Speed Monarch will be a hardback book in full colour with over 500 pages and over 400 photographs and drawings from the Eric Fernihough and Ernst Henne albums and papers in the Brooklands and BMW Munich archives. The book has comprehensive coverage of early American, Australian, British, French, German and Italian world’s motorcycle speed record attempts before World War 2. Publication in print is planned for August 2024 and the book will be available to buy from this website, Amazon and any motoring bookshop.

Author and journalist Doug Nye is writing the Foreword and has commented:

My goodness you really have done his memory proud! I think it’s a stupendous piece of work … I think your overlay of technicalities, associated racing and record-breaking events and developments, the subject’s personal life, contemporary events taking place out there ‘in the real world’, relevant houses, homes and business premises, the atmosphere of the time and above all the magnificent archive content make your work very, very special indeed.

The back of the cover says this about the contents:

When Eric Fernihough lost control of his motorcycle at over 170mph, he was the last British rider to have been the ‘world’s fastest’ on two wheels. An orphan, an adopted son, a public schoolboy, a Cambridge graduate, an engineer, a noted tuner, a European motorcycle champion, a multiple Brooklands race winner, ‘Ferni’ was a motorcycling household name in the nineteen thirties. On a new road in far-away Hungary, he rode to his death on 23 April 1938. His life story, which this new book tells, spanned more than thirty year’s of furious competition for the world’s absolute motorcycle speed record before World War 2.

First in 1900 was a Frenchman on an American motorcycle. French motorcycles took the lead in 1902 until an American boardtrack rider rode his best ever at England’s Brooklands Motor Course in 1911. An English rider and machine promptly took the title back before the Americans recovered it. With the world at war, in 1916 an Australian was the fastest on a remote dirt road near Adelaide.

After a short period of American supremacy on the sands of America’s Daytona Beach, Brooklands was the setting for more world’s record efforts before the long, straight roads of France became the new battleground. British riders and motorcycles were unbeatable until German technical ingenuity, and a BMW rider Ernst Henne, became dominant during the lean years of the Great Depression.

Eric Fernihough set out to challenge this German hegemony. With supercharged big-twin JAP engines in Brough Superior motorcycles, he drove to the south of Budapest and set the absolute world’s motorcycle speed record there at 169.79mph in April 1937. Gilera-mounted Piero Taruffi just squeezed past him before Henne took the title again at 173.68mph. Back in Hungary, Fernihough was aiming for over 175mph when he crashed and was killed.

Drawing on Fernihough’s personal papers and photographs at Brooklands Museum, the Mutschler collection in Germany, Henne’s private albums at the BMW archives and many other sources, this new book has hundreds of never-before-published photographs and drawings. It is the first detailed history of the world’s absolute motorcycle speed record and the first biography of a great motorcycle rider.


Here are some sample double-page spreads from the book , the first showing some early French motorcycle record breakers ... zoom to 200% in your browser settings to see the book text more clearly.

…. and the first motorcycle road races on three and two wheels ..

In America there was a different approach to racing on banked timber board tracks and here some of the world’s fastest speeds were ridden …

The massive concrete track at Brooklands, below, was the scene of early British record breaking;

After his Cambridge university days, Eric Fernihough became an enthusiastic Brooklands racer, almost exclusively with JAP engines …

Meanwhile the leading British riders dominated speed records during the nineteen twenties …

All sorts of ideas were put forward for record breaking motorcycles following the lead taken by land speed record car designers …

Phil Irving, second from right, below, was the designer of this fully enclosed streamlined Brough Superior JAP ……

German technology with a high-revving, supercharged BMW, was all but unbeatable …

Eric Fernihough took up the world’s record challenge with a supercharged Brough Superior, eventually taking the absolute record from Ernst Henne …

Ernst Henne took the absolute world’s record back and Eric Fernihough built a new supercharged Brough Superior with more extensive streamlining. He was to be killed during a record attempt in Hungary on 23 April 1938. Mourned throughout Europe he never received any recognition from the British crown or government.

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