The world record for the highest speed generated by a human-powered vehicle has been broken. VeloX3 has become the world’s fastest bike. It has clocked a speed of 83.13 mph or 133.78 km/h. The VeloX3 featured in the World Human Powered Speed Challenge that is held at Battle Mountain in Nevada, US, and the pilot of VeloX3, Sebastiaan Bowier sped up the vehicle to the superfast record-breaking speed. The VeloX3 has been developed by a group of Dutch students from the Delft University of Technology in Amsterdam, a group that is more popularly known as the Human Power Team. The team worked on the preceding VeloX bikes and their designs, namely the VeloX and VeloX2. There are several designs and functional elements of the earlier vehicles in the VeloX3. The group worked in association with another team of students from VU University in Amsterdam. VeloX3 is an un-paced cycle with a fully faired recumbent form. The outer shell or aeroshell that was used in the VeloX3 has the same paint job done as is found on Formula One cars. There were numerous issues with the VeloX3 during the trial phase but the problems were attended to before the bike went on the run at Battle Mountain. The world record for the fastest human-powered vehicle speed was held by Sam Whittingham. The Canadian had held the record at 133.18 km/h. At the beginning of the challenge, it had seemed unlikely for the VeloX3 to break the record with all its technical glitches and performance issues. But the bike eventually made its mark on the last day of the challenge. The VeloX3 is pretty state of the art where a cyclist is in recumbent form, gets some room to move around and gets a view with the aid of the camera installed outside and it has a tenth of the drag as is experienced with normal cycles. But the advanced bike has a considerably low tech start. The bike needs to be pushed to get started. The starting mechanism has thus been named ‘push’. The starting mechanism possibly explains why Sebastiaan Bowier took 8 km to achieve the record-breaking speed. If the distance needed for the push can be shortened or if there was a more advanced starting mechanism, then the run-up could have possibly been shorter. Regardless of the minor oddities of the VeloX3, it does happen to be the fastest human-powered vehicle in the world right now. myhybrid.net