Re: Richard Noble's book "Thrust" is well worth a read...
Thrust 2 reached a peak speed of slightly under 651mph, as you say the CFD predicted that the car would have flipped if it had gone 6mph faster which is lucky because before the record run they had cranked up the front suspension by literally thousandths of an inch to get a higher peak speed.
ThrustSSC learned from this, they had a Martin-Baker rocket pack installed inverted ahead of the cockpit. If the front wheel loads had dropped below a pre-set value then the rockets would have fired to use 4,000lb of thrust to keep the nose down, followed by jacking up the tail suspension and releasing the brake parachutes to abort the run. When you hear the "armed" and "safe" calls on the radio these refer to the arming switch for the abort system which includes the rocket pack.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
