Can you get your knee down on a motorcycle? How about your elbow? If you’re Scott Redding, you can get your head down but we wouldn’t recommend it. If you’re Marc Marquez you can get your whole body down sliding at high-speed… repeatedly.
Well, the editor of our esteemed German counterparts Motorrad has just had the honour of breaking a new Guinness World Record (unofficially for now) for the speed at which a rider is able to get an elbow down.
Fabian Dresler - equipped with a sturdy elbow guard and steely nerves - succeeded in getting his arm down onto the Tarmac at 168.65km/h (104.79mph), putting 6 km/h between himself and the erstwhile record of 162.4km/h (100.91mph) achieved by American professional racer Josh Herrin.
To achieve the feat it had to be done on a road-going bike, so no MotoGP or WorldSBK trickery here, and the leaning steed chosen here was a Honda CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP.
The second task was to find a corner which had enough entry speed, is long enough so as not to come hurtling into a hard braking zone way over the limit and banked enough to allow Dresler to lean the Honda just enough to kiss body to asphalt.
That came at the startlingly fast Slovakiaring in, well, Slovakia - a mainstay of the Endurance World Championship - and after two close attempts, nailed it on the third.
The record needs to be formally verified by the bods at Guinness but it looks like a new marker has been set… from one publication to another, congratulations!
We will be bringing this up at the next Visordown team meeting to see we can entice Toad into trying to surpass this with his own elbow-down - or butt down - record at, I don’t know, Mallory Park? Just kidding...
