Victor Wouk, today regarded as the father of the modern hybrid car, was personally inspired by concerns about the health effects of air pollution caused by conventional cars. Drag racing legend E.J. Potter, a.k.a. the Michigan Madman, also started thinking about air pollution and electric cars. Potter passed away recently. To honor his memory we're detouring away from the early days of electrics, a century ago, to looking at one of the experiments that came out of that renewed interest in the '60s.
A drag racer's dream
Potter had achieved his crazy nom de speed by building a machine based on a silly sketch, a small block Chevy V8 mounted in a Harley Davidson motorcycle frame. That idea became a series of drag bikes known as the Widow Makers, which Potter ran in exhibitions across the country and around the world as the Michigan Madman.
Everything about him was self-taught. By trial and error Potter developed a launch sequence that involved putting the bike up on a stand, engaging the clutch and then dropping the bike off of the stand with the back wheel already going full speed. That wheel would spin and burn rubber all the way down the track but with a stock motor Potter was seeing 140 mph trap speeds. He once calculated that the wheel speed at launch was 230 mph. It was a wild show, but the NHRA and track insurers weren't that keen on Potter's V8 bikes. The AHRA and the promoters at outlaw tracks, though, embraced him. Potter spent 13 years racing the Widow Maker, eventually seeing 190 mph speeds and setting a Guiness Book record with an 8.68 second run in Australia. He never missed an appearance, but he did have a couple of bad incidents.
One of those incidents was a fire caused by a backfiring Allison V12 airplane engine he'd mounted in the back of a Dodge Dart. Another was while running a turbine powered jet trike, which left him temporarily paralyzed, giving him time to consider alternatives.
With all the talk about air pollution and renewed interest in electric cars, Potter decided to make an electric drag car. He considered using a starter motor from a jet engine. Those can generate up to 200 horsepower but have electrical current needs that can not be met by batteries, at least not the way Potter wanted to use them.
The 800 horsepower slot car
So Potter built what he called the Super Slot Car. He mounted that Allison V12 on a trailer and hooked it up to a generator. Also on the trailer were two large spools of electrical cable. At exhibitions, he'd tow the trailer with a pickup truck and unspool the cables down the ¼ mile track. The Super Slot car had four of those 200 horsepower motors in a 4WD configuration, for a total of 800 horsepower. Two electrical pickups carried electricity from the cables to the car's motors, just like the way a slot car works, hence the Super Slot Car name.
Eight hundred horsepower is impressive power in any car, but the Super Slot Car was a gutted Austin America, a tiny car derived from the Austin Mini and imported from England where it was sold as the MG 1100.
Potter was a natural born showman and it took about three minutes for the trailer to be driven down the track, for the power cables to be laid out, and for the big V12 Allison to be fired up.
Once staged, Potter would engage the pickups to the cables and, along the lines of his Widow Maker launches, just flip a switch. Apparently he didn't bother with a sophisticated motor controller, just a switch and presumably some solenoids. With all that torque, the Super Slot Car would leap forward and then whine down the track at triple digit speeds. Light weight and 800 ponies meant that Potter was able to turn quarter mile runs in the low 10s and hit trap speeds of 120 mph.
The Michigan Madman had hoped to find some kind of corporate sponsor, but a life size slot car was perhaps too out of the box. He blamed a lack of publicity on hot rod magazines shying away from EVs, saying that editors and publishers didn't want to antagonize advertisers who sold equipment for conventional gasoline powered cars.
Today, though, the burgeoning electric drag racing community considers Potter to be one of their pioneers. Perhaps performance-oriented EVs like the Tesla Roadster will someday consider the Super Slot Car to be their predecessor.
This article is the latest in an occasional series. Find the first article here, the second article here and the third article here.
