Valerie Thompson crashes… but still earns a new speed record!

Bruno Gomes

April 3, 2018

Valerie Thompson is the fastest wmen on two-wheels!

Motorcycle speed records are always an interesting testimony of the adrenaline that runs in every motorcyclist’s veins, and just how innovative we can be in the search of our limits. Valerie Thompson, eight-time land speed record holder, is one of such persons, and at the recent DRLA Speed Week she did it again!

At the Speed Week event held in March in Australia’s Lake Gairdner, Valerie Thompson took the BUB 7, a streamliner motorcycle powered by a turbocharged V4 engine with 3000 cc and capable of 500 hp, to a new speed record of 328.467 mph (528.616 km/h)!

She became the first female to break the 300 mph barrier in Australia and beating her own record as the fastest female motorcyclist in the World, a record she set in 2016 at the Bonneville Salt Flats with 304.263 mph.

Valerie and the team expected to use the Speed Week to do a last check-up on the BUB 7 streamliner, a monocoque structure in carbon fiber, but they ended up getting a new speed record for a female motorcyclist.

But the real challenge Valerie Thompson had was the World Land Speed Trials, where she wanted to become the fastest motorcyclist on Earth!

She wanted to take her BUB 7 over the 376.363 mph barrier and conquer the overall land speed record, but the record-run didn’t end the way Valerie and her team expected.

When travelling at 343.7 mph, and according to Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme (International Motorcycling Federation) reports and team video, the streamlined bike rose off the dry lake surface and the vehicle went airborne.

At that moment the bike’s parachutes were deployed, the bike flipped and rolled multiple times, and wreckage could be found for more than a mile across Lake Gairdner salt flats.

The horrific crash was caught on camera, and although the video shows us the violence of the many impacts suffered by the BUB 7, Valerie Thompson escaped with only minor bruises and lacerations, and vows to continue to pursuit the overall land speed record as soon as possible.