Printed in full colour with over 500 pages and over 400 photographs and drawings from the Fernihough and Henne albums and papers in the Brooklands and BMW archives. The book has comprehensive coverage of early American, Australian, British, French, German and Italian world’s records before World War 2.

The book was published in August 2024 and is still available from Chaters, Hortons and other automotive booksellers.

Here are some sample pages, the first showing some early French record breakers ...

…. and the first roadraces ..

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 …

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 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 ……

But 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 regained the absolute world’s record and Eric Fernihough built a new supercharged Brough Superior with more extensive streamlining. He was killed trying to take the record back in Hungary on 23 April 1938.

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