BangShift Blog Archive: We Interview EJ Potter, The Michigan Madman
Oct 11, 2013
Brian LohnesBangShift News7
The link didn't work right , so here's the story!
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Editor’s note: We ran this piece on EJ Potter back in 2010- We’re running it again today because we were thinking of EJ yesterday when the dude wiped out on the V8 bike in the vide we showed. Potter has passed away since this interview was done.) - EJ Potter ranks near the very top of our personal hero list. He is a true American original. Educated on the farm as a thoughtful, empirical thinker, Potter built some of the most legendary vehicles to ever grace a drag strip. The most famous are his jackstand-launched, small-b-Chevy-powered, Harley-framed motorcycles.
“The acceleration would be real noticeable and the vibrations, bumps, and engine noises would stop registering. It got kinda mental. It would feel like I was doing something that was not supposed to be even possible because from the time I drew that first picture in school of the Chevy and two wheels, nobody I ever talked to about it ever thought it was possible, and more to the point, nobody thought I could do it. So here I am going real fast, real smooth, all by myself approaching a place that no one else could, at that time, get to.” – Excerpt from Michigan Madman by EJ Potter
EJ Potter isn’t dead. Let’s get that out of the way real quick. You probably have a pal who’s a real guru on drag racing history and he’ll recount a half dozen stories of how ol’ EJ bought the farm. They are all bunk. He nearly checked out a couple times, sure, but his ticket was never fully punched.
The concept for his iconic machine was born during high school. Potter got the idea stuck in his head that a small-block Chevy engine looked like a Harley motor from the end, only longer. Finally following through with that reasoning, in 1960 he used a Harley frame as the base of the first bike. That bike would evolve into his drag strip act and ticket to international notoriety began. Potter first built a centrifugal clutch using Harley-Davidson brake parts and a sprocket from a combine that was on his father’s farm. After a couple of failures, Potter had the machine set up where it would run about 115 mph in the quarter mile. Then the idea that would become his signature came, “It developed that one night, while drinking about one beer and feeling really philosophical in my drunken haze, I came to realize that the clutch had to go in favor of a direct drive system,” Potter remembers in his book.
The system is brilliant in its simplicity. He put the bike on a stand, engaged the clutch with the tire off of the ground, run it to the redline, and dropped it off of the stand. Aside from fishtailing and roiling the tire down the entire strip, Potter was now making about 140 mph at the top end, all with a motor that was basically stock. It was immediately obvious that he was onto something, “I could tell that there was something afoot here, and I gradually started to think of making a living like this someday,” Potter said.
By the end of his career, when the bike was running nearly 190 mph in the quarter mile with alky-injected, 450-horsepower small-block Chevy motors, Potter’s math suggested that the tire was spinning 223 mph when he nudged himself off of the jack stand. There are not words in the English language to sum up how completely and utterly nuts that is when you think about the fact that these were ancient bias-ply car tires, not drag slicks, or modern racing rubber.
EJ spent 13 years of his life making a living by riding his series of Widow Maker bikes at strips across the country. “The big NHRA tracks would never have me in so I spent most of my time at small strips and outlaw tracks,” Potter said.
He found a willing audience in Jim Tice, the maverick owner of the AHRA. The sanctioning body was known for its innovative nature and willingness to take risks, like booking an unknown kid from Michigan with a V8-powered motorcycle into to its 1965 Winter Championships race at Bee Line Dragway in Arizona. It was on that weekend in 1965 that Hot Rod staff photographer Eric Rickman caught the bike on film and those photos began to make the rounds in a non-internet world.
“Tice told me the story later on that after I made my first run, his insurance guy came storming into the tower asking him if he had completely lost his mind. I thought that was kinda nice,” Potter said.
EJ on On Evel Knevil,
“I did one show that Evel Knevil was at. The difference between me and him was that he got paid to say he was going to do stuff, whether he did it or not. I got paid to actually do stuff.”
The Widow Maker would earn Potter a cult hero status rarely found in any genre of racing, let alone exhibition performances. He took his act worldwide, with a disastrous performance in England that ended with Potter balled up against the retaining wall. “That crash in England was a complete human error deal,” Potter explained. “I had made runs for four weekends and had no problems until the end of the last day of the trip.”
It’s always the last run that bites you in the ass. Potter had failed to tighten the right side of the rear axle, putting lots of strain on the chain adjuster, breaking it, and allowing the tire to move in any direction it chose to, the bike basically started to steer itself. The wreck put Potter in an English hospital. The upside to the story is that the bike, which had arrived in England in a shipping container as a motorcycle, was far cheaper to ship back labeled as “assorted motorcycle parts.”
Despite the injuries sustained in that crash and a handful of others, Potter never missed an appearance. Once he was so badly burned he had to wear gloves soaked in alcohol to keep an infection from setting into his hands. He drove his truck with the bike in the back to his next booking in that condition, with his wife mopping up the ooze from the wounds as they went down the road.
His 1973 trip to Australia was far more productive. Potter zinged off an 8.68-second lap that got him into the Guinness Book of World Records. As he writes in his book, “The (drag strip) surface was made out of asphalt with clam shells mixed in it,” he said. “I mean to tell you it was a real attention getter to look at those million little knives all ready for me to fall off and slide on them.” There had to be an easier way to make a living, and frankly, Potter had tried.