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

During the 1976 racing season, a new team emerged, beginning on a golf course in Florida.  The owner of an entrepreneurial trucking company from the Tampa-Saint Petersburg area, Mike Gray, met up with a fellow golfer who loved motorcycles, Mike Murdoch.

As friends, they discussed various common interests.  One of those interests was a love of speed and all things high performance.  Murdoch was a sportsman and motorcycle drag racer who owned and operated a high-performance motorcycle aftermarket company known as Murdoch Racing Enterprises.  Mike Gray was the principal owner of a successful interstate trucking company, Terminal Van Lines.

Gray went to watch Murdoch race on occasion, and when the subject of how to make the bike go faster came up, Gray was never short on ideas.  He had been an NHRA drag racing fan for many years, so his affiliation with quarter-mile drag racing had his imagination ripe with ideas to try.  Murdoch was an experienced drag racer, who happened to own a motorcycle parts company.  When they started exchanging ideas, their brilliance showed.  Their first collaborative effort to make Murdoch’s bike go faster was historic.

As the 1976 racing season unfolded, Murdoch, Gray, and one of Gray’s trucking partners, Dick Wade, teamed up and began racing together.  A collaborator who assisted with local fabrication services, Dan Childs, rounded out the mix.

The team set out with a Kawasaki H-2, two-stroke bike.  That was fast, but they knew they could make it faster.  What they decided they needed most was a quicker, smoother way to shift the motorcycle’s five-speed transmission.  They started out with an electric solenoid device that, when activated via a push button on the handlebars, would quickly engage the shift lever while momentarily killing the engine ignition, allowing a microsecond of quick shifting of the transmission into the next gear.

Their first test of the device came at a race in Bradenton, Florida, resulting in a new national record in their bikes’ sportsman class.  As the back-slapping ensued, the elation was short-lived when the new battery they had installed short-circuited, resulting in a fire that almost destroyed the motorcycle.  They were on the right path with the new invention, but improvements were called for.

Childs suggested using a pneumatic cylinder to replace the electric solenoid.  At first, he installed an air-piston-driven cylinder 14 inches long with a bore diameter of 4 inches.  This combination was very over-powered, resulting in the bending of the transmission shifting lever, but they knew they were on the right track.  Childs located and tried various smaller-sized air cylinders till they came up with the smallest combination that would still reliably shift the bike.  Thus, the air-shifter was born in 1976.

This was the beginning of many great innovations by Gray, Murdoch, and Childs, which set them on the path to Top Fuel and the eventual clash of Titans with Elmer.  In battle, they started out as adversaries, but later in life, when they combined forces, they changed the world.

During the 1976 season, as the team attended national motorcycle drag racing events, Gray kept a close eye on the pinnacle of the sport, the Top Fuel class.  He commented to his buddy Murdoch, “We can do better.”  Gray set out to enter the class by the season’s end.  He needed a new motorcycle to tinker with as he endeavored to move his race team into the professional racing ranks.

Motivated to enter the class of Top Fuel, Gray contacted motorcycle drag racer Sam Wills who, throughout the 1976 season, stomped racers with his then B/F Kawasaki injected nitro dragster motorcycle.  In January of 1977, Mike Gray purchased Sam Wills’ injected-fuel bike with the express intent of evolving the motorcycle into a Top Fuel bike.  Wills packed the bike into his van and drove it to Florida to personally deliver it.  On his way the Terminal Van Lines trucking facility in St.  Petersburg, he picked up his old friend, Bo O’Brachta, to help him deliver the bike.

Wills and O’Brachta were old racing buddies at the time.  Their story began in the fall of 1973, when Wills set out to buy a new Kawasaki Z1, shortly after it was first released in the US market.

Wills bought the first Z1 available at Reed’s Kawasaki in Jacksonville, Florida.  He became fast friends with the parts manager, O’Brachta.  They began socializing and soon started going to drag races on their new Z1 motorcycles.  They started bracket racing in Jacksonville, Florida.

Later in 1973, when the friends got serious about motorcycle drag racing, O’Brachta ordered a drag racing chassis from Kosman Specialties.  Wills had acquired a Chapman chassis and modified it to accept his Kawasaki Z1 engine.  The first national event they entered together was in Warner Robbins, Georgia.

While at the A.M.D.R.A. sanctioned national event, Wills and O’Brachta first laid eyes on real Top Fuel motorcycles.  Wills remembers Sonny Routt’s Triumph as the first nitro burner that impressed him.

Wills and O’Brachta also met many important people at these events, who were impressed by their racing efforts.  One of them was a motorcycle parts manufacturer named Ken Tipton, who owned and operated a shop at the time known as MTC Pistons, located in California. Mr. Tipton approached Bo O’Brachta with a racing proposition.

O’Brachta was invited by Tipton to work and race for MTC.  O’Brachta accepted, Wills tagged along, and soon their racing endeavor became a west coast effort.  While O’Brachta went to work at MTC, Wills went his own way and soon found employment at a chopper shop known as D&K.  The custom motorcycle shop serviced and modified motorcycles of all types in downtown Los Angeles.

While working at D&K, Sam Wills learned to weld from an older man, a shipyard welder once employed by the General Dynamics Shipyard.  He had many welding certifications and enjoyed teaching Sam the tricks of the trade.

Soon, Wills was welding and fabricating racing chassis while assisting in building custom bikes.  In his spare time, he started building a dragster chassis for himself.  When his time came to part ways with his employer, his chassis came with him.  From this, he constructed an A/G (class A dragster, gasoline-powered) Kawasaki to run in Super Eliminator.  At this point in time, the class of S/E was only one step down the ladder of performance from Top Fuel.

While running in S/E, Wills met and impressed Big Carl Ahlfeldt, a racer and shop owner from Oklahoma.  Carl was a master machinist with a penchant for extreme performance motorcycles.  Carl’s forte was the sanitary construction of assembled machines that, when finished, looked as fast as they performed.  Big Carl bonded well with Wills and, in early 1976, Wills went to work with Carl at MCU (Motor Cycles Unlimited) in Oklahoma.  But Wills also operated as an independent contractor, with his own enterprise, which he named “Racing Innovations.”  They worked in the same building, but Wills was doing his own thing in concert with Carl’s operation.

While racing out of the MCU, Wills had great success with his Kawasaki-powered dragster, which he originally created at D&K. The combination was now a fuel-injected, nitromethane-powered lightweight dragster with a big engine.  The results were like launching a rocket ship.

This creation evolved into a B/F (Class B dragster, fuel-burning) machine with a stock clutch setup in a stock transmission, producing a stunning 8.48-second elapsed time at a mind-blowing 168.60 mph!  In 1976, Wills started kicking everyone’s butt from coast to coast with his fuel-injected nitromethane-burning Kawasaki.  This raised a lot of eyebrows, one of which belonged to an entrepreneur who owned a trucking company and wanted to enter Top Fuel motorcycle drag racing.  At the end of the 1976 racing season, Sam got a phone call from Mike Gray.

Prior to the 1976 season, O’Brachta had drifted back to his home in the Sunshine State.  He was still involved in motorcycle drag racing, both as a racer and by assisting his buddies with their race bikes.  He had a reputation as a throttle jockey who was never shy about holding a throttle wide open while racing.  For O’Brachta, a throttle had only two positions: closed or wide open.

When Wills and O’Brachta delivered Wills’ drag bike to Gray, Murdoch was slated to drive it for what was then the Terminal Van Lines racing team.  Mike Gray and Dick Wade would work as pit crew for the new team.

While their ultimate destination was the Top Fuel class, Gray chose not to enter the bike at first, as his team made adjustments to the machine.  The motorcycle they started out with was once Sam Wills’ winning drag bike, but it was now Mike Gray’s test bed.  There were changes to be made immediately before the season began. Gray wanted to start testing his theories out on the bike right away.

The team again called upon Dan Childs, who had begun a racing fabrication enterprise known as Competition Products.  Gray had Childs install a small fiberglass wind-deflecting fairing on the front of the motorcycle, just forward of the handlebars.  Then he crafted a lower air dam that was mounted on the bike just behind the front wheel.  To round out the initial changes, a tailpiece was fabricated and added to the rear of the bike.  Aerodynamics was the first issue Gray chose to address for their future T/F bike.

At the first race of the 1977 season. Murdoch was prepared to drive the new TVL (Terminal Van Lines) bike for testing until he got injured just before their initial outing.  Murdoch broke his foot and was on crutches the day they first wheeled the bike out at the race track. He was going to give it his best shot, broken foot and all.  Then they had a change of heart at the last minute.

Gray noticed O’Brachta at the race helping out a fellow racer with a new Pro Stock bike.  He had his racing leathers with him and was ready to go racing.  This gave Gray an idea.

Gray knew that O’Brachta was already associated with the motorcycle.  He also knew Sam Wills, who originally built the bike, and he could ride like the wind.  So Gray approached him and asked if he would drive the bike for the initial testing.

O’Brachta said, “Sure.”

On the bike’s first outing, the pilot was out of touch with the machine.  O’Brachta was always a gas-bike pilot who would “take it to the throttle,” and he quickly learned that’s not how a fuel bike is ridden.  This resulted in a lot of parts breaking, but he quickly learned how to handle a throttle with nitromethane on the other end.  When the bike scattered motor parts, he was always the first one in the pits, diving into the motor to see what went wrong.  This had a big impression on the team owner.

About 3 months after the bike’s initial testing, O’Brachta got a call from Gray one night saying, “What are you doing on Sunday?  I wanna fly out to you, take you out to dinner and talk about this Top Fuel bike project?”

O’Brachta replied with, “Come on out, let’s talk.”

At dinner, the proposal to O’Brachta was, “How’d you like to get paid to race our bike?  We’ll pay all your expenses.  You build the bike as needed, sleep with it, kiss it if it needs it, you do whatever it takes, and we’ll pay you to do it.  What do you say, would you like to come racing with us, we pay for everything?”

O’Brachta replied, “Ok let me think about it, YES!”

Bo recalled, “I started living in Saint Pete, working on the bike every day.  We ran it for about a year with the injection system while learning the bike.  We did add an air-shifter to it at one time, we tried different combinations with the clutch. The 1977 season for us was all experimental.”

There were two full years of nothing but experimentation and development for the team while racing in Super Eliminator.  The Terminal Van Lines team didn’t enter the Top Fuel ranks until the 1979 season.  There were twenty-four months of research and development that preceded their ascension to the pinnacle of motorcycle drag racing.  Gray’s project was all about innovation, and they had fast competition.

Going into the 1978 season, the new TVL bike had company in the Top Fuel innovation department.  A team sprang up from the West Coast that was of some interest to Gray, the new machine created by the Top Fuel team of Teson and Bernard, out of California.

Ronnie Teson and Jim Bernard were T/F racers who deviated from the double-engine fuel bikes that ruled the day by going single engine with a supercharger fed by fuel injection to produce extreme power.  In 1978, they were racing a supercharged 750 cc Honda motor that was bored bigger with a stroker crankshaft added to produce 1055 cc’s.  Much to everyone’s surprise (but theirs), by mid-season in ’78, they had gone as quick as 7.71 seconds and held the I.D.B.A. national speed record at 184.42 miles per hour.  While the twin-engine-powered Harley Davidson bikes were typically running around 8.4 seconds, suddenly, Teson and Bernard were rewriting the rules about how to go quickly on the drag strip.

Some double-engine motorcycles weighed over 800 pounds with a rider mounted on top.  While two engines working in concert could produce close to 500 horsepower, if that power is eaten up by pushing such an enormous amount of weight just to get off the starting line, then the combination is in trouble before it even gets started.  That split second of time it took to get such a heavy machine going was adding to the elapsed time.  A single-engine bike that would weigh just under half the weight of a double-engine bike, and with a supercharger force-feeding nitromethane into the motor, it was possible to produce almost as much power as the bike weighed.  This would result in a close-to-1-to-1 power-to-weight ratio, yielding the quickest elapsed times ever.

Teson and Bernard were on to something, and it didn’t take Gray long to figure out what it was.  Gray smiled to himself when he realized what he needed to do next, and before December 1978, there was a supercharger, the first of many, delivered to the Terminal Van Lines facility.

During the 1978 season, the TVL bike went through several distinct phases while still racing as a Super Eliminator bike before it and the team was ready to make the jump to Top Fuel.

Childs began working with O’Brachta to reconfigure the bike yet again.  They widened the rear tail section to accept up to a 12” wide car tire.  Childs made side-mounted motor plates that allowed the engine to be moved up to 1.5 inches vertically or 7.5 inches from front to rear.  This was done to help find the best balance point for the bike.  A removable chrome moly frame rail on the left and right side of the motorcycle tied the motor plates together, giving new support to the entire chassis structure.  A two-speed transmission was now tucked in behind the motor, and a John Dixon slider clutch was installed.

Under Gray’s direction, the phases of metamorphosis were: 1) Turn the cylinder head around so the intake ports were facing forward into the oncoming air stream, run the bike on fuel injection with nitromethane.  2) For a short period, the team tried nitrous oxide injection in addition to the nitromethane, fuel-injected motor.  After destroying parts constantly, the next combination became:  3) A supercharger was added to the motor and the fuel system was adjusted to accommodate 100% methanol for fuel.  After getting a handle on the motor running on straight alcohol, they completed the metamorphosis by switching it to accommodate higher percentages of nitromethane.

Once the bike reached this configuration during the 1979 season, the whole combination began to come together.  On October 8, 1979, at the NHRA World Finals, the Terminal Van Lines team received the “Best Engineered” award, which had over 600 cars present.  They clocked an elapsed time of 7.81, which was a low qualifier for the race.  All of drag racing could see what was happening, and beginning in the 1980 season, for the next two years the Terminal Van Lines bike decimated its opposition.

By the fall season of 1980, O’Brachta started laying down numbers of 7.40 seconds at close to 184 miles per hour. Throughout the season, the TVL bike crushed everyone at every race.  Then, at the season’s end, the machine ran the numbers that stunned the racing world.

In October of 1980, at the NHRA World Finals, held at Ontario Motor Speedway in southern California, O’Brachta piloted his T/F bike into the history books.  At close to 9:30 am on the Saturday morning of that race, during the first qualifying session of the day, the Terminal Van Lines bike produced a mind-blowing 7.08-second elapsed time.  The pass was just a whisper away from entering the six-second zone.  No other Top Fuel bike of it’s time was even close to this number in 1980.  Gray’s Top Fuel bike project ended the era of the double-engine bikes once and for all.  And it was O’Brachta who schooled Elmer with the Terminal Van Lines bike.

At the IDBA Sunshine Nationals in the spring of 1980, Elmer’s double-engine Harley had to face O’Brachta for the finals.  The bikes left the starting line at about the same time, but close to seven seconds later, when O’Brachta’s win light came on, Elmer had just shifted his bike into high gear.  All Elmer saw of the TVL bike was the rear tire of the thundering machine as it quickly accelerated away from him.  Elmer was taught a terminal lesson about Top Fuel motorcycle drag racing: a single engine, supercharged motorcycle is lighter, more powerful, therefore quicker.  The days of double-engine drag bikes winning Top Fuel motorcycle drag racing were over.

There was only one solution to this problem for Elmer.

The Next Installment of Elmer Trett and the Gods of Thunder will be released on June 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. E-mail Tom on Facebook

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