Discovering
the World of
Hydroplaning

To find out how a motorbike could cross a

pond, I needed some advice from someone

who knew a lot more than I did about

sending things hurtling across water.

KIMMING   stones was about my

S

limit, but even with that I could see

that there were forces and techniques

involved that I would have to get to grips with.

Chuck any old stone on to the surface of the

water and it will make a splash, but it will go

straight to the bottom. On the other hand, I

knew that if you picked up a flat stone, got

down really low and threw it out across the

water, it would glance off the water and skip

across the surface, especially if it left your

hand spinning like a discus. What was going on

there, then?

The man with the answers was Dr Hugh

Hunt, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Among his many other achievements, in

2011 Hugh was the engineer who recreated

Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb, the one used

by the Dambusters during the Second World

War, for a TV show demonstrating how

Wallis developed the idea. Hugh successfully

skimmed his version of the bouncing bomb

across a lake in Canada to blow up a dam

that they had built specially for the show. It

didn’t sound quite the same thing as riding a

motorbike across a pond, and I really didn’t

want any effort that I made to end with a

massive explosion, but Hugh was able to

explain what was going on with the motorbikes

that rode on water.

142  HYDROPLANING MOTORBiKe

Basically, what the riders were doing was

hydroplaning. This is something anyone

who drives on the open road in any kind of

truck, car or motorbike has probably heard

about, even if they don’t know exactly how

it works. I knew that something as big as a

truck could quickly become uncontrollable

if it hit a patch of standing water on the road.

The wheels no longer have any traction and

the vehicle drifts, as though it’s floating. It

can happen to anyone driving too fast over

a wet surface and it’s not something you’d

normally want to experience, but the guys on

those internet videos appeared to be having

fun mastering the art of hydroplaning. In the

few seconds they spent skimming across the

water, they were also achieving respectable

distances – so I made some enquiries about

what the world record was for hydroplaning.

I got in touch with the people at Guinness

World Records and quickly discovered that

there was no official record.

Hydroplaning is all to do with

a build-up of water pressure

beneath the wheels.

Now I had a challenge on my hands and they

gave me some guidelines about what I would

have to do to set a record. They insisted that I

would have to use a standard motorbike that

could not be modified in order to make it float.

I could add foils or planes (more about them

a little later) to the bike to help it hydroplane,

but they were adamant that the ‘modifications

must not affect the static buoyancy of the

motorcycle’ so that ‘if the motorcycle comes to

a stop it MUST NOT float’. They also specified

a minimum depth of 1 metre (3 feet) over the