Richard Noble

Why organisations work with Richard Noble

• He is one of the very small number of speakers who has actually held a world record under personal physical risk and built the team, the car and the funding model that made it possible. The Thrust2 record stood for fourteen years.
• His work on ThrustSSC produced the first and only land vehicle to break the sound barrier, and the lessons he draws are about how a small underfunded team executed something the established motor industry had judged impossible.
• He is the rare speaker whose case studies are his own. The Bloodhound education programme, the ARV Super2 light aircraft, Farnborough Aircraft and JCB Dieselmax are all ventures he founded or led, and the failures are discussed as openly as the records.
• He pioneered distributed sponsorship in Britain, with the ThrustSSC supporters club running what his team describes as the country’s first end-to-end electronic trading site. Boards considering crowdfunding, community equity or non-traditional capital get a working precedent.
• His message is uncomfortable on purpose. He argues that the British funding establishment systematically rejects ambitious engineering, and he uses his own story to challenge audiences who claim to back innovation without backing risk.

Biography highlights

• Drove Thrust2 to 633.468 mph at Black Rock Desert, Nevada, on 4 October 1983, returning the World Land Speed Record to Britain after thirteen years in American hands.
• Project director of ThrustSSC, which on 15 October 1997 became the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier, at 763.035 mph, with RAF pilot Andy Green at the wheel.
• Founded the Bloodhound SSC project in 2008 and built its associated education programme, which has reached approximately 4,600 UK schools and over two million schoolchildren worldwide.
• Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE); winner of the 1983 Segrave Trophy; honorary Doctor of Technology from the University of the West of England (2010); honorary degree from the University of Bradford (2018).
• Author of “Thrust: The Remarkable Story of One Man’s Quest for Speed” (Partridge Press, 1998) and “Take Risk!” (Evro Publishing, 2020), which together document eleven of his record-breaking and aviation projects.
• Founder of ARV Aircraft (the Super2 light aircraft) and Farnborough Aircraft, and a contributor to the JCB Dieselmax diesel record car that exceeded 350 mph at Bonneville in 2006.

Biography

Most organisations talk about risk. Very few are built to back the kind of venture where failure is the likely outcome, the budget is gone in three months, and the project has to be rebuilt from a scrapyard sale of the previous prototype. Richard Noble has spent his working life inside that gap.

His Thrust2 programme began in the mid-1970s with £175 raised from selling the wreckage of his crashed Thrust1 car for scrap. Eight years later, on 4 October 1983, Thrust2 averaged 633.468 mph at Black Rock Desert and returned the World Land Speed Record to Britain. He was awarded the OBE and the Segrave Trophy that year. The record stood for fourteen years.

The follow-on project, ThrustSSC, started with a £40,000 sponsorship from Castrol and a two-year computational research programme led by aerodynamicist Ron Ayers. Noble gave up the driving seat to concentrate on funding. On 15 October 1997, with RAF Tornado pilot Andy Green at the controls, ThrustSSC ran at 763 mph and became the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier. The financing model behind it, including a supporters’ club website his team has described as Britain’s first end-to-end electronic trading site, prefigured a generation of distributed online fundraising.

The Bloodhound SSC project, founded in 2008, aimed at 1,000 mph and built one of the largest STEM education programmes in the UK, working with around 4,600 schools. It went into administration in 2018, was sold to Ian Warhurst, and Noble has written about that ending as candidly as he has written about the records. His 2020 book “Take Risk!” tells the same story from the angle that matters most to a corporate audience: the eleven projects, the people and companies who backed him, and the British institutional culture that he argues consistently fails to back ambitious engineering.

Key speaking topics

• High-risk venture leadership
• Resilience under repeated failure
• Team formation under extreme pressure
• Risk-taking and risk culture in business
• Entrepreneurship and unconventional capital formation
• British engineering ambition and innovation
• Leading without institutional backing

Ideal for

• Boards and senior leadership teams setting risk appetite, particularly those wrestling with the gap between stated ambition and actual investment behaviour.
• Innovation, R&D and engineering leaders responsible for high-uncertainty programmes where conventional ROI cases do not apply.
• Sales conferences and incentive events where the audience needs a credible, lived account of resilience and persistence rather than a generic motivational story.
• After-dinner audiences at industry conferences who want a senior speaker with genuine record-breaking authority and a sharp argument about institutional risk aversion.

Audience outcomes

• A concrete sense of how a small underfunded team can deliver something an established industry has judged impossible, drawn from Thrust2 and ThrustSSC rather than abstract case studies.
• A sharper view of where their own organisation talks about risk-taking but funds and governs as if it does not.
• Practical reference points for raising capital outside conventional institutional channels, including distributed sponsorship and supporter-funded models.
• An honest account of failure as part of the same career as the records, including Bloodhound’s collapse, that gives senior teams permission to talk about their own setbacks more openly.
• A persistent argument they will keep returning to: that ambition without willingness to absorb sustained personal and financial risk produces neither records nor breakthrough commercial outcomes.