Elmer Trett and the Gods of Thunder: Chapter 5 – Fuelish Intentions
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
Exactly when and where Elmer first experienced nitromethane is unknown, but the result was an epiphany. Love and lust is not the same thing in a man’s life, but when a man loves speed, one day his lust for nitro will call. It’s as common as tire smoke on a drag slick.
At some point in Elmer’s life, it’s likely he came into contact with a fuel car at a drag race, warming up in the pits. As the cackle of the nitromethane-fed engine called to him, he abandoned whatever he was doing on his gasoline-powered drag bike to go stand next to this behemoth 426 cubic inch, fuel-injected, supercharged, fire-breathing engine. Elmer loved a powerful engine; there was no resisting its call.
As the fuel car engine reached operating temperature and others shied away from the motor, Elmer stepped closer. He came too close to the header pipes and got his first face full of raw nitro. His eyes burned as he winced, but he was smiling. His lungs wanted to cough to expel the vile, toxic mixture, but he just held his breath as he inched closer into a safer position. He could not take his watering eyes off this engine.
With the motor now fully warmed up, the driver in the cockpit gave the crew chief the nod that all gauges were reading properly. The crew chief did the deed – he hit the throttle gently but firmly for a quick, short stroke. The malevolent motor barked like a cacophony of shotguns all going off in eight-part harmony. This cannon shot hit Elmer in the chest like a clap of thunder, shaking every cell in his body. Everyone standing near Elmer jumped or flinched at the first hit of the throttle but not Elmer; he just broke into a big broad smile. Not just any smile, he knew right then, and there this was where it was at in drag racing.
Hot Shot got his first face full of CH3NO2, the organic compound known in the racing world as nitromethane. In the fuel racing world, all nitro junkies agree with the old racing adage, “gasoline is for cleaning parts, alcohol is for drinking, nitromethane is for racing.” Elmer quickly embraced this philosophy while making plans to change the course of his racing.
In 1973, Elmer started branching out with his motorcycle drag racing. His attendance at national-level competitions put him on the same race tracks as the biggest and baddest motorcycle racers on the planet. One of them was a southern gentleman named Danny Johnson, who stood out among the top-fuel racers. It was Danny who was beating back the invaders with Goliath, his twin-engine fuel bike.
Coming into the nineteen-seventies, when Elmer started to get serious about motorcycle drag racing, his beloved Harley-Davidson was under heavy attack from import bikes. British iron like the Triumph motorcycles as well as Nortons were taking a toll on the Harleys at drag races everywhere. Elmer could see they were not the real threat his fellow V-Twin racers faced; the Japs were the real enemy.
In 1969, when Honda released the CB 750 double-overhead cam motorcycle, they upped the ante for motorcycle racing worldwide. With four cylinders, a separate carburetor for every cylinder, and a solid crankshaft, the CB 750 motor was like a small sports car engine. This machine was capable of great modifications, which would not only multiply a good speed modification by 4, but also handle the added power. This was also an all-aluminum motor, unlike the Harley-Davidson Sportsters of this period, which had cast-iron cylinders with cast-iron heads on top.
Enter the super bike shot heard round the world of motorcycle racing: the Kawasaki Z1.
In September of 1972, the Kawasaki Motors Corporation of Japan unleashed the Z1 model to the U.S. market. This double, over-head cam, 903cc, all-aluminum engine produced 82 hp stock from the factory. With very few modifications, this bike ran in the ten-second elapsed time bracket in quarter-mile drag racing. This was nearly the same elapsed time Elmer’s highly modified AA/Gas dragster was running. Elmer could see that when someone started adding nitro to one of these bikes, the Harleys would soon be in trouble. He was right, and Danny Johnson was leading the fight against the invading horde. In the spring of the following year, a magazine story convinced Elmer that Danny was the man to talk to about nitromethane powered fuel racing. That magazine story changed Elmer’s life.
The May, 1973 issue of Cycle magazine, ran a four page story, with photos, created by journalist Sandy Roca on “Danny Johnson’s Roaring Double.” The story gave all the details of Danny’s double-engine nitro-burning drag bike. Two Harley Davidson big twin Shovel head engines with stroker kits in them, S&S fuel racing carbs; a car tire drag slick in the back, Elmer was convinced this is the way to go. He was inspired. Soon, he was ringing Danny Johnson’s phone at “Johnson High Performance” in Yadkinville, North Carolina.
Danny convinced Elmer if he was going to cross over to nitromethane racing, he should ease in with double engine gasoline to first get used to the big ponderous bikes. If Elmer were to create his first double-engine drag bike, the first thing he needed would be a chassis. Elmer heeded Danny’s advice, and he called the best in the business at the time, Sanford Kosman of Kosman Racing Products in California.
Sandy remembers:
When Elmer called me for the double-engine gas bike chassis, he knew what he wanted and how he wanted it, so we gave him our best. I never met a more humble man. He always called me Mr. Kosman. He seemed a gentle man in his demeanor, but I when I looked in his eyes, I saw a gunfighter.
Elmer was always serious about motorcycle drag racing, always.
During the 1973 racing season, Elmer put his engine-building skills to work, preparing two identical 103-cubic-inch Sportster motors. As the ’73 season came to a close, Elmer was stockpiling engine components, preparing for his double-chassis setup and the coming drag-racing season. There were a lot of phone calls to Johnson High Performance as well as calls to another shop in Wallace, North Carolina, where a Harley fuel racer was creating a beast Elmer knew would be a brute he may have to contend with one day. That shop was Super Cycle Engineering. The beast was a supercharged, fuel-injected, nitromethane-burning, Harley-Davidson top fuel bike that was way ahead of its time, being built by John Dixon. The T/F bike technology explosion started at this point in motorcycle drag racing history. Dixon became an early advisor to Elmer.
As the 1974 drag racing season was about to unfold, this was the dawn of the dinosaurs of motorcycle Top Fuel drag racing. In the previous decade, single and then twin-engine British bikes went head to head with Harley Davidson motorcycles in fuel racing, winning more races than the beloved American-made V-Twins. They had an inherent mechanical advantage by design.
The imported bikes all had one-piece crankshaft lower-end motors. Harley had to contend with a pair of heavy fly wheels that were a ‘bolt together’ assembly with a common crank pin. The assembly then rotates on a pair of bolted-on shafts. From the very beginning, the imports had the mechanical advantage. As the Harley racers struggled to keep their machines in one piece, the imports regularly stomped the Harleys as they were lighter, faster, and more reliable. Most of all, imports didn’t have lower-end assemblies that tended to come apart during the stress of high-speed rotation.
In 1971, Harley-Davidson fuel-racing pioneer Joe Smith of California won the NHRA US Nationals for Top Fuel motorcycles with a Harley-Davidson single-engine bike. It was the last time a single-engine nitro Top Fuel Harley would do so for decades to come. The nineteen seventies were the decade of the doubles, and Elmer jumped right into the thick of it feet first, and Danny Johnson showed him the way.
When Danny unveiled Goliath 1 in 1971, it was a technological breakthrough in Top Fuel motorcycle. There were, at that time, no other Harley-Davidson-powered twin-engine T/F bikes. Danny, unlike Joe Smith, lined up two Shovel Head motors, held together by aluminum side plates bolted to the chrome-moly chassis.
Knowing a single engine fuel Harley made close to 200 hp, Danny didn’t believe the standard motorcycle clutch could handle twice that number being produced by two engines, so Danny machined up what he needed to install a car clutch into his new creation. Goliath 1 was direct-drive with no transmission, just a sliding-type lock-up clutch that, as the motorcycle went faster, grabbed more power. The final creation was a 700-plus-pound motorcycle that produced nearly 400 horsepower.
There were many skeptics about Danny’s innovative Goliath machine when he rolled it out for the first time, but all criticisms ended when the bike qualified as number one on its first outing. From the day Danny started racing that bike, until its untimely crash in the 1973 US Nationals, Goliath 1 never failed to qualify number one at any race Danny entered with it. These details did not escape Elmer’s quest for knowledge and power.
As Elmer began his progression towards the fuel-bike ranks in 1974, Harley-Davidson Top Fuel bike racing was entering a whole new phase of development. While Elmer was racing a single-engine gasoline-powered dragster-type motorcycle, his eyes were really on the fuel bikes. He was watching closely as to what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly, why.
Danny proved the viability of a twin-motored monster beginning in ’71, but he upped the ante in ’74 with Goliath II. This second generation of Goliath had a B&J two-speed car transmission to accompany the car clutch. With this combination, Johnson was pushing close to 500 hp onto an eight-inch wide car tire to motivate a motorcycle that was now a ponderous eight-hundred-pound monster.
Elmer’s AA/Gas, lay-down, dragster-type drag bike was tiny in comparison to what he was about to start racing. His gasser barely weighed three hundred pounds, race-prepared and ready to go down the quarter-mile. The double-engine monster he was about to build would weigh twice that. So, taking the advice of the Gods of Thunder who ruled the roost in the mid-seventies, Elmer started out with two gasoline motors, one carburetor for each. In 1974, Elmer prepared for entry into the class then known as Top Gas.
Top Gas, or “T/G,” was the entry-level class for serious racers who aspired to advance to T/F fuel-bike racing. If a motorcycle drag racer couldn’t handle a double-engine gas bike, they had no business trying to build a double-engine fueler, never mind entering into competition with one.
The 1974 season for Elmer was a tough one. He had to get used to a drag bike that weighed double what he had been racing and was a lot longer than his previous motorcycles. His entire racing program was much more complex in every way. Elmer was used to winning, qualifying deep in the competition field, doing well in every way; his entry into T/G was just the opposite. When he completed the bike during the late 1974 racing season, it was followed by a year of learning how doubles acted, what they liked and didn’t like, and how to drive such a creature safely.
Elmer enjoyed the adaptation phase of changing drag bikes; to him, it was challenging. He also discovered a perk that came with T/G racing: his new class allowed him to rub elbows with all the big boys that were ahead of him. At national events, T/G always ran either just before or just after the T/F bike during a race, so Elmer was in his leathers when Danny Johnson, Marion Owens, Karl Ahlfeldt, Boris Murray, Sonny Routt, and all the members of the T/F motorcycle class were getting ready to run. Elmer was paying his dues as he transitioned from gas bikes into fuel racing.
In 1975, Elmer began his first full season of racing with his double-engine gas bike. While getting gasoline at a gas station on his way home from a race one day, the local gas station attendant who gassed up the Trett rig took notice of the twin-motor drag bike in the trailer Elmer was towing. The attendant made a comment. “Hey, that thing looks like Zeus.” Elmer took a liking to the name and it stuck, the double gasser became known as Daddy Zeus.
In Greek Mythology, Zeus was said to be “Father of the Gods of Thunder.” That gas station attendant, as well as Elmer himself, had no idea how appropriate that title would be for this motorcycle and its reference to its creator, Mr. Trett.
Just as Elmer came from humble beginnings in the mountains of Kentucky, so too were his beginnings with Daddy Zeus. While the Top Fuel bikes were running in the eight-second elapsed times at over 180 mph, Elmer was working his way up with a nine-second elapsed-time, double-gas Harley that occasionally crested 130 mph. His double was one second quicker than his AA/Gas bike but it had a top end charge that just wouldn’t quit. Stopping the almost half ton monster was always an eye opener.
Daddy Zeus was powered by two Harley Davidson Sportster engines with a bore and stroke combination that yielded 103 cubic inches of displacement for each engine, or, if you prefer, 3,342 cc’s of motorcycle engines. The front engine’s power was connected to the rear engine via the clutch basket and a drive chain. The transmission in only the rear motor was utilized, then the power output was controlled with a “Johnson Slipper Clutch,” made for Elmer by Danny Johnson. A 15” Centerline rear wheel from a car was adapted to a rear wheel spindle that allowed Elmer to use a car tire for the first time. An “M&H Racemaster” rear tire was fitted to the wheel to hook up the over 200 horsepower Elmer would now send to the race track for the first time. Elmer’s days of sportsman racing for fun were now over; this bike took a lot of work every time it went to or from the race track. Elmer now needed help to ride this motorcycle, so he turned to the one person he could trust most: his wife.
Elmer and his wife Jacquelyn were married in 1969, and they loved each other with all their hearts. Both Elmer and Jackie came from solid family stock where family was everything, so home and hearth came first, and then work. In the six-year span between their marriage and the creation of the double known as Daddy Zeus, the Tretts increasingly became more embroiled in motorcycle drag racing as a vocation. Elmer’s exploits at the race track were an advertisement for Elmer’s talents as an engine builder. This was both very good and very bad for the Trett Family right from the start, yet the family depended on racing to support their income.
The good news was that the Tretts could see that Elmer’s racing was his ticket to attracting customers to build engines for. The bad news was that it cost a ton of money to build a top-level drag bike, plus go motorcycle drag racing. Additional bad news was, as it now took exponentially more money to race, it was also many times more work effort to race a double engine drag bike. “Double Trouble” was more than words to the Family Trett.
Elmer couldn’t afford to pay a pit crew, so he enlisted the help of the people he knew and trusted the most; Jackie, and eventually her daughter, Gina. He couldn’t have picked a more challenging time in his life to do it. Elmer’s daughter, Kelly Trett, was born in 1975, and Gina was 13 as the Trett Family entered the fuel bike battles. Their actual participation as active crew members began during the double-engine fuel bike years.
Gina’s first job on the race bike was clean up. The motorcycle drive chain would oil the rear wheel and tire on the side every run, so she had the inglorious task of wiping oily stuff clean, then polish any surfaces that needed it. During the metamorphosis of the double-engine motorcycles Elmer built, when the race bikes began using wheelie bars, this became her next workstation, cleaning the burnt rubber off them. In racing, life starts at the bottom in ‘the pits.’ People don’t call it ‘the pits’ without reason.
Jackie began duties as chief starter. In the early days of racing the double, Elmer had to roller start like everyone else did. When Elmer’s team advanced in technology, Elmer adapted a “Funny Car” starter to his race bike. Jackie’s job was to place the forty-five-pound starter on the front engine, carefully rotate it into the correct position, then await Elmer’s nod to start. When he gave her the signal, she would press the button, sending 24 V DC through a pair of heavy welding cables to the starter she held in her hands.
The large electric motor she held, bare-handed, turned the twin racing engines while Elmer squirted fuel into his intake system. Then, he lifted his finger from the magneto button to light the engines. When he did, Jackie had to disengage the starter from the race bike, quickly turn, put the starter on the starter cart, then run forward with Gina to push Elmer back to the starting line after every burnout. These women worked hard every race day for the next twenty-one years.
As the family racing enterprise grew, so did the ladies’ duties. Elmer couldn’t be the only one turning wrenches, so Jackie and Gina were first taught all the basics of hand tools, just as Elmer’s father had before him once taught his eager son. In short order, the ladies were transformed into mechanics who could rip into their assigned area of the bike after every pass. Elmer became the task master, the ladies would respond. Everyone busted butt; this was a real race team that required real hard work. No matter how hot it was or how humid, if there was a race to run, every pass needed to be a winning pass. This was serious.
In drag racing, second place is the first loser. Win every round of racing or go home. No one remembers who lost, only who won. Elmer’s philosophy on this was simple: “If you’re the fastest, you’ll eventually win the most races.” Elmer’s new religion was hailed at the altar of speed, as in miles per hour. He wanted to be the fastest man on the race track. Not just to win races, but to be noticed; he wanted everyone to know his name. His intent was that the name “Trett” would one day be synonymous with “the world’s fastest motorcycle.” Elmer was a man of great personal pride. He wanted his family, all four brothers and all four sisters, to know when he left home that he, too, was going to make his mark in the world. Family mattered a lot to Elmer, so did his perception of self.
As the Trett Family racing team began crisscrossing the United States, Elmer would frequently ensure the route to or from a race included stops in Corbin, Kentucky. In 1975, when the Tretts really started to race as a family race team, they made sure to stop by the family homestead whenever they could.
Elmer’s mom still held her arms wide open for her little boy, who was far from little as a grown man. Hot Shot may have grown into manhood, but to his mother, that was still her little boy, her youngest, all grown up now. She sometimes wept when she thought of him and always asked him to give up his high-speed ways. “Elmer, please stop racing those things, you’re gonna get awful hurt one day. Please, son, stop racing.”
Elmer would respond with his charming smile, look his mother in the eye. “Momma, this is what we do. We race now.” His big bear hug would follow, and, as always, his momma would melt in his embrace; she was powerless to stop him.
Elmer’s need for speed was established now; his race team was in place, and his skills were sharp. This was the turning point in Elmer’s racing career. There was racing, and racing put food on the table, so racing came first. Exactly six weeks after Kelly’s birth, she was at a race track as the family thrashed yet again to gain notoriety for Trett racing. Racing was not only serious business; it was now the family business.
Elmer was NOT happy with the business by the end of the 1975 racing season. Daddy Zeus may have been a big, impressive gasoline-powered drag bike that looked and sounded bad, but its performance was elusive until Elmer hit just the right combination. However, as soon as he got the bike flying, all his competitors started gossiping about his sudden performance gains.
They started whispering, “He’s cheat’n.”
Soon, Elmer got wind of this, and he was infuriated. “I never cheated, not once,” he told a reporter. He was mortified that anyone would talk negatively about the Trett name that way. Elmer was always a man of honor with great dignity and heartfelt pride. Gas was no longer Elmer’s class. Gasoline was for washing parts, nitromethane was for racing; it was time to go racing for real.
The Next Installment of Elmer Trett and the Gods of Thunder will be released on April 15, 2026 on Dragbike.com
| For those interested in owning a printed copy of the original book, please contact Tom McCarthy. Limited copies are available. |
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