Speed is a funny thing. On paper, it’s clean and objective. Distance over time. A number you can brag about or casually drop in conversation. But when you’re the one actually doing the speed, everything changes.
I can roll up to 100 miles per hour on my Yamaha XSR900 without much drama. The bike is planted. The chassis feels sorted. The brakes work. The tires actually want to stay attached to the road. Modern motorcycles are engineered to make big numbers feel boring.
Now rewind more than a century. Same speed. Completely different reality.
If someone told me I had to hit 100 miles per hour on a motorcycle built in 1907, the answer would be a resounding hell no. Just no. Chances are you'd say the same thing, too. And that reaction alone tells us everything we need to know about how weird speed really is.
Because here’s the thing. 100 miles per hour in 1907 wasn’t just fast. It was borderline unimaginable. In modern terms, it’s closer to doing 200 today. The materials were primitive. The tires were barely tires. Frames were more like reinforced bicycle frames. Brakes were, well, optimistic at best. There was no safety net, no margin, and definitely no room for error.
That’s where the Curtiss V8 motorcycle enters the story. Built by aviation and motorcycle pioneer Glenn Curtiss, this machine wasn’t designed to be practical or refined. It existed for one reason only: to go faster than anyone had ever gone before on two wheels.
The specs still sound absurd even now. A massive 4.0-liter V8 engine originally developed for early aircraft use, making around 40 horsepower. That number doesn’t raise eyebrows today, but in 1907 it was nuclear. Most motorcycles of the era were making a fraction of that, often with single-cylinder engines that struggled just to stay running. It also goes to show just how crazy engineering has come these days. Modern V8 engines of a similar displacement are capable of pumping out literally 10 times more power than the Curtiss V8, and that's just mind blowing if you really think about it.
Back in its glory days, the Curtiss V8 was said to be capable of 130 miles per hour. Some accounts put it even higher. That’s not just impressive. That’s borderline unhinged. And the story gets even better. The motorcycle featured in the video isn’t the original 1907 land speed record machine. That bike is far too valuable and fragile to be ridden and lives on as a museum artifact. What we’re looking at instead is a painstaking, fully functional recreation built to match the original as closely as possible. And it appears on Jay Leno’s Garage.
This matters because Leno isn’t just another celebrity tourist in the automotive world. He’s one of the most legit car and bike guys out there. He doesn’t just collect machines. He understands them, works on them, and most importantly, rides them. He gets his hands dirty and actually respects the engineering, flaws and all. His garage isn’t about flexing rarity. It’s about preserving history. The Curtiss V8 fits that philosophy perfectly. It’s loud, crude, and mechanically honest. And it has absolutely zero interest in modern comfort or safety.
Watching Leno talk about the bike, as well as the B-roll of it being ridden on an empty back road, feels different because he never downplays the risk. He doesn’t romanticize it into something cute or harmless. He treats it with the respect it deserves, fully aware that this thing comes from an era when speed records were chased with courage rather than calculation.
And that brings everything back to speed. Speed hasn’t changed. Instead, our relationship with it has. Today, triple-digit speeds are filtered through electronics, suspension tuning, tire science, and decades of hard-earned engineering lessons. Back then, speed was raw, uncertain, and terrifying. Hitting 100 miles per hour meant trusting early metallurgy, questionable tires, and your own nerve.
Traction control, ABS, multi-compound tires, and fancy gear wouldn't become things until decades later. So back then it was really just you, the machine, and all the consequences. And that’s why the Curtiss V8 still matters even today. Not because of the number it achieved, but because of what that number meant at the time.
Source: Jay Leno's Garage
