Britain’s Richard Jenkins has just broken the world land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle. The high-tech machine he used is called the Greenbird, which is the fifth wind-powered ride Jenkins has built. The resourceful adventurer designed the Greenbird himself over the course the past 10 years and built the machine almost completely from carbon fibre. Greenbird is sponsored by Ecotricity, the company currently working to build an electric Lotus that will be charged using wind-generated power.

In Nevada, USA on a dry lake bed, Jenkins managed to get Greenbird up to an amazing 202 kph, handily breaking the old record of 186 kph, which was set in 1999 by American Bob Schumacher. According to Jenkins, the feat itself was rather uneventful, saying, “things couldn’t have gone better.”

Now that Jenkins has successfully broken the record on land, he’s turning his attention to the ice, where he plans to break the record for that surface using a new, different Greenbird. The ice vehicle has blades not wheels and has a symmetric layout, with outriggers extending from each side of the fuselage. Jenkins hopes to answer the debate over whether travelling on ice or land will prove faster.