With his family, friends, current and former sponsors, and a whole crew of onlookers anxiously standing by, Chris strapped in and took advantage of what were apparently excellent salt conditions to rocket down the eleven-mile long track at over 354 miles an hour on his 'out' run, then reload and pull the trigger for a 346 mph pass on the return run. Two passes within two hours are the FIM requirement to officially take the record. The average was a bit over 350 and Chris is now the Fastest Man in the World on Two Wheels.

Here's an interview with Chris about his experience at Bonneville:

What were your thoughts coming into the event?

I knew that anything could happen. I was concentrating - my biggest thing is, I want to take it fast, but I wanted to get it off the line clean, I wanted to get it going. The course was eleven miles long, and in testing up until this point, I had never ridden the thing more than 4.7 miles, so I had a longer run-up than I had in my total longest run. So I didn't want to do anything silly early and have to abort the run.

We were actually, on our first run, going to do a 325 mile and hour pass, because the fastest I had ever gone up to that point was 300 miles an hour. I got the thing up, got it going good, I was at the four-mile marker, doing 325, and I rolled out of it a bit, because that's where we were headed. Everything felt good, it felt stable, and they told me if I felt good that I had a green light to go, and I felt great, so it took me about three or four seconds to put my foot back in it, and I did that at the four-and-a-half, I accelerated out the back side, and on my dash it said 342 miles and hour. I hit the high-speed chute, coasted past the eight, which takes a little while, put my main chutes out and coasted her to a stop. I'm thinking, 'well we had a pretty good run, we were close, everything's awesome, the bike felt great, I felt good, we were safe.'

They came up and told me we did 354 miles an hour and my jaw about hit the salt, to be honest with you. Come to find out that we had a different front tire on it and they never did a roll-out on it and recalibrated the front wheel for the speedometer, and I think we were all in a bit of shock at that point. After the initial elation kind of wore down a little bit, we realized, 'hey we got some work to do here.' We've got to get this thing turned around in two hours and go the other way.

We had a real solid turnaround, everyone did their job that they were expected to do, we had no issues on the return run, the winds were decent. We turned it around in about an hour, and started heading the other way. It ran a little lean off the bottom, it took a little while to get first gear. About the one mile marker, I started to pick up a cross wind, and it was blowing me toward the right side of the track. My natural the instincts and what they've told me to do is, you just steer it into the wind and keep it matted. I steered it to the left all the way through six, and we went through the timing lights and 346 and some change for an average of 350.884, and we were pretty happy with the new world record.

What does the bike turn in first gear, 200?

Nah, about 150. I kind of short-shifted it. We had a really, really solid first run, but I realized on the way back, by the two, that I had to keep my foot in it, and I was fighting it pretty hard, because I had to keep it wide open all the way through the six. I Kept wanting to punch a hole in the floorboard putting my foot down (laughs.) The run back was a lot more difficult than the run out, and I had my work cut out for me, and those winds probably cost us a few miles an hour on the return, but it was a good run, and it was enough to have a two-way pass at 350 plus, I think we were all kind of shell-shocked at the end of the second run, but it was enough to hold out all week.

Is the machine a four-speed?

Yes it is.

What's the cockpit like?

The bike has two joysticks that work opposite of each other, so it's kind of like a steering wheel, except it doesn't have a loop. The reason they designed that is for ease of getting in and out of the bike in case shit happens. To give you an idea of how quickly I can get out of it, the FIM came over and had to watch me escape from the bike from bring locked and loaded as if I'm going down the track. I popped the hatch - and somebody would remove that, because it's expensive and you don't want to throw them things around - popped the hatch, undid the five-point safety harness and was standing on my feet in six seconds. That's the reason for the push-pull design.

My controls, and the controls - both the right and the left - are out of an F4 Phantom fighter plane: My right gunner is transmission up, my left gunner is transmission down, my rocket launchers are skids up, skids down, my torpedo button 1 is for my high-speed parachute, torpedo button 2 is for my main parachute, and those are both on my right joystick. On my left, I have my auxiliary parachute and my power button. Those are the things I have to operate, along with my gas pedal. It does have a rear brake on my foot, and I have a toe release on my foot and a clutch on the left side. There's a lot of shit going on.

In On Any Sunday, they mention that the steering changes at certain speed thresholds, you have to turn left to go right at certain speeds. Did you have any of those sensations?

Not with this bike, no. If I want to right, I pull back right and push forward left, If I want to go left, on the left, I pull back and push forward right. It's just like a steering wheel, there's just no loop. It acts more like a car in that respect, except there's only two wheels. The design of the bike, the aerodynamics hug it to the ground, so it steers really, really well. It's different than a bike, but you are on two wheels.

What ran through your mind during the turnaround?

As far as I was concerned, I needed to concentrate. It takes a lot of concentration to run one of these things at these speeds. The last thing you want to do is make a silly little error and forget something, so I was doing the run in my head again, and just going over the controls and making sure I didn't miss anything, paying attention to the wind direction, the reports were getting down course so I knew what to expect. My return run was the first time I had gone in that direction on the salt, so I took a few minutes to study some landmarks on the horizon, what to aim for. Even though we have flags marking both sides of the racetrack, the last thing you want to do is to not know where you're at on the slat because it's such a big expanse. So, I let them focus on getting the bike ready, and I focused in on doing what I had to do to get this thing on down the salt and get us a record. That pretty much took the rest of my hour after getting down to the turnaround area.

Denis made a gearing change to prepare for a counterattack, should it be necessary. Did you guys have a target for what the thing would do with higher gearing?

I think our next goal was a 365 pass, and we made adjustments accordingly. We also had to put a new rear tire on, because I chunked the tire we had on the return run. We were set to go faster. We knew we had a bike capable of doing it, we just never had to pull it out of our hat.

Did you win any cash or a trophy or any token of the event?

Well, for now, I'd like to call myself the fastest man in the world in the BUB streamliner. That to me is a hell of an award. No, but we got lots of pictures.

How does this compare with everything else you've done?

I had very similar emotions to winning my first Grand National dirt track. The emotions were very, very similar. This was my very first race at Bonneville, and it's a race that we were able to win. So I think, if there's any comparison, I think that's it. Bear in mind, I'm not done going to Bonneville. I set a World Record, it's a record I expect will be broken, if not by ourselves, by some of the other capable teams. Sam Wheeler put out a one-way number of 355, that's certainly formidable. ACK Attack bike with Rocky Robinson at the controls is certainly formidable, they had several runs in the 340s throughout the week, and Dave Campos, who was in attendance at the event, and who held the record before ACK Attack broke it last Sunday, has vowed to come out of retirement, so we very well may have four motorcycles that are capable of - three for sure, we don't know what Campos is going to build, or if they're going to bring the old bike and make it faster or what - but we certainly have four pilots that are capable and at least three machines right now that are capable of bumping the number up. I think we're going to see a war of sorts at Bonneville for the next few years, anyhow.

Do you see 400 mph on the horizon?

I think the BUB streamliner is certainly capable of that, and I hope to be at the controls when that happens.

There's not much to see if you're there. You disappear, then you return.

Ask anybody that stood between the five and the six what they thought of those things going by at 350 miles an hour and then tell me that. It's smokin' dude!

Is there any sensation of speed?

The flags are going by, and you can tell the mile markers, but you have to focus hard on them to catch a wind direction because the flags float. You don't have time to appreciate the speed because you have so much going on. I never thought about going 350, I thought about going as fast as I could, and getting it stopped, and having the thing still rolling when it got to the stop. You don't have time to appreciate the speed, not when you're doing eight-and-a-half second miles. Doing 350, you're doing 512 feet per second, so basically you're looking at almost two football fields per second.