I don't know how much breathing my brother did during a race. It was all over in a few seconds. As for someone on an exposed "motorcycle" attempting to do 400 MPH, the dynamic pressure being stuffed down his nose would be pretty high. Inhaling wouldn't be a problem but exhaling could prove difficult.

When someone ejects from a plane going 400+ MPH, it's a pretty violent situation. I don't recall any of the stories I've read talking about difficulty breathing during an ejection, but then they're wearing oxygen masks to help protect their faces. Anyone crazy enought to attempt 400 MPH on an exposed motorcycle would probably have to wear a mask of some sort.

Then there was this guy back in the 1970s who called himself a wing walker. Actually, he was strapped to a pole mounted on the top of an old jet airliner (I think it was a DC-8). The airliner flew around at over 200 MPH at a few airshows with him riding on top. If memory serves, he ended his airshow career when the airliner flew through a rain shower with him outside in the breeze. Those raindrops beat him up pretty bad. I did a quick search online and couldn't find anything on him.

And then there was John Stapp who rode a rocket sled to a land speed record of 632 MPH without a face mask. That guy had balls of titanium. He apparently was there when Murphy's Law originated, too, according to this source:

Murphy'S Law prov. The correct, *original* Murphy's Law reads: "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." This is a principle of defensive design, cited here because it is usually given in mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges of design for lusers. For example, you don't make a two-pin plug symmetrical and then label it `THIS WAY UP'; if it matters which way it is plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical (see also the anecdote under magic smoke).



Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later.

Within months `Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on "Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is sometimes referred to as Finagle'S Law. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself!