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) in two runs in opposite directions. The bike is now an exhibit of the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum. 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