Mr. Potter, whose early career paralleled that of the motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel, toured the country in the 1960s and ‘70s, when many drag-strip exhibitions featured racers known for building their own vehicles and for taking extreme risks. Like Knievel, Mr. Potter made a niche for himself in motorcycle racing.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter, Alison Tiihonen, said.

NEW YORK - E.J. Potter, aka the Michigan Madman, a legend of the US drag strip who earned his nickname riding 170 miles per hour on a motorcycle he fitted with a Chevy V-8, and who later went nearly 200 miles per hour on a three-wheel bike powered by a jet engine, died April 30 in Ithaca, Mich. He was 71.


“Usually, a guy went for the fastest time on the track, or he tried to win the competition for the highest speed clocked that day,’’ said Roger Meiners, a motor sports journalist. “E.J. wasn’t looking to win anything. He just showed up and tried to make people go, ‘Oh, my God!’ ’’

Mr. Potter was a motor-obsessed farm boy who grew up tinkering with tractor engines, building motorcycles, and racing at both organized and informal drag strips in central Michigan well before he was old enough for a driver’s license. The idea to mount a V-8 car engine sideways on the frame of a chain-driven Harley-Davidson motorcycle came to him when he was 16.

As far as anyone knew, no one had ever done it. Though technical problems would emerge, Mr. Potter concluded that his youth and ignorance were his greatest assets in seeing the project to completion. He rode the motorcycle for the first time in 1960, reaching 130 miles per hour.

“Ignorance is a powerful tool if applied at the right time, even, usually, surpassing knowledge,’’ he wrote in “Michigan Madman,’’ a memoir he published in 1999.


In the late 1960s, the same combination of know-how and useful ignorance helped him construct a three-wheel motorcycle rigged with a rocket engine purchased from US military surplus. He called it the Widow Maker.

Riding these vehicles required a certain composure.

“The acceleration would be real noticeable and the vibrations, bumps and engine noises would stop registering,’’ he said. “It got kind of mental.’’