HowToBikeAt 296 kph
By the world’s fastest cyclist.
Standing on the end of an eight-kay salt flats course, Mueller-Korenek mounted her custombuilt bike and tethered it inside a fairing on the back of the racing car. Over the first two kilometres, the 1 000-horsepower dragster accelerated to 177km/h – the velocity necessary for the rider to turn the cranks on the bike’s massive 529 gear inches (normal gearing is between 20 and 70). As she began winding up the pedals, her driver released the tether. The dragster continued to speed up, and MuellerKorenek kept hammering under the protective fairing. Over the course’s final kilometre, she averaged a world-record 296km/h.
The bike’s GPS registered an error, but the course timing showed increased speed at every kilometre, said Mueller-Korenek, a 45-yearold US national champion cyclist from Valley Centre, California. She and her driver, Shea Holbrook, a seven-time Pirelli World Challenge winner, already held the Guinness World Record for the fastest female in a slipstream, at 238km/h, a speed they hit using a specially adapted Range Rover in 2016. They had hoped for another record-setting attempt that year, but were rained out.
“It’s like a dance,” Mueller-Korenek says. “Behind the fairing, I’m constantly adjusting, floating forward and floating back. Shea is doing her own dance, accelerating and decelerating so she doesn’t drop me or cause me to hit the car. She has to match my stride.”
It’s a bit of a blind dance, too. “Imagine being in the back of a box truck with no windows,” she says. “Everything is just white, with no reference points, like telephone poles zipping by. You can hear the engine start and you can feel it taking off, and what you feel tells you when you’re going fast.”
It’s also not a dance for the faint of heart. Ever since 1899, when Charles ‘Mile-a-Minute’ Murphy set the first paced bicycle speed record of 97km/h while drafting a steam train, it’s been a terrifying tango that has left many a rider dead or mangled. That was especially true after the 1930s, when cyclists took the game to a new level, riding behind souped-up race cars outfitted with wind-blocking fairings.
One such rider was Dutch cyclist Fred Rompelberg, who crashed twice going over 160km/h at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats,
IT’S A FEAT INCONCEIVABLE TO MOST SOUND-MINDED MORTALS: LAST SEPTEMBER, DENISE MUELLER-KORENEK RODE A BICYCLE AT NEARLY 296KM/H – FASTER THAN THE TAKEOFF SPEED OF AN AIRBUS A340 – AND CRUSHED THE MOTOR-PACED BICYCLE LAND-SPEED RECORD.
breaking 24 bones in 1988 before returning in 1995 with his custom-made dragster to set the previous speed record of 269km/h. MuellerKorenek pulled into Bonneville with that same car, which her team had restored.
The KHS bike she rode was a dragster in its own right. The low-slung, chopper-style bicycle is well over two metres long and outfitted with 17-inch motorbike rims and tyres for stability at insane speeds. It also demands a two-part drivetrain to propel the absurdly tall gear.
“The drive ratio is 62x12, twice,” says John Howard, Mueller-Korenek’s coach, who once held the motor-paced record himself at 245km/h, back in 1985. “She’s travelling nearly 40 metres every time she turns those cranks. It’s pretty mind-boggling.”
If you’re surprised that a woman set this new record, don’t be. “I’ve been coaching mostly women for the past 35 or 40 years,” Howard, 70, says. “My theory is that women are able to push that ageing envelope a little further than men, and are more capable of long-distance peak performance.”
Howard coached Mueller-Korenek on and off for three decades, but spent two hard years training her for the speed record attempt after she had spent 23 years away from racing.
“So she’s no spring chicken, at 45; but she’s a superb bike handler, and at the peak of her strength after coming back after taking time off and having three kids,” Howard says. “We were ready to break the overall record last time, but the Range Rover wasn’t quite fast enough and the weather didn’t cooperate. But she was totally ready.”
Mueller-Korenek thought so, too. “After we missed it in 2016, we were so full of adrenaline and piss and vinegar from being rained out, we opened our mouths and said, ‘We’re coming back. We’re coming back, and we’re going to take the men’s record,’ ” she says. “We wanted to finish what we started in 2016.”
Finish they did – going nearly 27km/h faster than anyone has ever gone before.