It’s Full Steam Ahead for this Record-Breaking Motorcycle – Hagerty Media

A shed-built motorcycle powered by a steam engine has just shattered drag strip records.

The bike, known as Force of Nature, was built by British engineer Graham Sykes at his Yorkshire home and recently headed to the track at Santa Pod, U.K. to blow all its rivals out of the water. Force of Nature is now the quickest accelerating steam motorcycle and the quickest two-wheeler over 1/8th of a mile. Its quarter-mile time of 5.5039 seconds puts it second behind a rocket-powered bike.

It’s taken Sykes six years and five different iterations to get to this level of performance from his steam machine and he reckons there’s more to come. “I think that we can probably go 0.6 seconds quicker over the quarter mile. So, we should be able to run into the high fours. That’s the target we’re aiming for,” he told Motorcycle News.

Force of Nature works by using a jet of superheated steam that is forced through a pair of de Laval valves at 1.1 times the speed of sound. That means the bike emits an “almighty sonic boom” as it sets of down the drag strip.

It’s not a bike you can simply jump on and ride as the 120 liters (32 gallons) of deionized and demineralized water has to be heated to 250 degrees Celsius (482 degrees Fahrenheit), and pressurized to 580 psi. It requires a separate boiler, powered by kerosene or vegetable oil, and takes up to five hours to get up to temperature.

On the go Force of Nature expels 40 liters (10.5 gallons) of water every second, and delivers a peak acceleration force of 6.8 G. “The power is on or off. You can’t moderate the flow rate of the valves. It’s 100 percent or nothing,” explained Sykes.

Sykes has been involved in drag racing since 1979, and the idea of using steam actually came from America’s greatest daredevil. “I remember years ago watching Evel Knievel trying to jump over Snake River Canyon and he was live on television and I found out it was steam,” Sykes said.