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World Hydroplaning Motorbike Distance Record
Current record: None
Target distance: 100 m (330 ft) Minimum water depth: 1m (3 ft) Record venue: Bala Lake, Wales
The Challenge
‘Speed, an element of danger and motorbikes –
three of my favourite things!’
T’S  amazing what you can find on the internet these days, isn’t it?
There’s a heck of a lot of rubbish out there, and that can make it
difficult to find the good stuff, but if you look hard enough you can
always find a few gems sparkling among the dross. For obvious reasons, I
tend to focus on anything to do with motorbikes, and that’s what led me to
some video clips of blokes in Argentina and in the United States riding
their dirt bikes across ponds and lakes.
I
They weren’t riding the bikes across the bottoms of the ponds – they were
skimming right across the surface. Some of the ponds they were riding
across didn’t look too deep but, even so, motorbikes – even dirt bikes –
aren’t designed to float across water. Dirt bikes may be in their element off
road, but ‘off road’ doesn’t usually mean ‘off hard ground altogether’! On a
couple of the clips you could see a bloke standing in the pond as the bikes
shot past and he was just about up to his backside in water, so there was
plenty of depth available for the bikes to do just what you would expect –
sink like stones. Yet they managed to stay upright and keep going.
(BELOW WATER LEVEL)
10M
20M
30M
40M
50
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100
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150
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200
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250
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300
M
THE CHALLENGE   139
START
10
METRES