In 1928 Fritz Von Opel set about building the world’s first rocket powered motorcycle, dubbed the Opel Raketen Motorrad, the bike was designed to use it’s internal combustion engine to reach 75mph at which point the rider would hit a foot pedal, igniting the 6 rear mounted solid rocket boosters.
The plan was to break the current land speed record and reach a top speed of 132mph. Sadly the German authorities vetoed the attempt due to safety concerns. The rocket powered motorcycle went on to complete a number of demonstration runs and was used as a marketing tool by Opel for a number of years.
I was surprised to learn that it isn’t currently owned by Jay Leno.
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 Racing Scene is a 1969 film presented by James Garner, interestingly it’s a personal favorite of Quentin Tarantino who showcased it at the New Beverly Theater in Los Angeles alongside the Steve McQueen classic Le Mans. The film covers a wide array of different racing series and formats including sports car racing at the…
To say that the Greeves Challenger, and all Greeves motorcycles, were ahead of their time is to significantly understate the remarkable foresight of Bert Greeves and his lightweight two-stroke off-road racing motorcycles. Bert developed the first examples of his scrambles and trials machines in 1952, almost 20 years before lightweight two-stroke motorcycles would rise to…
At the age of 93, WW II veteran and AMA Hall of Famer Ed Fisher still rides everyday, and even continues to race as an amateur. Ed has always had a throttle in hand, since he was 16 years old. He began his racing career as a factory rider for Indian Motorcycles, before representing…
This custom Triumph is essentially a newly designed motorcycle developed by Kevin Dunworth, fitted with a ’70s era Triumph unit-construction parallel twin. You may be familiar with Kevin’s work, he’s been a highly-influential and celebrated custom motorcycle builder for years, his builds have appeared in many of the world’s foremost motorcycle magazines and websites, not…
Tripla 0.0 675 is a series of 5 bespoke Triumph Street Triples from Italian Dream Motorcycle, a company that describes itself as a microscopic motorcycle manufacturer due to the fact that they produce a limited series of motorcycles each year, with a maximum of 5 per series. Sergio Giordano and Italian Dream Motorcycle Italian Dream is an unusual…
This off-road racing motorcycle is the only one like it in the world – it was built in Sweden by a motocross racer as a parts-bin special that was considerably quicker than most of its competition. The Gold Star The bike started life as a BSA Gold Star, widely regarded as having one of the…
