British and world trials champion Dougie Lampkin has become the first person to wheelie a motorcycle all the way around the 60.2km Isle of Man TT course.
Many racers and visitors to the TT have pulled wheelies on the course, but none has made it the entire way around … and Dougie did it with the roads open to traffic!
Dougie delayed his record attempt by a day because of gale-force winds, but still battled high wind gusts on the day on his heavily modified Vertigo Combat two-stroke fuel-injected trial bike.
While Michael Dunlop this year set a TT lap record of 16 minutes 53.929 seconds for an average speed of 133.962mph (215.591km/h), Dougie set his record in 95 minutes at about 38km/h (23mph).
The time was a little faster than he had expected.
“It took a while to sort of settle down a little bit really. I knew I was going too fast,” he says.
“I was on the brakes too much but still couldn’t sort of stop myself.”
Wind gusts of 64km/h almost quashed his attempt as he tackled the mountain section.
“And then I had two massive moments at Gooseneck,” he says.
“I just thought we’re going to have a nightmare now, because it’s just so windy.”
The record was shown live on Red Bull TV last weekend.
Wheelie records
Other notable wheelie records are:
The fastest wheelie is 307.86km/h by Patrick “Ghost Rider” Furstenhoff on a Honda Super Blackbird 1100cc turbo at Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground, Leicestershire, England, in 1999.
The longest wheelie belongs to Yasuyuki Kudo of Japan who rode a wheelie on his Honda TLM220R for 331km at the Japan Auto Research Institute proving ground in May of 1991