Evel Knievel 1972. On January 7 and 8, 1971, Knievel set the record by selling over 100,000 tickets to back-to-back performances at the Houston Astrodome. On February 28, he set a new world record by jumping 19 cars with his Harley-Davidson XR-750 at the Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, California. The 19-car jump was filmed for the movie "Evel Knievel." Knievel held the record for 27 years until Bubba Blackwell jumped 20 cars in 1998 with an XR-750. In 2015, Doug Danger surpassed that number with 22 cars, accomplishing this feat on Evel Knievel's actual vintage 1972 Harley-Davidson XR-750. On May 10,
Big Red (motorcycle) Big Red (motorcycle) Big Red was the machine with which American Don Vesco took the motorcycle land-speed record, , on September 17, 1970 at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. At Bonneville Speed Week in 1969, Vesco took Big Red to a speed of . The following year, with the five and a half meter long motorcycle built from an aircraft drop tank, he undertook several more attempts to break the record set by Robert Leppan in 1966. He succeeded in setting a new record of . A month later, the record was broken again: Cal Rayborn reached an averaged