Annals Of Inanity–Where’s The Fire?: Most of us have been slapped with speeding tickets, mostly for topping the speed limit by 15, 20, 25 mph. So TWC would like to offer a salute to one Samuel Armstrong Tilley, from the great state of Minnesota. Last month, Tilley was hit with a speeding ticket for doing, umm, 205.1 mph on a Honda motorcycle. Yikes. That’s believed to be an unofficial world record for speeding on a public road, exceeding the previous record set by New Yorker Dr. William Faenza, who was nabbed doing 182 mph (in a 55 mph zone) in a 1997 Lamborghini Diablo. Tilley was clocked by a police plane using a stopwatch, but is contesting his ticket by arguing his Honda RC51 bike is only capable of about 145-150 mph (oh, is that all?). Might the police plane pilot have made a mistake? Turns out he was timing both Tilley and a friend of Tilley’s (who was doing 111mph on an MV Agusta F4i)…and flying the plane at the same time. You decide. Anyhow, if you want to get a sense of what it’s like to be on a motorcycle doing close to 200 mph, check out this mesmerizing video (note: the speedo is registering kilometers per hour. When it hits 299 the bike is doing about 180 mph).

Tilley’s fine was only $105 so he doesn’t have to worry too much one way or the other. He’s just lucky he’s not a citizen of Finland, where speeding ticket fines are proportional to the speeder’s personal wealth. The result: Finnish millionaire Jussi Salonoja was recently fined a world record $216,900 for speeding in a 25 mph zone. Now that’s a fine…



Tilley’s Defense: “C’mon, Judge. There was no way I was doing 200 mph on this thing…”