This can be a good thing - your house is probably full of bimetallic strips that use this effect. In central heating thermostats, when THE HOUSE cools down the strip bends and switches the heat on. In electrical circuit breakers, if the current is too high, the strip gets hot and bends, turning the power off.
The problem comes when you heat up a precision-made supersonic chassis to 175C, with the different metals trying to grow at different rates.
If we bend the chassis, it's wrecked, and any chance of running Bloodhound in 2015 has gone.
After over a year of work to get to this point, the chassis cure was the last critical step. We put the chassis, mounted on its Manufax jig, into the huge autoclave (oven) at the National Composites Centre down the road from us in Bristol.
Heating it up to 175C and cooling it down again was done very slowly, over a period of eight hours.
The result? A near-perfect shape, with just a tiny amount of 'pillowing' (panel distortion) in a couple of places. A huge sigh of relief and we're one step closer to our 2015 roll-out.