Jan 7 (Reuters) - Spanish motorcycle rider Carles Falcon was flown to hospital with serious injuries after he crashed near the end of Sunday's second stage of the Dakar Rally in the deserts of Saudi Arabia.
Race director David Castera told reporters Falcon had lacked a pulse but was resuscitated by the first doctor to arrive on the scene.
French veteran Stephane Peterhansel took the 50th car stage win of his record-breaking Dakar career as familiar names moved back into the reckoning and Spain's Carlos Sainz took over at the front for Audi.


Peterhansel, known as 'Monsieur Dakar' after 14 overall victories on two wheels and four between 1991 and 2021, finished the stage from Al Henakiyah to Al Duwadimi 29 seconds clear of compatriot and nine times world rally champion Sebastien Loeb.
The stage win was the 83rd of Peterhansel's career across two and four wheeled categories and the Audi driver now shares the car record with Finnish great Ari Vatanen. The 58-year-old moved up to ninth overall.


Three times Dakar winner Sainz, 61, was eighth fastest on the 463km stage.
Saudi Arabia's Yazeed Al Rajhi slotted into second place overall in his Toyota, one minute and 51 seconds behind the Spaniard, with Loeb moving up from 19th to third with four minutes and 17 seconds to make up.
Defending champion Nasser Al-Attiyah of Qatar was fourth on the stage, ending up seventh overall and more than 12 minutes off the lead.

"We pushed from the beginning, but after we broke the rear we stopped for more than 10 minutes to repair," said the five times winner.
"With all the problems yesterday and today we are still in the game, it's only 12 minutes in the overall."
Overnight leader Guillaume de Mevius dropped from first to fifth after having to go first on the road and losing 27 minutes to Peterhansel.
"A difficult day for us for sure," said the Belgian.
"We started in front so, the first 200 km was OK I think. And after 200, a little bit more, Carlos passed us when we got lost.
"Then we were in the dust of Carlos and then we got lost a second time and then we got a puncture and then everything after was more difficult."
Botswana's Ross Branch was 11th in the motorcycle stage but retained the overall lead on two wheels with Chile's Jose Ignacio Cornejo two minutes and 55 seconds behind.
American rider Mason Klein, third overnight, hit mechanical trouble and spent two hours on repairs.

Hubert Auriol, who won the Dakar Rally on three occasions between 1981 and 1992, has died following a lengthy illness at the age of 68.
Born in Addis Abeba in Ethiopa in 1952, Auriol plied his early Dakar days in the motorbike category, competing nine times and winning the event for BMW in 1981 and 1983.
Nicknamed “the African”, Auriol was a natural on the fast desert tracks of the Dakar and gained universal admiration in the 1987 edition following an epic rally-long duel with great rival Cyril Neveu.
The pair battled tooth-and-nail all rally, with Auriol crashing agonizingly close to the end on the final stage, breaking both ankles.
Despite this, he made it to the finish broken and in tears as Neveu claimed victory.
Auriol then moved into the car category the following year, contesting the 1988 edition in a factory Mitsubishi Pajero T3.
He won the 1992 Dakar, which finished in Cape Town, South Africa with Mitsubishi before joining Citroën for 1993.

His final Dakar as a competitor came in 1994, marred by controversy when both Auriol and team-mate Pierre Lartigue by-passed a waypoint while the Mitsubishi duo of Bruno Saby and Jean-Luc Fontenay got stuck in the sand dunes.
Auriol still holds the record for the highest number of stage wins in one Dakar in the bike category (9) and has a total of 37 stage wins across the bike and car classes.
After retiring, Auriol joined Dakar organizer, the ASO, and was race director of the event between 1995 and 2004 before handing over to Patrick Zaniroli.
Auriol, who was also crowned cross-country rallies champion five times, was awarded the National Order of Merit and the Légion d’honneur in 1995.

Disgraced Moto2 rider Romano Fenati deservedly lost his spot on the Marinelli Snipers team after he attempted one of the more dangerous stunts we'll see in competitive racing.
As Fenati rode beside competitor Stefano Manzi at the San Marino GP, the 22-year-old reached out and grabbed Manzi's brake at 140 mph.

Luckily, Manzi didn't fall off his bike as Fenati's antics were completely uncalled for. Fenati was shown the black flag and disqualified from the race for attempting to harm an opponent.
While he was banned for two races and fired from his team, Fenati thought the penalty was unfair. Still, he added that he has no plans to race again.
Via Marca.com:
"That world is closed to me, I'll not race anymore," he said in an interview he granted to La Repubblica."It isn't my world. There is too much injustice. I was wrong, that is true, but nobody cares about my pain."I wasn't a real man, I was unable to control my anger but Manzi could have killed me too."

He still has a passion for the sport and he still has the style! See Jeremy McGrath ride a 500 two-stroke, an era of racing he just missed during his decorated career

Its high-speed, flowing corners make for great racing. They also make for scary, possibly career-ending crashes when it all goes wrong.


Then there are the fickle, sometimes frigid winds off the ocean. And the seagulls. Every couple of years, some seagull that for some strange reason thinks it's a good idea to hang out in the middle of a raging pack of unmuffled race bikes will lose his life in a collision with a World Superbike or a MotoGP prototype.
Even worse luck befell this track day rider at Phillip Island. A goose. He didn't even hit the goose. Another rider did. But he still paid the price in broken parts and shattered fairings.
Clearly, nothing in this video was good for the goose or the gander.

Valerie Thompson is no stranger to speed.

Thompson has been chasing land-speed records since she left NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle drag racing for the salt flats. In 2016, she took the title of world’s fastest female motorcycle racer and now wants to be fastest, period. But those numbers come at a price. 
During a run at the Lake Gairdner World Speed Trials, her BUB Seven streamliner lost control and crashed... at 343 mph. According to a Facebook post by the event’s sanctioning body, the Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme, “Thompson had passed the four-mile marker and reported being at 299 mph when the trouble started. Chase vehicles saw the tail end of the streamliner come up in the air, but the chutes were deployed which helped stabilize the resulting crash. The wreckage was spread out along nearly a mile of the course.” When I first saw this video, I expected severe injury at the very least, but I seriously underestimated the BUB Seven.

Denis Manning, the designer behind the BUB Seven, was on hand to comment on the crash in the video posted by Bonneville Stories:

“It’s gonna take time to determine the why, but we certainly know when and how. The best news is that she walked away from it. When you’re designing a machine like this, you are overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of getting the record.The theories about how much horsepower, how much frontal area, what kind of drag, all of that, you take into consideration and you make your choices to try to get the record. The dark side, I call it, is that you don’t really know what can happen if you have calamity, tragedy.”
If anyone was qualified to make a guess, though, it’d be him. The AMA counts Manning among the most accomplished builders in the sport. Decades of record-chasing all started as a teen watching Mickey Thompson race his quadruple-engined Challenger. Today, Manning can be found pushing the boundaries of speed with his creations.

​“As the builder, I come away from this very proud that the machine did what I thought it would do. I swore by the monocoque carbon fiber composite, I knew in my heart that it would be all right. But again, that’s just theory. Now, you walk up to it, and the theory, it’s right. Number one, she walked away. Number two, the machine says OK, I took a beating, but here I am.”


Thompson is expected to make more attempts at the overall motorcycle land speed record of 376.363 mph, set by Rocky Robinson in 2010. Hopefully she makes a full recovery as expected and can get back to chasing her dreams aboard the resurrected BUB Seven.

When it comes to packing big power in a small package, it's hard to beat a two-stroke engine. Dirty emissions have largely sidelined the two-stroke in modern machines, but a newly-founded motorcycle company hopes to bring it back in an ultra-lightweight bike available in street and track variants.
The Vins Duecinquanta is a carbon-fiber monocoque bike packing a 249cc V-twin two-stroke with electronic fuel injection. With an eye on extreme lightness, the street bike promises a curb weight of less than 210 lbs. No power figure is given, but with such a featherweight bike, it's almost guaranteed to be quick.
If that's not extreme enough for you, Vins also plans to introduce a Duecinquanta Competizione, a track-only variant cranking out more than 80 horses and weighing less than 190 lbs. Top speed is targeted at 150 mph.

Vins, based in Maranello, Italy, is the brainchild of a team of five who met each other while working at Ferrari in design and engineering. Their first prototype bike, the 100cc Powerlight, was introduced in Milan a few years ago sporting a carbon fiber monocoque.
While it's unclear whether Vins can get a two-stroke engine past European emissions regulations, the idea of a superlight two-stroke bike is extremely intriguing to us. Even at prices that, frankly, put it well out of our reach: $48,000 for the street bike, more than $60,000 for the track model.

Pretty sure the suspect didn't expect the motorcycle cop to have this much riding skill. Watch this intense high speed pursuit unfold on the steets of brazil

tags: breed of speed , motorcycle , brazil hot pursuit , nathan finneman , sirdrifto , motorcycle chase

A British engineer has designed and built his own steam-powered bicycle that can travel at 20m ph.
62-year-old Geoff Hudspith, the man behind the machine, said: "When it's underway it's surprisingly well-balanced because the weight of the boiler is balanced by the weight of the water tank on the other side at the back."
The steam powers a double action single cylinder, this turns a flywheel, which powers a chain on the front wheel.
The bike has a range of around ten miles on one tank of water.
Geoff has turned down several offers to buy it, even for high sums of money.
"I even had a bloke in Denmark, some years ago now, who was so taken with it he wanted to swap a house for it," Hudspith recalls.
"And well, I just thought; 'Well, you know, is this bloke serious or what?' You know. I suppose I should have taken the house and just made another steam bike."

For a second we thought he might save it, but unfortunately that didn't happen, thankfully he walked away with minor injuries.