Burt Munro: Offerings To The God Of Speed is a documentary that was made many years before Munro became an international icon thanks to the Anthony Hopkins film The World’s Fastest Indian.
Burt was born in New Zealand in 1899, he’s most famous for his incredible exploits at Bonneville but in his earlier life he was a professional speedway rider, a motorcycle salesman, a mechanic, and during his active racing years he rose to the top of the New Zealand rankings.
This sub-30 minute documentary is a wonderful look into who Burt was in his own words, he’s now rightly remembered as one of the greatest privateer landspeed racers of all time.
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
This Husqvarna Model 30 A is a custom motorcycle of sorts – it was built by a privateer racer before Husqvarna offered their own factory-built version – the Model 350DT (DT for “dirt track”). The 1920s and ’30s were an important, formative time for dirt track racing – also called flat track, circle track, and…
Once Upon A Wheel is Paul Newman’s iconic 1971 racing documentary, it’s a fascinating window into the period and it includes appearances by the likes of James Garner, Kirk Douglas, Mario Andretti, Stirling Moss, John Surtees, Richard Petty, Jackie Stewart, Hugh Downs, Dick Smothers, Dean Martin, Denny Hulme, Cesar Romero, Al Unser, Jackie Oliver, Pedro Rodriguez,…
The Ducati 750 Sport is an exceedingly rare motorcycle that sits squarely between its two more famous siblings – the Ducati 750 GT and the Ducati 750 Super Sport (SS). Put simply, the Ducati 750 Sport (also known as the 750S) was a higher-performance version of the slightly more consumer-friendly 750 GT.
Dynamics Of A Crash is a ’70s film from Chrysler Corporation about car crashes and passenger safety, all cars were fitted with seatbelts in the USA from 1968 onwards as per Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 208, however seatbelt wearing wouldn’t become mandatory until the mid-1980s in most US states. There was a significant resistance…
This was Steve McQueen’s Nimbus Model C motorcycle – an unusual and quite advanced bike from Denmark characterized by its inline-4 cylinder engine with a single overhead cam and the distinction of being one of the first motorcycles to be fitted with telescopic front forks. The Nimbus Model C The Nimbus Model C is one of the…
This rather unusual motorcycle is the 1975 MV Agusta 750 Turbo Prototype, it was built as a proof-of-concept for a possible future production model, though of course this production model never appeared. It’s interesting to consider what might have been if MV Agusta had worked out the bugs and managed to get this bike into…
