Meet the world's fastest steam-powered rocketbike

We sacrificed a camera to get up close and personal with the world's fastest steam-powered

rocket bike, which is also the second fastest motorcycle ever made. Propelled to staggering speeds by the rapid release of superheated water, the aptly named

Force of Nature is breaking world records left and right with aims to go even faster

There's no such thing as a safe rocket actually, let's put it into perspective

We caught up with the Force of Nature team as they prepared for a fresh attempt at breaking

their own record to see the steam-powered rocket bike in action, learn what goes into building and

riding a one-of-a-kind bike like this, and meet the man putting it all on the line to push steam

power where it's never been before. I always wanted to ride a rocket bike. No one's ever going to say

hey Graham, you know, do you fancy riding my rocket bike? So the only way to do it is build one

When I was a little lad, my dad brought me to Santa Port. The first thing I saw were drag bikes

It was like a moment in time I'd found what I wanted to do

In the 1970s, Evel Knievel tried to jump over Snake River Canyon

and that was a super-heated water rocket. That sort of inspired me. I'm not a trained rocket scientist

but when it comes to water rockets, there's not many people with more information than I have

What we're trying to do is become the quickest accelerating bike in the world using steam

So we got 120 litres of water in the boiler which you can see That wrapped around with insulation and at the front we got a burner That heating the water up to around about 260 degrees

That's 50 bar pressure. We've got a lot of energy stored in there. We release that in

three seconds. One of those per valve per second. You can't just get an old oxygen bottle and heat it up. We went to a company that manufactures

pressurised vessels for the nuclear and oil and gas industry. They made the vessel

We're well within the safety margin of what we're using it for

Because if it exploded, it wouldn't just be myself that would be injured or killed

It would be everybody else around me. So we've got to be very wary of what we're dealing with

What do you eat on the day? Well, I tend to not eat a great deal apart from sugary sweets

We've all got our vices. Go on. Go on. It's not the sort of vehicle you can just jump on and say, hold my beer

It's the quickest accelerating vehicle in the world, so I've been told

You've got to learn how to ride it. This is a bit where I start getting nervous

It's just this little moment in time when I'm on my own. Just sort of think about it

If there's an accident and this shuts off the bike, closes the valves and deploys the parachute

So we never have to use it, but I always check it just to make sure. Every time you get on the bike you have trepidation You got adrenaline and you got that little bit of reservation in your head thinking when I press this button my life going to change hopefully for the better

But if you've done everything you possibly can to make it as safe as you can, then you can do no more

Once we've got the bike off the mothership and we're going to the line, Diane, my wife, takes the safety pin out

shows me the pin to say the bike is mine and it's all live, tats me on the head, which is good as a kiss, and off we go

Five, four, three, two, one. As soon as I press that button, it's like something kicking me from behind

The whole g-force pulls your body back, tears your head backwards. Nothing can prepare you for what you're going to experience

6G on the hit and then we take us down to around about 3G before we run out of power

so even as we're running out of power we're still accelerating really well there's no torque

reaction it's not trying to wheel it's not trying to steer from the rear it's very low it's long

and it's it's very stable we've got no engine braking and very narrow tires so all the designs

which are there to help it go quick work against us when we're trying to stop

Once I see that parachute come out of the end I know everything alright

Yeah I'm alright. We have to go back and yse the data

Still quick. Not as quick as I wanted but still quick. But it's never as quick as I want

People think that steam is an old fashioned, out of date power source

source every power station that generates power from fuel is powered by steam when we first started

building it wanted to run a five second quarter and a 200 miles an hour pass neither have been

done using steam we've since achieved both of those goals and because we're so close to running

a two second eighth mile and a four second quarter we've now changed our objectives to see if we can

do that the quickest eighth mile we've run at the moment is 3.1 and the quickest quarter mile we've

done is 5.5. Same time again tomorrow we'll be out and with a different setting. Riding the bike

secondary in fairness, just the engineering side of it is what appeals to me. Especially when people

say that it's not going to work that gives you more incentive to to try and prove people wrong

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