An English engineer spent almost 750 hours turning an old Yamaha R6 motorcycle and several hundred pounds of spare steel into the world’s fastest penny-farthing bike.
Popular during the 1870s and 1880s, the penny-farthing bicycle is considered a symbol of the late Victorian period and the ancestor of the modern bicycle. Its odd name was inspired by the size difference between its front and rear wheels, with the British penny coin being considerably larger than the farthing. The iconic bicycle was only in style for about a decade, until the invention of the modern bike, which proved much safer, more comfortable, and easier to ride, but there’s just something about the odd look of the penny-farthing that still fascinates people. Case in point, this young engineer from Swindon, England, who spent hundreds of hours converting a 20-year-old motorcycle into the world’s fastest penny-farthing.
Photo: Greg Mitchell
“The idea for it came in a dream,” Greg Mitchell told Motorcycle News (MCN) Magazine. “I fell asleep watching YouTube videos and then dreamt of making this bike. I woke up and immediately wrote it down. I can’t draw, so I got AI to mock it up and I knew then that I just needed to make it.”
Mitchell first planned to build his SuperFarthing out of aluminum, but then he realized the raw material alone would cost him about £4,000 ($5,000) so he decided to go for some steel he had buried in his backyard instead. He then started working on a massive, 165-kilogram front wheel made up of 420 individually-machined pieces, as well as a massive vertical swingarm.
The English engineer found a 20-year-old Yamaha R6 that was perfect for his crazy build and spent dozens of hours repositioning its exhaust and radiator, drilling 890 individual holes, and figuring out ways of converting the motorcycle into the world’s fastest penny-farthing. He made it work somehow, but when the time came to finally take it out for a test drive, it became apparent that the bizarre contraption was downright unsafe to ride.
Photo: Greg Mitchell
Just to keep the SuperFarthing upright at all times, Mitchell had to install a pair of lateral stabilizer wheels, which he originally conceived as hydraulically retractable. However, he soon realized that attempting to maneuver his creation without them was “suicide with extra steps” so he removed the option to lift the stabilizers altogether. But that was only one of many problems he would have to solve. Even at full steering lock, the bike would only go straight due to huge fork flex, and despite all the rider’s efforts, the bike followed even the slightest road camber.
Mitchell knew he had to go back to the drawing board to make the SuperFarthing rideable, and he did just that. He installed a rigid fork assembly, fortified the frame of his unique bike, and to make it even slightly controllable, he implemented a hydraulic power steering system, using handlebar-mounted buttons to keep the penny-farthing from succumbing to road cambers.
“I was originally thinking I would ride it once and then never again, but it’s actually nowhere near as bad as you would think. With the stabilizers down, it’s just like riding a really tall quadbike,” Greg said. “So far, I’ve only managed to get about 50mph out of it, but that was on a short stretch of road. It’ll definitely do more though. I’ll need to find somewhere bigger to get some more practice in because it’s so different to riding anything else.”
The world’s faster penny-farthing isn’t road-legal in England because of its non-pneumatic front wheel, so testing it out on the open road isn’t an option, but Mitchell would really like to ride it on a perfectly flat track to bypass the hydraulic power steering, as “trying to steer it with buttons is not the best, as you can imagine, especially at speed”.
Although still far from being the world’s safest or most comfortable motorcycle, the SuperFarthing is still both visually and technically impressive. And Greg Mitchell honestly believes that under the right conditions, it can reach speeds of around 140mph.
