Steam and electricity are the motive forces driving two mind-boggling motorcycles through their paces at The Main Event, Santa Pod Raceway’s European championship drag racing spectacular over late May’s Spring Bank Holiday weekend.
While an array of bikes – remarkable machines in their own right – battle for supremacy in the FIM European Drag Racing Championship, a Dane and a Yorkshireman will demonstrate radically different approaches to drag racing’s quarter-mile; two wheels are the common denominator, but the similarity ends there.
Silver Lightning is the name of the quickest-accelerating battery-powered vehicle in the world, on two wheels or four. Hans-Henrik Thomsen has brought his electric motorbike from Denmark to Santa Pod twice before – 2020, 2022 – and set fresh world records on each occasion. The 1,200kW projectile clocked 6.619sec at 206.24mph over the standing-start quarter-mile on its last visit, world-leading marks for elapsed time and terminal speed which Thomsen and his True Cousins team will seek to better yet again this time out. In drag racing’s sound world, an electric motor whirr and the squeal of rubber on concrete count as pure silence, but stand by for plentiful noise if Thomsen scores another goal.
Yorkshire precision engineer Graham Sykes uses steam power (yes, steam!) to propel the bike he calls Force of Nature through the quarter-mile, and he doesn’t exactly puff his way up there. Like Thomsen and his electric machine, Sykes sets world records. Whereas Silver Lightning is wheel-driven, Force of Nature is a rocket bike. When Sykes opens the valve, an 88-litre tank of super-heated water empties its contents through a pair of nozzles into a jet of steam which blasts the bike towards the horizon. The tank runs dry in just 1.9 seconds. Thereafter, the bike simply coasts to the finish at over 150mph. But quarter-mile performance is not the full story. The real excitement takes place at the start of the run. A Top Fuel Dragster, reckoned the quickest-accelerating wheel-driven vehicle on the planet, will cover the first 60 feet in a little over 0.8sec on a good run. Force of Nature has been timed at a full tenth of a second quicker, and has been clocked at nearly 190mph at the eighth-mile (660 feet), just as the oomph is running out. Sykes plans to install a 110-litre tank producing 3 seconds of power later this year with an eye on topping 200mph.
While these two machines demonstrate their abilities on exhibition runs, riders of conventional motorcycles (conventional, that is, in drag racing terms) will be competing for supremacy in the FIM European Drag Racing Championship. Reigning Top Fuel Bike champion Rikard Gustafsson from Sweden defends his crown with the fastest two-wheeler on the premises, at 260.65mph, while racers battle for early-season advantage in three other classes: nitro SuperTwin, Pro Stock Bike and Super Street Bike (street tyres, no wheelie bars and 6.6sec/230mph courtesy of Hungarian champion Dániel Donát Lencsés).
The Main Event 2025 takes place from Friday, May 23rd to Monday, May 26th at Santa Pod Raceway, near Wellingborough NN29 7XA, with a wide range of off-track entertainment complementing the racing action. Full event details are available at https://santapod.co.uk/main-event.php.
Book in advance, online at https://santapodtickets.com/p/mainevent or by telephoning the Box Office at 01234 782828. Paddock access is free for a close-up view of all the pitside action.
This story was originally published on May 13, 2025. 
