'Jungle' Jim Hunter was possibly the originator of strapping yourself and your skis to a vehicle when he invented truck skiing, prior to winning bronze at the 1972 Sapporo Olympics. He used this as practice and got up to the mighty speed of about 62mph.
Next up was Finland's Kalevi Hakkinen who got up to speed of 118 miles an hour in a Lada which must have been going downhill to go that fast.
In 1980 Benny Lindberg got involved for a Saab advert. Producing cars for incredibly niche sports was a contributing factor in the demise of that car brand.
Here's the text form the ad: Many Italian drivers did a double take when they saw this strange arrangement of a Skier mounted to his skis which are mounted to the ski rack attached to a beautiful Saab 900 Turbo. On the top is Swedish downhill racer Benny Lindberg, testing his equipment at full speed. Behind the wheel of the Saab 900 Turbo is none other than Olympic ski champ Ingemar Stenmark.
I guess Ingemar Stenmark won the game of scissors, paper stone.
Next up was the UK's speed skier Graham Wilkie who got up to 12 mph in 1985 to test out his spandex suit.
In the same year two American skiers decided that they'd drop the pretence of skiing practice and go for a world record. Kirsten Culver got up to 153mph and holds the women's record and Sean Cridland holds the overall record with 162mph.
And that seems to be where this strange and brief trend died a death. The most recent example I can find is from speed monoskier Xavier Cousseau, who apparently practised on his old Fiat 500 around 2005. I'm not sure how much use the project was, he set a monoski speed record that year of 128 mph, which is about three times faster than a Fiat 500 goes.
The cameraman moved faster than the car.
I can't find any evidence of any roof-top snowboarding records.. The closest we've got so far was this Norwegian advert and either no record was attempted or the snowboarder died trying.
The car-top skiing world record ranks pretty high up the levels of pointless records, along with the recent indoor snowboarding speed record. There's an opportunity for some snowboarder to create a new record here, you don't even need to be good at snowboarding. Once you've achieved that, the boat-top world record, the aeroplane-top world record and the immensely dangerous helicopter-top world record are all waiting to be set.
You Might Also Like...
Darren Powell - The World’s Fastest (and most obscure) Snowboarder
.jpg)
