I was born in 1952 and remember both the Bluebird land and water speed attempts with Donald ..
I was totally gobsmacked by the beauty and sleek lines of the Bluebird-Proteus CN7 and have stood many times in front of it in awe at Beaulieu ...also (but not quite as much
) the K7 boat 
In 1967 I was 15 and remember well the images and haunting words as Donald lost his life in K7
I have followed the retrieval of K7 and your quite stunning rebuild over the years and have been amazed just how well she performed 'out of the box' - a real tribute to you all, especially with the huge percentage of original material you used. Congratulations and very well done.
In my only post I felt compelled to make a small reference to the apparent 'mud slinging' that's going on around K7 and running on Coniston as I feel strongly that your professionalism and obvious abilities should rise above it and take the moral high ground - frustrating though that may be.
Keep strong and if Coniston comes to nothing because of 'jobsworths' and bureaucracy turn your back and run somewhere else that's as accommodating as Bute seems to have been.
I wish you well with future running and agree totally that items such as K7 deserve to be running and not stuck in stuffy museums in silence gathering dust. I would love to see someone spark up Proteus CN7 ... now that would be something
I build and fly rado controlled model planes and have done since I was 8 and love to see projects that intend to get planes back in the air where they belong - https://www.lincsaviation.co.uk/news/la ... to-flight/
So more power to you as boats of importance, like K7, need to be run too .
) and there is a website to which questions can be sent. With the 111th issue of Fast FACTS published this month there is a lot of reading, should you feel so inclined.