Another 'Great White Cars' story ('30s Germany - Bernd Rosemeyer and such in the fabulous Auto Unions) ie 'Audi' today, with the 4-rings logo: a mere shadow of its parent Self. Someone came up with this illustration of the extreme power/weight of these cars -

You are driving at 100 mph. You pass a white car stopped on the side of the [autobahn]. Some X-seconds later (was it 9? too lazy to calc some > 1G accel values possible with sticky tires) the White car has passed you, and is disappearing .. er, Fast!

Anyway - agree with your analysis.. even 2 minutes at 110 head start needs a Kawa ZX-11 type rocket to nail anytime soon. The sot must have slowed to use the cel fone.

I'm having trouble imagining Greg's trajectory, though not a lot.. (if'n ya don't encounter anything solid while er scrubbing off momentum).

One Rollie Free (then in his '50s) once slid off his Vincent "Black Lightning" (prone position = lying flat with feet straight out) at Bonneville. This may have been *before* he stripped to swim trunks, as he was running just under 150.0 mph, heading for a long-standing US "Class C" speed record. He thought the leathers were losing him a mph or so - and he was right.

I believe the fall-off is not an urban legend (via some contemporaries' reports) - but I'm not sure whether he accomplished the longest slide imaginable on salt du jour: in leathers or *skin*. {ugh}

Anyway and fershure - bikes are Not for the bravado-besotted or the Stupid - as any idiot could figure out. Uh.. maybe not. (I think that Moto-Cross demonstrates the limits of purely human controllability of physics! in 3-D; even more so than flying - you are constantly ricocheting from 'launch point' to the next one, spending most of the time (and distance) airborne. Only kids who start at ~5 yo - ever seem capable of this much suppression of fear when older: they never fell off, so have no imaginations of being hurt! - is one explanation.)

Space flight doesn't count except for.. say, a landing like Armstrong's in '69 and a few other True-[geek + guts] scenarios. He flew that sucker seat o'pants: Like A Motorcycle! only greatly handicapped by the bizarre spatial position of his body - while maneuvering. Virtuoso performance.


Vroom vroom