"Greyhound" would surely be more appropriate

Today brings the news that a team is seeking to make a car that will travel at 1,000mph.

Fantastic. Although if we could get one-hundredth of that speed on the M6 between Birmingham and Coventry during the rush hour, I'd be more amazed.

Sorry, I'm being deliberately churlish. Everyone, after me: "Bad fatboyfat! Stop churling."

In truth this could be brilliant. And as a bloke I'm duty-bound to be excited. At some point there will be running around in small circles and hyperventilating. Especially if they actually do race it against a .357 Magnum bullet, as in the video. That would be cool. And it might explain why they'll have to do it in America.

It's nothing to do with the salt lakes. But if they did it over here, it'd be racing against a Super Soaker, and that's not really much of a challenge.

It appears that the motivation for this is to encourage British kids to get interested in science, in the same way that the Government was making noises about UK astronauts a couple of weeks back. So, as well as plopping a bloke in a tin can and chucking it upwards, we're going to put another one in another tin can and chuck it sideways. Because apparently science, with lasers, colliding light speed particles, plasma, supernovae, quantum, DNA and cats-that-are-perhaps-waveforms in boxes , isn't sufficiently down-with-the-kids.

But why call the car Bloodhound? They're not the swiftest of animals, are they? Perhaps there's a British tradition of naming science projects after dogs. After all, we had Beagle 2, which started out as a Mars probe and ended up as a manhole cover.

Perhaps our next stealth fighter will be called the Labrador? I look forward to our fleet of King Charles Spaniel hunter-killer submarines.