Johannesburg — THINGS move slowly in Northern Cape, but perhaps not for much longer.

The country's least-populated province may one day host a rocket- and jet engine-propelled attempt to break the land speed record with a car that travels at 1,4 times the speed of sound.

The public face of this effort, RAF Wing Commander Andy Green, will this weekend travel to Verneuk Pan, a dry stretch of mud 150km south of Upington, to see if the site is a possible location to run the Bloodhound, a car that he wants to drive at 1000mph (1600km/h).

Green, who holds the land speed record that was set in 1997 with a speed of 1228km/h at a site in the US, is looking for a suitable stretch of land about 20km long.

"Because of the performance of the car - it is so much faster at accelerating - to get up to 1000mph will take us about 16km. We are looking for 20km of surface in case we have braking or parachute problems. The biggest single problem you have at 1000mph is stopping. Once you're up there, there is no other solution but to slow down again. It's a very slippery, heavy car at that stage," he says.

To build from scratch a 12,8m-long vehicle weighing 6422kg, containing the engine of a Eurofighter Typhoon jet and a separate rocket booster may sound like madness. But for Green and his partners behind Bloodhound SSC (super sonic car), the £10m-project is not just a men-and-machines fantasy. It is a calculated measure to get children between five and 19 interested in science and encourage them to boost the UK's dwindling ranks of engineering graduates.

"If we achieve 1000mph as well, brilliant, but if they get excited about the journey, whatever the speed, it doesn't matter very much," he says.

To drive the Bloodhound car faster than a jet fighter can fly at low level, Green needs a flat surface. "A fairly small dip is not a small dip at 1000mph," he says.

The alkalite playa dried mud site he used in 1997 in Black Rock Desert in Nevada has deteriorated due to drought and is no longer suitable.

Green is weighing up Verneuk against the dried salt lakes of central Australia, as both have flat surfaces. However, because salt pans dry very hard and the car will have metal wheels (any flexible material like rubber would be shredded at these high speeds), getting a grip on a salt pan is a problem.

Verneuk, with the same surface as Black Rock Desert, is his preference, but he cannot say which sites will be on his priority list until he has seen them all. He does not, in any case, rule out having a number of options, as the weather renders different locations unusable at different times of the year.

The Bloodhound testing process will be incremental. Green paints a picture of a series of 20 tests a year for three years.

"The days of getting in, driving a new record, getting out and going to the pub ended in 1929, when Henry Seagrave got the Golden Arrow. That would be nowadays risky to the point of catastrophic," he says.

With the £1m research stage of the project at an end, the private Bloodhound venture will now seek funding for the rest of the project, not an easy task given the financial crisis.

Once funding is in place, it will take a year to build the car, Green says.

"If it's ready by Christmas next year, it's winter in North America, not dry until June at the earliest. We try to find somewhere hot, sunny and drive."

If the South African site is chosen, Green and his colleagues at the Bloodhound SSC Racing Adventure should beware. The site's name means "to cheat" in Afrikaans and it has rung true in the past.

In 1929 Scottish nine-time speed record holder Malcolm Campbell headed to Verneuk to set a new record . Unfortunately, while he was in Cape Town waiting for the lake bed to dry out , he heard that rival British racer Henry Seagrave had set a new record on Daytona Beach, US.

This was more than Campbell could hope to set at the higher altitude of Verneuk. He felt he was cheated of the prize.