petrolhead stop.

It isn’t really about what there is to see when you arrive.

It’s about knowing the story of the place.

For a few weeks in 2019, this empty piece of Northern Cape earth became one of the fastest places on the planet.

A jet-powered car went past at 1,010 km/h.

Then the engineers packed up, the crews left, and the Kalahari went quiet again.

If you know what happened there, though, you’ll never look at it as just another empty pan.

And if you’re willing to drive into the middle of nowhere just to see the place where it happened?

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