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- Neil Campbell aims to break the cycling land speed record this weekend.
- He plans test runs Friday before attempting the record at Bonneville Speedway.
- The current record is 183.93 mph set by Denise Mueller-Korenek in 2018.
SALT LAKE CITY — Months after a harrowing accident during a test run that left him bruised inside and out, a British man said Thursday he hoped for a better outcome this weekend as he attempted to break the cycling land speed record at Bonneville Speedway.
Neil Campbell said he was planning to do multiple test runs on Friday before "pushing some boundaries" on Saturday.
"Hopefully by tomorrow, we're going to be knocking on the door of the current record," Campbell said Thursday afternoon during an interview with KSL. "I just want to get on it and do it."
The current cycling land speed record is 183.93 mph, set in 2018 on the Bonneville Salt Flats by Denise Mueller-Korenek.
During the ill-fated "warmup" run in Arkansas last October in which he ran into the truck in front of him and then held onto that truck for dear life as the cycle tried to drag him away, Campbell set a new men's cycling land speed record of 175.89 miles per hour.
"The bike crashed, I didn't," Campbell laughed. "That was enough, really. I don't want to repeat that."
To reach such high speeds on a bicycle, Campbell said it requires cycling in a "slipstream."
"Slipstream cycling is taking standard bike racing to the extreme," Campbell said as he explained the action of riding just off the bumper of a specially configured truck to create an aerodynamic advantage. "Typically, if you're riding behind somebody you're saving about 30 percent of your energy compared to the guy in the front. This takes it to the extreme of how fast you can go when the wind resistance is removed."
Campbell said he initially got interested in speed and land speed racing 30 years ago and has been actively pursuing records for the past 15 years.
"That was a slow process to start out with just a tandem bicycle and a local runway in the U.K. and then slowly start getting faster and faster and the bikes got better and better, and the cars got faster and faster, and it culminated in the crash in Arkansas last year," Campbell said. "We've always done it on 2-mile runways, and the dream was always to do it here."
He said he was hopeful the smooth surface and long runway at Bonneville would help him get over the top.
"This has been my dream," Campbell said. "Hopefully that big 'carrot' will overcome all doubts and worries and stresses and anxieties and once again on it, it will be like, 'yep, let's go!'"
