riding behind a car in 1937. On 22 October 1938, Alfred Letourneur reached 147 km/h at a velodrome in Montlhéry, France, riding behind a motorbike. On 17 May 1941 Letourneur broke the record again, reaching on a Schwinn bicycle riding behind a specially equipped midget racer, on a Los Angeles freeway near Bakersfield, California. The first to surpass 200 km/h was the Frenchman Jose Meiffret in 1962, when he reached behind a Mercedes-Benz 300SL car on a German motorway. Allan Abbott, a cycling enthusiast and motorcycle racer, elevated the motor-paced bicycle speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats, reaching in 1973. John Howard, Olympic cyclist and Ironman triathlon winner, reset the record to , also at the Bonneville Salt Flats, on 20 July 1985. Fred Rompelberg from Maastricht, Netherlands was the holder of the motor-paced speed world record cycling with from 1995 to 2018. He used a special bicycle behind a dragster of the Strasburg Drag Racing Team at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Denise Mueller-Korenek claimed a women's bicycle land speed record at at the Bonneville Salt Flats on 10 September 2016. Mueller was coached by former record holder John Howard. On 17 September 2018, again at Bonneville, she took the outright world record, riding a special KHS bike with a 62Tx12T gear (488 gear-inches) to a new overall record top speed of 183. behind a converted rail dragster with a fairing. History of downhill records During the last decade of the 20th century, two Frenchmen, Eric Barone and Christian Taillefer, set the speed record descending on snow several times. On 28 March 2015, Eric Barone reached at Vars ski resort, France, besting his own record from 2000, using a specially designed prototype bicycle. Using a serial production bicycle, as opposed to prototype bicycles, the record holder is Markus Stöckl from Austria. He set a world speed record in 1999 on snow, descending at at Les Arcs. On 14 September 2007, Stöckl rode an Intense M6 mountainbike down the ski slope of La Parva, Chile, reaching the current record of . The top descending speeds have always been obtained on snow. Apart from that, the ashes of a volcano have been the other surface used. In November 2001, Eric Barone descended on the Cerro Negro volcano in Nicaragua at , beating his previous record achieved in Hawaii in 1999. Barone believed he could do more, and returned to the same