China biker held after record-breaking circuit of Beijing ring road

For anyone who has sat in a sweaty taxi in hellish traffic on the second ring round that circles Beijing’s heart at 7pm on a Friday evening, a video of a motorcyclist clocking 237km/h (147mph) on the same stretch is like a vision of freedom and release.

Self-shot video footage of a 30-year-old man surnamed Pang achieving just that feat on his Yamaha YZF-R1 in August has gone viral on social media in China, probably for just that reason, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

For the record, the most recent model of Yamaha YZF-R1 has a top speed of more than 280 km/h.

Mr Pang made a 37.5 kilometre lap around Beijing in 13 minutes and 43 seconds, which is three times faster than the official speed limit.

Vision of freedom or not, Mr Pang has since been picked up by police in the southern province of Guangxi for his feat and brought back to the capital Beijing to face the music, according to a statement posted by the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau on its microblog.

The ring roads get their share of boy racers. In April, two men crashed a Ferrari and a Lamborghini were nicked trying to emulate some of the exploits from the high-octane car movie Fast and Furious.

Both of the wildly expensive cars were wrecked when the overshot a guardrail in an underpass and smashed into walls at speeds of over 160 km/h. The two drivers were sentenced to jail terms of five months and four months respectively.

But generally the ring roads are more Waiting for Godot than Le Mans. By way of example, last Friday it took 25 minutes to cover a small four-kilometre section of that same second ring road in a taxi with no air conditioning.

Mr Pang recorded his thrill-seeking journey in the early hours of August 22 with an action camera,then posted the footage on the popular video sharing website Youku where it was viewed more than 220,000 times. Before he was picked up, Mr Pang boasted how his personal record for a lap of the second ring road was 11 minutes.

In the video he weaves through the cars and overtakes others on the road. High-powered motorbikes are banned in the main ring roads, and other than small-engined two-wheelers and electric bikes, high-performance motorcycles are not supposed to be driven downtown.