Sounding for all the world like something the 3 hosts of Top Gear might dream up for an episode in Lapland this photograph from 1908 shows an iceboat racing a motorcycle across a frozen lake in Canada.
It looks like the boat is going to win although the motorcyclist would have been literally risking his life, the bikes of the era had little in the way of suspension, power, grip or brakes so exactly how he’s staying up right on the ice is a mystery to me.
Click the photograph for the higher resolution version.
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.
The ZOOZ One is an electric BMX bike that’s 20% larger than a standard BMX bicycle, to ensure that it’ll comfortably accommodate adults from 5′ all the way up to 6’5″. The bike’s design is the work of Pete Kelly, an industrial designer and the former head of design at both SkullCandy and Fossil Watches….
The story of Elspeth Beard is legendary within the motorcycle community, in 1982 aged just 23 she set off on a round the world adventure with nothing more than a tent, some meagre savings from her job in a bar, and her trusty 1974 BMW R60/6. This was many years before GPS, email, cell phones,…
The BMW K100 The BMW K100 was the motorcycle developed by the German marque to take the fight to the new breed of Japanese inline-4s, whilst at the same time meeting the increasingly stringent emissions regulations in Germany. It was never likely that the Germans would copy the favorite engine layout of the Japanese that…
The bespoke Royal Enfield Classic 500 Scrambler you see here isn’t a production model, though it does look a lot like the trials and scrambles machines built using original Enfields in the 1950s and ’60s. Despite appearances this isn’t a vintage Enfield, in fact it’s an entirely new motorcycle that started life as one of…
This 1982 Barry Sheene interview has been largely unseen for the past 36 years, it includes some fantastic quotes from Barry including him remembering a time he had to steal diesel in from a construction site in Munich to get to a Grand Prix in Austria in 1971. It was originally filmed as part of a…
The Harley-Davidson Sportster Street Tracker The Harley-Davidson Sportster Street Tracker is by far the best American motorcycle that isn’t actually in production. Custom motorcycle garages like XTR Pepo make light work of turning a stock Sportster into a handsome, nimble, and fast street tracker – but the Harley-Davidson factory in Milwaukee has been very slow…
