THE WORLD’S FASTEST VELOCETTE
“200MPH IS NOT THAT FAR AWAY BUT THE MOUNTAIN IS GETTING VERY STEEP”
ONE of the many great things about land speed racing is the sound. There are no decibel limits nor audio barriers as riders and drivers stay hard on the gas seemingly forever, then stay on it some more. Long after they’ve disappeared into the haze and just as the noise starts to fade, the exhaust echoes off the far mountain range and you get to hear it in stereo. And still they stay on it!
Most of the cars run booming V8s but they’ve been outnumbered by bikes for a while now, a direct legacy of The World’s Fastest Indian. The quickest local riders go as fast as 230mph on late-model four-cylinder Jappas, but it’s the big twins running up to 175mph that sound most like Burt Munro’s much-modified Scout. And then there’s Stuart Hooper’s Velocette which sounds like nothing else, at 193mph the world’s fastest single-cylinder anything and possibly the loudest.
“The exhaust is big,
