About This Series
This article is part of an ongoing monthly series on Dragbike.com featuring select chapters from Elmer Trett and the Gods of Thunder, the 2012 biography by Senior Editor Tom McCarthy. Released throughout 2026 to honor the 30th anniversary of Elmer Trett’s passing, this series chronicles the life, legacy, and impact of one of the most influential figures in motorcycle drag racing history. Each chapter explores Trett’s journey from humble beginnings to global Top Fuel dominance, while also preserving the deeper history of the sport and the pioneers who shaped it. New chapters are published monthly exclusively on Dragbike.com.
Before reading this article, read the previous article posts:
- Series Intro
- Book Intro
- Chapter 1 – Humble Beginnings
- Chapter 2 – The Origins of Mountain Magic
- Chapter 3 – The Teen Years
- Chapter 4 – North to Ohio
- Chapter 5 – Fuelish Intentions
- Chapter 6 – Class Dismissed
- Chapter 7 – Fateful Liasons
- Chapter 8 – A Terminal Lesson
- Chapter 9 – Single Solution
Chapter 10 – Very Unpopular Decisions
As the 1980 racing season unfolded, Elmer’s racing program was traveling at a rate of speed not unlike his drag bike; mind- boggling fast. Now that the Harley factory had decided to lend money to support his racing program, Elmer gave Dixon of Super Cycle Engineering the green light to make a chassis for his latest creation: his first blower bike.
Elmer’s family, business, and life were all in high gear, just like his fuel bikes. Gina was turning 18, Kelly was about to become 5, and Jackie and Elmer had been married for 11 years; 10 of those years were spent drag racing. Life now had its rhythm for Family Trett, and the beat evolved around V-Twin motorcycles. Not just any, mind you, but the world’s fastest and quickest V-twin-powered bikes made and driven by Elmer. This was the pinnacle of Elmer’s Harley years.
As his success in racing evolved, so did Elmer’s business in Ohio. What started out as a basement-based motorcycle engine repair business had now morphed into a full-blown motorcycle repair shop at the start of the nineteen-eighties. No longer in the basement, Trett’s Speed & Custom now had its own building and a showroom full of Harley-Davidson accessories. Anyone with a Harley could drop by for service or parts. If someone with an engine needed repairs, Elmer was there with a smile, ready to accommodate, so long as the motor was a Harley-Davidson. However, from Friday to Sunday, a sign on the front door read “Gone Racing.”
Jackie was, at times, just as busy as Elmer, if not more so. While she fully supported her husband in his racing efforts, she was not just a crew member: she was also a mother of two daughters, a loyal wife, and a mechanic. She could now add business partner to the list. While Elmer was rebuilding engines for customers, creating racing engines, and beefing up his drag bike, Jackie had to run the front counter in the showroom. She also had to keep track of inventory, order parts, monitor racing schedules, handle phone calls, and deal with customers. In her spare time, Jackie still had a house to attend to, meals to cook, two daughters in school, and a husband who was busier than a one-armed paper hanger. There was seldom a dull moment in the Trett Household.
Kelly Trett recalls, “Some of my best moments with my Daddy were when we just had some us time, it was so rare. My favorite times were when we would just sit and watch cartoons together, but those moments were few and far between.”
For Elmer, it wasn’t that he didn’t have time for his daughters; he was simply engrossed in his racing program. Elmer was out to create history. He was currently the world’s fastest man on a Harley Davidson motorcycle, but he was out to be the world’s fastest man on two wheels. His single-engine solution was meant to be his ticket to stardom in motorcycle drag racing.
Elmer was a man of great focus; he didn’t accomplish what he did by chance. His design and implementation of the first side-by-side one-piece crankshaft vertical twin were an epic moment in motorcycle drag racing history. He didn’t know it at the time, but this design would ultimately become the basis for the world’s fastest Harley-Davidson-based drag-racing motors for decades to come. This engine was the predecessor to a modern era racing engine known as the Overkill motor.
Throughout racing season, Elmer’s blower bike came together. Dixon finished the chassis. Shumaker and Elmer wrapped up the machining of the engine components. Stordeur fabricated parts as needed. Everyone’s efforts brought the bike to life. This was a historic event in the making, and it took the entire year to build.
A racing reporter, who was a confidante of the Trett Family, was called out to the residence in Ohio to record the moment when the bike was completed. Greg Guarinello, a photographic journalist, arrived around Valentine’s Day, 1981, with a camera in hand.
When Elmer and Stordeur fired up the bike in Elmer’s private garage, Greg was there. The fuel-injected, supercharged, nitromethane-burning monster was louder than any Harley drag bike they had ever heard. This thing was mean, even at idol. When the bike was warmed up enough to take a hit of the throttle, Elmer applied a gentle twist of the wrist.
Throttle response from a fuel-injected bike is instantaneous; throttle response from a supercharged, fuel-injected bike is exponentially quicker. Elmer’s brief twist of the throttle caused the bike to bark like a shotgun blast. The resulting thunderclap blew a four-foot-long fluorescent light fixture clean off the ceiling. Glass carnage, embellished with sheet metal, crashed to the floor, giving everyone a laugh and a moment to remember. This bike hadn’t even left the garage yet, and it was breaking things!
Elmer and Shumaker both had very high hopes and thousands of dollars invested in the Harley-based blower bike project. Elmer had visions of the Harley factory getting in solid behind him to finance his racing ventures so he could just concentrate on going fast. Unfortunately, Elmer’s dreams were short-lived because unbeknownst to him, he was trying to hitch his cart to a lame horse.
While Elmer, like thousands of other motorcyclists, had great faith in the Harley-Davidson Motor Company, the business world did not. In early 1981, the last great American motorcycle company was headed deep into financial trouble. Import motorcycles were having an enormous negative effect on Harley’s sales figures. The entire company was falling into dire financial straits.
Budget cuts were called for by the management of Harley-Davidson. It was time to tighten the belts and cut out whatever fat they could; namely, the racing programs. All department budgets were cut, and after the first financial quarter of 1981, O’Brien, who ran the racing department, was called into a meeting by upper management. O’Brian got the bad news: slash all your racing programs, save what you can, but only X number of dollars will be allotted to the racing department for the foreseeable future. It was crunch time.
The factory was trying to keep a sinking ship afloat. O’Brian was ordered to reduce the amount of money he had to spend for the racing season. He had no choice but to call Elmer and deliver the bad news.
Elmer had just begun testing the blower bike. He had a drum of nitromethane through it, and the combination showed promise, but it was too weak in the cylinder heads to support the power the lower end generated. When the bike was first assembled, Shumaker had taken the cylinder heads off his street bike, a new set of Shovelheads, to get the blower bike operational. Cast-aluminum factory-stock heads were much too weak for the cylinder pressures generated by a fuel-injected, supercharged, nitromethane-burning Top Fuel Harley. The bike cracked the heads every time they tried to make a pass.
Elmer needed money for research and development of the new combination. He needed his phone to ring so he could lobby for funds to take this project to the next level. The phone rang, and it was the factory, but it wasn’t the call Elmer wanted to hear.
O’Brian called Elmer to give him the bad news. Elmer’s portion of the racing budget was no longer available and O’Brian had to renege on his offer. This was devastating news. With no income coming into the Trett racing program, his season was over.
Many things disturbed Elmer greatly about this phone call. His new single-engine solution to address the rapidly advancing Jap Top Fuel bikes had to be fueled by money before it was by nitromethane; no budget, no racing. Not only had the factory turned its back on Elmer after first promising him money, but when Elmer lost his money, his best friend lost out, too.
Elmer had promised Shumaker he’d get paid for all those hundreds of hours that went into machining. This development meant Elmer had to tell his friend he couldn’t compensate him after his friend had already delivered his part of their bargain. This was highly unacceptable. Elmer was a man of honor. To go back on one’s word was to bring dishonor to the family name; that was not going to happen. Elmer had to think about this for a while; there were no good answers on how to handle it.
His solution came to him a few weeks later, fueled by more bad news.
Word reached Elmer’s ears that, in the weeks after the slashing of the Harley-Davidson racing budget, there was a business meeting involving the inner circle of H.D. racing. Elmer was told that someone at that meeting made the comment, “Don’t worry about Elmer. He’s already made the new bike; he’ll race it anyway.” This comment infuriated him. If someone thought they could take advantage of a Trett, they were in for a surprise. Elmer was angry. There would be changes ahead.
Elmer sat late one night in his workshop, alone, after a day’s work, looking at the single solution that could have, and should have, changed Top Fuel Harley racing’s direction. He had everything invested in this bike. Without major money investments, this research and development was going nowhere, nor were Trett’s Speed & Custom’s racing efforts. Worse, the Jap bikes were getting faster every year. If Elmer was to advance in Top Fuel motorcycle, he had to do something, and he had to do it fast. A new train of thought came to the troubled man.
Harley double-engine-powered Top Fuel bike racing was over, as far as Elmer was concerned. Two motors were too heavy, and heavy meant slow in drag racing. The Harleys could not continue to keep up with the lighter, quicker, faster Jap bikes. The inline four-cylinder motors had so many advantages over the Harley two-cylinder engines. Not only were the Jap bike engines lighter, stronger, and made with fewer parts, but they also multiplied every high-performance modification times four; one for each cylinder.
With a four-cylinder bike motor, if a mechanic makes a high-performance gain by hot-rodding the engine, because it’s a four-cylinder engine, the performance modification will yield a fourfold gain. With a Harley Davidson, a performance gain is times two for the two-cylinder engine. Also, because a Harley has a two-cylinder engine, if one cylinder has a mechanical issue or an ignition problem, the racer loses 50% of power. An inline four-cylinder engine with the same issue will only suffer a 25% power reduction. The end result, Elmer concluded, was that modern motors were the way to go in Top Fuel racing; they clearly had many more advantages.
Now came the hard part: what to do about this and how to do it.
Trett placed a call to a southern gentleman he’d done business with many times when he needed pistons. He called Ken Tipton. Tipton, who owned and operated MTC Corporation, now located in Florida, was not only the go-to guy for pistons used in race bikes, but also heavily invested in backing the Terminal Van Lines Top Fuel bike, which was at the peak of its performance in 1980. Some of the parts inside the TVL bike came from Tipton’s inventory. Tipton was a soft-spoken southern man like himself, so Elmer had no reservations about opening up to him in private over the phone.
“Hello, Ken, this is Elmer Trett,” he announced as the conversation unfolded. “Ah, Ken, I’m thinking about making some major changes in my Top Fuel racing program. If I were to change over to running a four-cylinder motorcycle, what could you do for me?”
After the initial shock had settled in, the two giants in Top Fuel motorcycle drag racing started exchanging ideas on what it would take to convert Elmer’s current supercharged Harley Davidson T/F bike into a Kawasaki-powered Top Fuel bike. After a few hours on the phone, Tipton let Elmer know he’d talk to Gray and Murdoch about this if that was okay with Elmer. They all needed to consider which Top Fuel bike parts they could put into Elmer’s program and what it would take to implement the changes. There was a lot to consider here, and Elmer agreed they would talk again soon.
After the initial conversation with Tipton, Elmer had an epiphany. Like a bolt from the blue, suddenly he had to decide if he was a brand racer or a true drag racer. A brand racer is devoted to and loyal to the brand of choice. A real drag racer is committed to going faster and quicker every year, no matter what the cost or consequences. So he had to ask himself, who was he as a racer? His answer sparked a very unpopular decision in the Trett Family household.
At dinner one night, as was the tradition in the Trett Family home, Elmer made his announcement to his wife and two daughters, “Hey, I’m not racing Harleys anymore. I’m building a Jap bike, and we’re gonna go racing faster than ever before.”
Gina looked at her Momma, who returned her gaze in utter disbelief. Elmer was a known prankster from way back, so no one took him seriously at first. Gina, Jackie, Kelly, and Shumaker assumed Elmer was up to one of his tricks again. This can’t be happening, not in the kingdom of Trett; this was a “Harleys Only” based family business.
A Harley-Davidson is a motorcycle, but the solo word “Harley” signifies a virtual religion. There are people who worship Harleys like a deity; there can be no belief in another. Talking blasphemy in a Harley home was out of the question. Family members assumed there was no way Elmer was serious about racing a Jap bike. At least that’s what they thought until parts boxes started arriving from MTC Corporation and M.R.E. Suddenly, there were Kawasaki engine components showing up at Trett’s Speed & Custom, and Elmer was no longer obsessed with working on the supercharged Harley.
Then the unthinkable happened. Elmer started taking apart his single solution wonder bike and delivered the engine back to Shumaker Racing Components. Kawasaki engine cases and crankshafts are now arriving at the shop. Elmer set up a set of empty Kawasaki engine cases and started making a set of engine plates to adapt the motor to the blower bike chassis. This was no joke. The Harley motor was out, and a Jap bike engine was being installed in the chassis. Gina was furious; she refused to even look at it.
In as tactful a way as possible, Jackie tried to talk to her husband about this, as did her daughter, who was a lot more vocal in her concerns. All of the kids whom the Trett children had played with while growing up came from Harley-Davidson-based households. Marion Owens kids, Jim McClure’s children, all held dear the common thread of Harley Davidson. What Elmer was doing was tantamount to treason! There was a war going on in Top Fuel, and Elmer, the one-time King of the Harleys, was jumping the fence and going over to the other side. This decision was as serious as a heart attack; long-term friendships and the family business were at stake here. Gina was livid. “Do you know what my friends are gonna say to me!” As a teenager with a Trett temper, she had a difficult time holding her tongue, and Daddy got an earful.
Elmer just smiled and tried to ease the wagging tongues, but he knew he’d made the right decision. Big Carl Ahlfeldt had switched to Kawasaki power in 1975; no one thought any less of him for it. Danny Johnson, who once inspired Elmer, had also switched to Kawasaki and was currently experimenting with single-engine, blown, injected nitro, as was Chris Hand, who had also gone four-cylinder import bike power. Hell, if they could do it, why not me, he thought to himself. His decision was mighty unpopular, but not without precedent. To Elmer, he was just stepping up to a new challenge, so people needed to get with the new program. Enough already with the wagging tongues. There was work to do.
As the new engine came together and the single-engine Harley blower bike came apart, eventually, Elmer put his foot down: no more negative talk by anyone; there was a new race bike to build. Unfortunately, one of their loyal Harley customers didn’t get the memo.
One afternoon, while Jackie was working the front counter at Trett’s Speed & Custom, a customer came in to pick up some parts for his Harley. He made a couple of comments about Elmer having a Jap bike under construction in the shop. Elmer didn’t take too kindly to the comments made in the presence of his wife. When the customer awoke from his sudden knuckle-nap on the showroom floor, Elmer warned him one last time never to use profanity in the presence of women in his shop. It was also a bad idea to be talking negatively about Elmer’s new Top Fuel bike. He was a man on a mission; woe be to anyone who got in his way.
For close to a year, from the summer of 1980 to the summer of 1981, the Trett’s Speed & Custom team did some racing, but not a lot. Elmer’s focus was on building the new bike. The John Dixon chassis that held the single-engine, blown, injected nitro Harley was cut up and reconfigured by Bonnie Truett, with help from Elmer, to accept the new Kawasaki inline four-cylinder motor. Then a new fuel system had to be set up, and a completely new ignition system had to be adapted to the bike. Having never built a Kawasaki Top Fuel bike before, Elmer asked for assistance from the best mind in the business at the time: Mike Gray.
Ken Tipton at MTC, Mike Gray, and Elmer were no longer adversaries on the race track. Yes, the Terminal Van Lines bike was the dominator from the preceding 1980 season, but the TVL bike had won all there was to win. Gray had accomplished all he wanted to and, at the end of 1981, he was going to pull the plug on the Terminal Van Lines racing operation anyway. So, in the summer of 1981, when Elmer needed a hand in putting his first Top Fuel four-cylinder bike together, there was no one better to guide him than the architect of the TVL bike.
Gray was accepted into the Trett Household as a valued friend and one-time adversary. He lived with the Tretts in their guest room for close to five weeks as the final stages of Elmer’s first inline-four cylinder Top Fuel bike came together. Once they got the fuel system and the ignition squared away, the bike was finally ready to fire up in September of 1981. After a few tests, Elmer called Jackie and Gina down to the shop for the celebratory first fire-up.
When Elmer and Gray spun the motor over, Elmer flipped on the magneto switch, bringing the ignition system to life and firing four supercharged nitromethane cylinders. The resulting thunder turned to a steady rumble as the beast came to life. While Jackie kept her distance and her eyes on Elmer, Gina stood firmly, arms crossed over her chest, her head turned to one side. She stood impatiently tapping her feet, “Are we done yet? I still ain’t looking at it.” Elmer grinned; he knew this was gonna take time.
The Next Installment of Elmer Trett and the Gods of Thunder will be released on July 1, 2026 on Dragbike.com
 | For those interested in owning a printed copy of the original book, please contact Tom McCarthy. Limited copies are available. |
Copyright & Republishing Notice
Republishing of this content, in whole or in part, requires prior written authorization from Dragbike.com or Tom McCarthy, confirmed through a valid news service or via email with Dragbike.com copied on the correspondence. Unauthorized reproduction, redistribution, or use of this material will be considered infringement and may be pursued to the fullest extent permitted by law.
