The team

The British Steam Car team poses with the vehicle. Not everyone has been able to stick around, given the number of weeks in which preparation has dragged on.

But there's been good news along the way, too. Wrote Wales on Thursday: "I am pleased to report that the car ran beautifully this morning. We have been carrying out low speed tests to check Jerry's software modifications and today were one of the last ones. We tested the slam acceleration which still needs a little more "tweaking", but reached in excess of 95mph again with just 90 second burn time. Tomorrow we are upping the burn time to 2 minutes so we should exceed 100mph and use approximately half of the track that we will have available come attempt time."