Another vision of the tricycle. The human mind is a complex organ. Sometimes he strives to put all his genius at the service of an innovation which appears to be sensational and… ultimately only produces a wet firecracker. An excellent illustration of this is the Tsar tank , also known as Char Lebedenko (after the name of its inventor), a prototype armored tricycle dating from the start of the First World War.

Slow & furious. Remarkable by its absurd shape, the machine was equipped with front wheels 9 meters in diameter and a rear wheel of 1.5 meters. A beautiful beast 12 meters high and 15 long, displaying 40 tons on the scale. Yes, the machine had to impose and to move it forward, the engineers had thought of equipping it with two 240 horsepower engines. Enough to allow it to reach a top speed of 17 km / h (a performance for the time) while taking a dozen men on board as well as two cannons and several shooting weapons.

Stop your chariot. If its design was thought so, it was to allow the tank to easily overcome obstacles. However, if the project turned out to be a fiasco (and its design abandoned in 1915), it was indeed because the design (and the weight) of the tank made it stuck in the soft earth. If you are passionate about wacky war machines, we can advise you better than to look at this great scooter , emblem of beautiful French engineering and used by the army during the 1950s.