Interview with Britain’s fastest snowboarder, Jamie Barrow, on his jet powered snowboard speed record

Well, after seeing videos of my previous speed records, a guy called Adam at Dreamscience Propulsion contacted me and asked if I was interested in testing out his ‘Thrusters’ (electric jet engines). I said yes straight away, it sounded pretty exciting! So we briefly tested them in the UK and then came up with a plan to try them out properly somewhere with my snowboard. After doing some research, the frozen lake at St Moritz seemed perfect and the team at St Moritz said they were happy to support me, they’re even pisting a runway for the event! I’m off there next week with Adam to test the jet engines and see how fast I can go.

No one has ever done anything like this before on a snowboard as far as I’m aware, so this is all pretty much unknown to us! 

The jet engines themselves are perfectly safe but they’re not that light. This will affect my balance dramatically and make me more likely to catch an edge and fall over, which at speed isn’t that fun! Other than that it should be fine…!

It’s completely different, in the other two records I relied on gravity to take me down the slopes. In this one, I’m on the flat and using the electric engines to propel me forward, so it’ll be really interesting to see how fast I can go.

Honestly, I’ve got no idea! We’ll only know once we start testing them on the lake.

There’s definitely a few similar projects in mind at the moment but we need to get the right support to make them possible.

Don’t fall over! No seriously, go for it, see what records you can break, push your limits and just enjoy yourself.