THE MICHIGAN MADMAN
EJ Potter was an engineering maverick with a showman’s heart and balls of steel. Which you need on a 5300cc drag bike…
The town of Ithaca is 200 miles south of the Canadian border on the Great Lakes and 125 miles north west of Detroit. The Michigan winters are long and there’s not much happening around there except for high school football and farming. In 1950 the town’s population was 2377, one of whom was a young Elon Jack Potter. Period photographs show a kid with thick specs, a crew cut and oily hands. And sometimes limbs in plaster cast too.
As a teenager EJ (even his mother stopped calling him Elon) had to make his own entertainment, much of which revolved around the internal combustion engine. With money saved from working on the family farm he bought motorcycles. He must have worked hard, one of them was a Vincent Black Shadow.
In his autobiography Potter paints a self-deprecating picture of himself as a dim-witted hillbilly but, reading between the lines, it’s clear he was far more than that. He had an audacious line in lateral thinking, an extreme case of can-do attitude, a showman’s understanding of what people will pay to watch and balls made of solid steel. Most of his knowledge was learnt at the school of hard knocks, he dropped out of college, but if what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger then Potter should have been indestructible. Well, almost. Alzheimers got him in 2012 but, given that 1960s drag race crowds had been paying to see him race in the expectation that there wouldn’t be another chance, it was pretty impressive that he lived into his seventies.
The moment that shaped EJ’S life occurred in the late 1950s when the teenager some how realised that a small block Chevrolet engine (that’s a 4300cc V8 that weighs well over 500 pounds) could be shoe-horned into a HarleyDavidson chassis.
‘Ignorance is a powerful tool if applied at the right time,’ EJ wrote of the idea in his autobiography, ‘even usually surpassing knowledge.’ Working nights in a petrol station, with access to a welding torch and a hacksaw,
‘More power saw EJ criss-crossing America, being paid to make a lot of noise, smoke and generally looking like he might not survive’
he set to work. Fitting the engine was one thing, but installing a transmission was something else; EJ made his own centrifugal clutch using Harley-davidson brake components and a sprocket from his father’s combine harvester. Gearbox? Given a surplus of power and a lack of space, why bother with gears?
The first drag strip outing was a failure as 200hp discovered the weak spots in the home made drive train, but the promoter, recognising an audience attraction when he saw one, invited EJ back, with the promise of a dollar for every mph that he could go, over 100. A career was born, though with the home-made clutch limiting the bike’s speed to 115mph earnings were just 15 dollars per outing. More was required.
‘It developed that one night, while drinking about one beer and feeling real philosophical in my drunken haze, I came to realise that the clutch had to go in favour of a solid drive system… Major leap of technology here.’
The new transmission, or lack of, meant that the V8 would be started with its back wheel on a stand and the bike would be launched by dropping it off the stand with the wheel turning at the equivalent of 150mph. Writing that is simple, but can you imagine the balls required to do it for the first time? The resultant wheel spin provided variable gearing and produced spectacular amounts of tyre smoke, while allowing EJ to point the snaking bike towards the end of the dragstrip. A rear tyre lasted just three runs. It looked dangerous because it was dangerous, but that first outing resulted in a terminal speed of 136mph and the promoter insisting on a new deal of one dollar for every mph over 120. That winter a revised version of the bike was built, with more power and improved engineering, and soon EJ was criss-crossing America, being paid to make a lot of noise, smoke and generally looking like he might not survive for a return visit. Somewhere along the way he acquired the Michigan Madman moniker, which helped the brand. It wasn’t long until his fame spread beyond America too. In June 1966 EJ was one of a team of American drag racers shipped into the UK to race at Santa Pod. Widowmaker was now quoted at 5300cc, with 450bhp and weighing 725lbs. On 4 June he recorded a 10.62 second run at Santa Pod, a new course record for motorcycles. Quoted in Motorcycle News he observed that: ‘Drag racing is a way to make a living without actually working.’
The following weekend’s activities didn’t have such a good outcome. On his sixth run, and attempting to better the new record, a 10.18 second time posted by Alf Hagon earlier in the day, Widowmaker slewed into the wall, then ricocheted up the track before depositing EJ on his ear. He was carted off to Bedford General Hospital; the next day he was reported to be cheerful and in no danger.
The bike was battered, but having got it back to Michigan some speedy repairs with the welding torch got it ready for the next meeting in Florida. EJ, still a little stiff from his encounter with English tarmac, had to be lifted off at the end of each run.
EJ eventually built seven different versions of the bike running them from the early sixties until 1973. The first three were called Bloody Mary, on account of being painted in the red paint used for Farmall agricultural machinery, subsequent versions were known as Widowmaker. And they didn’t just look dangerous, they were properly fast.
The 1973 Guinness Book of Records identified Widowmaker as The World’s Fastest Motorcycle, with a 1970 run of 8.68 seconds in the standing quarter mile, and a maximum speed of 172mph. Unfortunately motorcycle drag racing authorities didn’t recognise Potter’s speeds, apparently because the bikes didn’t comply with their rules. Which probably didn’t bother EJ, as long as promoters kept giving him cheques. Widowmaker wasn’t his only project, many of which utilised components that were available as military surplus. In 1966 he built a four-wheel drive electric car, using the body of an Austin 1100 fitted with a 200 horsepower motor at each wheel. The electricity required to run it came from a static generator powered by an Allison aircraft engine and the car picked up the power from cables laid down on the track; yep, a giant Scalextric car that did 120mph in the quarter mile. He also built a couple of drag race cars using 1000bhp V12 Allison engines from Boeing Super Fortress bombers.
When he came upon a Fairchild J-44 jet engine from a cruise missile he used it to power a trike featuring a Honda CB750 double disc front end and a Suzuki GT750 fuel tank. ‘I always thought trikes were sort of a wimpy contraption,’ he says in his book, ‘but in this case it was a necessity because with a giant exhaust pipe, you just can’t put a wheel back there very easily.’
The trike’s first public outing was scheduled for a three-day drag meet in Florida where EJ was contracted to run 150mph off the trailer, and do three runs of increasing speed each day. At the end of the first run the chute failed to open, ‘right about this time
I got a real quick touch of the murky future syndrome,’ observed EJ. The trike flipped and EJ ended up with temporary paralysis from the neck down.
Tractor pulling took off in America in the mid-seventies and started looking like a safer pastime. EJ used Allison engines for that too, specialising in building rough looking tractors that worked brilliantly, and really pissed off the opposition. The first was called Ugly. The next, built with a 4000hp W24 engine, he christened Double Ugly. You get the idea…
Somehow EJ Potter made a career out of messing around with excessively powerful engines and building extraordinary homespun contraptions. I spoke to him in 2007 when he was entertaining himself by building devices to dispose of snow in north America’s wintertime parking lots. ‘How do those work?’ I naively asked. ‘Oh they’re real simple,’ he replied. ‘It’s just a jet engine attached to a dumpster (skip). The only trouble is getting rid of the water fast enough.’