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.
This BMW 2002 Tii-Specification Groupe 2 was built at the dawn of the ’80s by two legends of French motorsport – Sport Garage G.Benoit and Danielson. Sport Garage G.Benoit of Villefranche-sur-Saone in France were perhaps better known for racing the BMW 3.0 CSi in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but their expertise with BMW…
The MV Agusta three-cylinder, known as the Tre Cilindri, was ridden by Giacomo Agostini to 13 of his 15 World Championship titles between 1966 and 1973. MV Agusta had started with a 350cc version of the three-cylinder in 1965, this engine would be expanded to 500cc for 1966, allowing the Italian company to challenge both the 350cc…
The Vincent Comet was one of the great single-cylinder motorcycles of its era with an advanced engine that’s also a stressed chassis member, cantilever rear suspension that was decades ahead of its time, a Girdraulic forks, and a steel backbone frame. The Vincent Comet The Vincent Comet was the sporting version of the Vincent Meteor, the latter of…
The Honda CX500 was a significant departure from the norm for Honda. The Japanese marque had made a name for themselves by introducing the Honda CB750 and creating what would become the Universal Japanese Motorcycle (or UJM) and have its basic layout copied by the other three major Japanese motorcycle manufacturers.
The Yamaha XJR1300 is probably the motorcycle Godzilla would ride, if he had longer arms and a slightly better center of gravity. The first thing that strikes you when you see an XJR1300 in the flesh is the physical size and implied menace of it – particularly the hefty dimensions of that mighty inline-4. The…
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.
