With a 120-liter boiler and steam at 260 °C, Graham Sykes took his Force of Nature to extreme acceleration — which revives old technology to break records on asphalt.
A water vapor-powered rocket motor once again demonstrated that this technology, associated for decades with locomotives and power plants, can still achieve extreme numbers on the asphalt.
The British engineer Graham Sykes took his machine, , from 0 to 100 km/h in just 0.4 seconds.
The test took place at the Santa Pod Raceway circuit in Bedfordshire, England, during a festival of acceleration in which Sykes and his team planned a single start with almost surgical precision.
The scene, described by the track itself, combined expectation, risk and a cloud of vapor that was expelled through the huge rear tubes of the motorcycle when the propulsion system was activated.
At first glance, Force of Nature is a somewhat unusual motorcycler. The long, tapered body, the two wheels and the large rear exits respond to a very concrete function: releasing at once the pressure generated in a 120 liter boiler.
The water is heated by a burner to approximately 260°Ccreating the energy necessary to propel the vehicle beyond 320 km/h.
The technical heart of this steam engine is precisely the component that Sykes decided not to manufacture in your workshop. As the pilot and engineer himself explained, the boiler was produced by a company specialized in pressure vessels for the nuclear, oil and gas industries.
The reason is security: “If it exploded, I wouldn’t be the only one injured or killed.“, stated Sykes. “They would also be all the people around me“.
The rest of the vehicle was developed almost entirely by Graham Sykes himself, a mechanic by profession and obsessed for years with the idea of building a real rocket motor.
The inspiration, he said, came from trying to Evel Knievel of jumping the Snake River Gorge in the 70s, with a superheated water-powered rocketthe. “I always wanted to fly a rocket motorcycle,” he said.
“But no one was going to ask me, ‘Graham, do you want to ride my rocket bike?’, so the only way to do this was to build a“.
The engineer’s next objective is to lower the time even further and get closer to a four-second pass over 402 meters.
