THE SPARROW STORY
Quicksilver: Mike Corbin's Electric Land Speed Motorcycle
Long before the Sparrow, Mike Corbin was building electric motorcycles for the Bonneville Salt Flats. Quicksilver, his 1974 racer, is the machine most closely tied to his name.
From the Sparrow archive. Product plans, events and availability described here belong to the original historical period.
Salt flats and silver-zinc
Company records state that in 1972 Corbin built and piloted an electric motorcycle that set a record over 100 miles per hour at Bonneville. In 1974 he built a new racer using Yardney silver-zinc batteries instead of lead-acid, which the archive describes as a first for an electric race motorcycle. The battery chemistry gave the bike its name.
Silver-zinc cells were valued in that era for high energy density relative to lead-acid, at a cost that made sense for racing rather than road use. Quicksilver ran to a recorded speed of 165.397 miles per hour in 1974. The archive notes that this record stood untouched for over three decades. Decades later the bike was polished up at the Corbin shop and displayed at the Quail Motorcycle Gathering in May 2014.