The Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah are used to taking a pounding. The world land speed record was repeatedly broken there from 1937 up to 1970 – before the British famously stole the crown in the 1980s and 1990s in a Nevada desert.

But all the modern-era record breakers, since 1963, have been powered by rockets or jet engines – they were basically horizontal missiles or aircraft without wings for which the wheels were giant castors. Now a British team is set to return to Bonneville with a vehicle that uses good old fashioned internal combustion and applies its engine power through the wheels.

Still under wraps (an announcement is due shortly) the vehicle will run on green fuel and is expected to achieve speeds of over 450mph when it hits the salt flats next year. The current record for a wheel-driven car stands at 458mph, a speed achieved by Don Vesco, an American driver, in 2001 in a machine named the Turbinator.

It’s a whole new and more demanding challenge for Andy Green, the RAF pilot who has become the mainstay of British speed records. A fighter pilot with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan behind him, Green is currently flying a desk in the RAF’s directorate of air staff in Whitehall. The only man to have driven at Mach 1 – Green piloted the jet-powered ThrustSSC through the sound barrier on the Black Rock Desert in 1997 to take the current outright world land speed record of 763mph – he was also at the wheel of the Dieselmax car that last August swatted the world diesel record.

“It’s an enormous challenge and a great opportunity to show the world what British design and engineering skill can achieve,” Green said.

He has not yet been officially named as the driver, but one source close to the project said last week it was inconceivable he would not be behind the wheel. Like last year’s challenge, the new assault on the speed record for a wheel-driven vehicle will be in the Dieselmax, albeit a modified version with at least 100mph more capability and adapted to run on biofuel.

Sir Anthony Bamford, the chairman of JCB, whose personal net worth is estimated at around £1 billion and whose company financed Dieselmax, is reportedly set to sign off on the new project.

Goodyear has already been recruited to make the tyres and the team is searching for a suitable green fuel. The car itself has only 151 miles on the clock and needs relatively little tweaking to go faster. During its record breaking run in 2006 it didn’t even get into top gear.

It is built around two JCB444 engines that have been blown out from 125hp to 750hp. The four-cylinder 4.4 litreengines normally pound along all day producing monstrous torque for moving mountains. In racing guise the engine remains recognisably a JCB unit and has a lowly rpm limit of 3800, but it’s been bored out to 5 litres and the innards refined to cope with extraordinary temperatures and pressures.

During the record attempt last year, one of the biggest problems was cramming in of enough air. The engines require about five tons of air an hour, which translates to a pressure of 5.2 bar (atmospheres) at peak power. That compares with 3 bar for Le Mans diesel racers and 4 bar for turbo-era Formula One cars.

Furthermore, Bonneville is 6,000ft up in the mountains, where air pressure is 85% that at sea level. The designers bolted on a pair of turbochargers bigger than your head but found they could only be made to work at altitude by having Green drive the car at full throttle and applying the brakes to create resistance and drive up engine temperature. Only once they kicked in at full power could he make a record run.

The other limiting factor was the tyres. Nobody in the world makes tyres that are good for more than 350mph, but as the 2006 Dieselmax team were initially aiming at a record of 236mph, they used Goodyear 23x15 racing tyres that looked as if they might have just enough safety margin to do the job.

Aircraft tyres were tested and discarded as unpredictable, and it was not possible to take wheels from much faster record-breaking cars such as ThrustSSC because there’s a world of difference between wheels that keep you straight while jet engines provide the power, and wheels through which the power must be laid down on the salt.

Thrust’s wheels, designed to absorb rim stresses equivalent to 35,000 times the force of gravity, would spin uselessly on Dieselmax. In the event, Green took the car some way past the tyre limiting speed on the first of his record runs, hitting 365.779mph. On the return run the car was reluctant to develop full power. The turbochargers refused to kick in fully, and Green debated whether to abort.

Eventually he managed to coax the car into a successful return run within the specified one hour of his first, giving an average of 350.092mph. A seal had come loose in one of the turbochargers, but the speed was still easily fast enough to take the record for a diesel powered vehicle.

With better tyres, properly working turbochargers and a chance to get into sixth gear, the 458mph record for a wheel-driven vehicle should be within the team’s grasp.

The 2008 record attempt will require tyres that are stronger still. A Goodyear spokesman said he was confident that the technology existed to make a tyre that could withstand speeds of more than 450mph. “It would mean taking the design and construction of the tyre to the ultimate in terms of the exotic materials being used in it, but it is possible.” These exotic materials would include Kevlar and carbon fibre.

British drivers have never lacked courage and British engineers have never lacked skill, but the Dieselmax is underpinned by the pockets of a British businessman who is determined to fly the Union Jack above the Stars and Stripes in the field of speed. Next year, Bonneville will witness something spectacular.

Brief history of speed records

- On February 4, 1927, Sir Malcolm Campbell reached 174mph in the Napier-Campbell Bluebird. It was the first car purpose-built for breaking the land speed record Mickey Thompson was the first driver to officially breach the 400mph barrier. In 1960 the American reached an average speed of 406.60mph in the Challenger 1, powered by four Pontiac V8 pushrod engines producing 700hp each Propelled by natural gas, Gary Gabelich drove the Blue Flame to 622mph on October 23, 1970. His land speed record stood for 13 years

- The British designed and built jet-propelled car, ThrustSSC, was the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier, on October 15, 1997, when it achieved a speed of 763mph with Andy Green at the wheel On October 18, 2001, Don Vesco clocked a new wheel-driven land speed record of 458.440mph in the Turbinator. This is the record the Dieselmax team intend to break

Rules of the course

The Fédération Internationale de L’Automobile (FIA) governs record attempts. To qualify as an official land speed record under FIA rules, a car must perform two recorded runs over a set distance (usually 1km or one mile) within an hour. The time is an average of the two runs. The record must be scrutinised by an official and carried out at a location recognised by the FIA. Cars are entitled to a rolling start (known as a ‘flying’ start). There are numerous record categories, ranging from solar-powered cars to piston-powered to jet-propelled

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