Foreward By Doug Nye

When Eric Fernihough lost control of his motorcycle at over 170mph, he was the last British rider to have been the ‘world’s fastest’ on two wheels. An orphan, an adopted son, a public schoolboy, a Cambridge graduate, an engineer, a noted tuner, a European motorcycle champion, a multiple Brooklands race winner, ‘Ferni’ was a motorcycling household name in the nineteen thirties. On a new road in far-away Hungary, he rode to his death on 23 April 1938. His life story, which this new book tells, spanned more than thirty year’s of furious competition for the world’s absolute motorcycle speed record before World War 2.

First in 1900 was a Frenchman on an American motorcycle. French motorcycles took the lead in 1902 until an American board-track rider rode his best ever at England’s Brooklands Motor Course in 1911. An English rider and machine promptly took the title back before the Americans recovered it. With the world at war, in 1916 an Australian was the fastest on an unsealed road near Adelaide. After a short period of American supremacy on the sands of America’s Daytona Beach, Brooklands was the setting for more world’s record efforts before the long, straight roads of France became the new battleground. British riders and motorcycles were unbeatable until German technical ingenuity, and a BMW rider Ernst Henne, became dominant during the lean years of the Great Depression.

Eric Fernihough set out to challenge this German hegemony. With supercharged big- twin JAP engines in Brough Superior motorcycles, he drove to the south of Budapest and set the absolute world’s motorcycle speed record there at 169.79mph in April 1937. Gilera-mounted Piero Taruffi just squeezed past him before Henne took the title again at 173.68mph. Back in Hungary, Fernihough was aiming for over 175mph when he crashed and was killed.

Drawing on Fernihough’s personal papers and photographs at Brooklands Museum, the Mutschler collection in Germany, Henne’s private albums at the BMW archives and many other sources, this new book has hundreds of never-before-published photographs and drawings. It is the first detailed history of the world’s absolute motorcycle speed record and the first biography of a great motorcycle rider. Historian and journalist Doug Nye has written the Foreword which is overleaf.