This is John Petsche, mechanical engineer by day, garden-shed inventor by night, and the very home-made motorcycle he is propping up in the picture did indeed come out of his garden shed - and now holds a US National speed record.
No, we're not kidding.
What makes this bitsa (it's an English term for a home-brewed racer - bitsa this bitsa that) special is not that it is a diesel (there's plenty of those around), but that it starts and runs on off-the-shelf canola oil.
Based on what looks like a Kawasaki Z200 rolling chassis with solid rear suspension, it now has a 4.8kW, 325cc Yanmar industrial diesel engine retuned to run on vegetable oil, a centrifugal clutch and chain final drive - that's right: one speed, no gearbox.
Once he'd got it running, Petsche took it to the Loring Timing Association in Loring, Maine, a bunch of speed freaks who use an abandoned air force base with what is reputed to be the world's 13th longest runway to stage top speed runs for enthusiasts who don't want to have to salt-proof everything for Bonneville.
Bragging rights for bikes at Loring start at 200mph (322km/h) but, after the scrutineers got over laughing at Petsche's Yanmarsaki, they created a category for it - 350cc Alternate Fuel - and Petsche is now the proud holder of the class record: 90.45km/h.
And he plans to improve on that next year with a more efficient clutch and longer gearing.
Never mind that he could have gone a lot faster than that (well, a little faster) on a standard Royal Enfield Bullet with a 325cc Lombardini diesel conversion kit, a number of which have been tweaked to run on unrefined vegetable oil - the point is that he built this one himself, using low-cost, mostly second-hand components, and still returned 2.36 litres/100km on his record-setting run.
That’s 2.36 litres of grown-in-a-field, 100 percent sustainable cooking oil; the guys at Loring aren't laughing quite so loud now.