“I mean if you’re not drinkin’ and speedin’ around, then what in the heck are you doin’ on a snowmobile in the first place?”
Norm MacDonald said that. He’s a comedian. A Swede named David Burman is no comedian, but he is now the world record holder for performing a backflip on a snowmobile on what could be described as melted snow, or snow in unstable lake form. And Burman was not drinking at the time.
Snowmobile people are like that. They enjoy pushing the edges of sanity.
As a rule, performing tricks on water is a thing done with a watercraft, or at least something with a level of buoyancy that lends itself to water. A typical modern snowmobile weighs 450 pounds. The first machines, rolled out in the late 1950’s, weighed over 1,000 pounds and had a top speed of around 20 mph. Today, the machines have an average speed between 40 and 60 mph. The Guinness world record speed for a snowmobile is 190.8 mph.
Burman, from the Swedish town of Arjeplog, decided to take his Ski-doo 600 RS snowmobile out on a nearby lake and spend the day setting speed and jump records, and ultimately he nailed a backflip.
The jump was about 22m long, and the velocity, coupled with the pitch jolted the audience and media on the shore as he successfully turned head over end and landed on the water, powering his heavy machine back to shore.
It was an impressive feat.
It’s safe to say that Burman is a pioneer for a new watersport, and clearly this accomplishment moves snowmobile sport into arenas that are not exclusive to winter months.
We guess the lead-up to the trick is straight physics. All the rider needed to do was maintain enough speed to hit the ramp and then quickly rev the engine to flip the machine. Of course, a healthy dose of crazy was likely necessary to execute such a trick.
