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.
Related Posts
Documentary: Shoot The Salt – The Fastest Woman On A V-Twin
Shoot The Salt is a documentary covering the first attempt of Jody Perewitz to set a new land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2011. Jody has been around motorcycles her whole life, her father is the larger than life, multi-award winning custom builder Dave Perewitz. Dave has been building custom motorcycles since 1973, including…
Read More
1956 Tojeiro-Butterworth AJB Air-Cooled Racing Car
The Tojeiro-Butterworth AJB is a bit of a historical anomaly, it’s the only one that was ever built, and it’s fitted with the unusual air-cooled, flat-four AJB engine. The intials AJB belong to Archibald James Butterworth, a visionary engineer, inventor, and designer, who was a successful and active racer in England until he suffered a…
Read More
Alan Cathcart’s 1987 Ducati 851 “Superbike Edizione 11 / 1987”
The Ducati 851 is a motorcycle that needs no introduction to anyone who was following the Superbike World Championship when it first launched back in the late 1980s. The outgoing Ducati 750 F1 had reached a development bottleneck, largely due to the fact that it had two-valve heads and air-cooling – the Ducati 851 would…
Read More
The Only One In The World: 1967 Meirson Sprint Motor (MSM) V-Twin Speedway Bike
The Meirson Sprint Motor (MSM) V-twin Prototype The Meirson Sprint Motor (MSM) V-twin prototype is an engine that you’ve probably never seen before. Just one was made in 1967 by a talented father and son team in Australia; Clarry and Allan Meirs – the name Meirson is a contraction of “Meirs” and “Son”. The two…
Read More
Documentary: Building An Engine From Scratch – Casting – Machining – Assembly – Test Riding
This 10 minute films shows the process of building an engine from scratch, including the casting process, machining, final assembly, and the completed motorcycle’s first test ride. It’s an interesting look into how motorcycle (and car) engines were painstakingly built back in the early days of motoring, every step of the process involved highly-skilled machinists,…
Read More
1980 Kawasaki Mystery Ship
The Kawasaki Mystery Ship The Kawasaki Mystery Ship was designed and built in 1980 by Alabama-born American designer Craig Vetter. At its peak, the Vetter Fairing Company was the second largest motorcycle-industry manufacturer in the USA – after Harley-Davidson. Craig Vetter’s Windjammer motorcycle fairing became so ubiquitous that people at the time often called all fairings “Windjammers”…
Read More
