SPEED MONARCH - THE SHORT LIF OF ERIC FERNIHOUGH

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 board-track 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 an unsealed 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.

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.

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. Historian and journalist Doug Nye

has written the Foreword which is overleaf. Publication is in August 2024.