Think you're fast?

[Bill Seward]

The first picture shows a bicycle ridden by Jose Meiffert back in 1962. Note the extremely large front chainwheel. This allowed extremely high speeds. How high? 127MPH!

The second pic shows a bike with an intermediate chainwheel set to get the same result as the first bike, but with smaller overall size. This bike was ridden by Fred Rompleberg to a speed of 167.004 MPH.....

Both of these bikes were ridden behind a windshield attached to a race car.
The 1962 record was paced by a Mercedes in France. Fred's bike was paced by a dragster at Bonneville.

 

[MagnaVMax]

Those are pretty sweet setups! I like to do some mountain biking in my spare time as well! Great exercise!

 

[Fire-medic]

I have a pic somewhere similar to the 1st one. The bike was paced by a midget roadster, powered by an Offenhauser, the engine builder of choice for AAA/USAC racing (Indy cars of the 1940's-'70's). It used the windbreak as-shown on the 300 SL Mercedes-Benz.

While anyone generating those speeds on a human-powered device is commendable, for me the greater achievement is the pilot of the Gossamer Albatross. Flying a human-powered machine is in itself amazing, flying it across the English Channel is almost superhuman!
http://www.avinc.com/about/gossamer_albatross/

Many of our forum members were not yet born when this happened.