Updated with information from Ralph R:
This is W. E. Cook. In 1909, he set a speed record of 90 m.p.h. (144 km/h) on the Brooklands track in England aboard the behemoth, which carried a huge 165.62 c.i. (2714 c.c.) engine. The motorcycle is the 1909 North London Garage record breaker.
The image above features a motorcycle I’ve never seen before, I’m tempted to guess that it’s a one-off design due to the less-than-polished look of the engineering. The size of the V-twin is impressive, in fact it’s one of the largest I’ve ever seen installed in a pre-WWII motorcycle, with the possible exception of the pacer motorcycles used on old Velodromes.
If you know what this bike is, who built it or who that chap in the image is, shoot me a message on Twitter here and let me know – this deserves some more research.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, 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 well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
