Things kind of progressed. Eventually, a friend of mind had a drag bike that I was doing some work on, and he had gone to some of the national events. He kept telling me, "If you go to a National event-I've seen those guys running in the class you're running in-and you can outrun everybody who's there because your bike is just faster."
So he talked me into going to Atco, NJ, for the National up there. That's when they protested me. And the guy who was the director of the association (M.A.M.A., the Mid-Atlantic Motorcycle Association) came over after the [protest] deal, and he shook my hand, and he said, "You've got an impressive motorcycle there." We got to be friends after that. I ran a couple years there, set some records, broke some of my own records.
Then he came to me and said [he wanted] someone to build a motorcycle that looks like a street bike, runs on nitro, and puts on a good show to run exhibition races, and he said, "We could get you a lot of races for show." So I built one, an 80-cubic-inch one, and put nitro in it.
HB: When was that?RP: That was 1969, but '70 was the year I ran it the most. I did a lot of work to it-I made fake shocks to go on the rear section of the frame. I took pieces of 3-inch-diameter aluminum tubing, put it in the lathe, and made grooves in it that simulated springs. Then I polished the whole thing and painted the whole inside black. And from a little bit of a distance, it looked just like a shock.
I built a fuel tank to go on the top, and then I hollowed out a fiberglass shell tank that covered over the gas tank and it lifted up like the body of a Funny Car. It got a lot of attention. The first few times we ran it-back then we had a pretty small rear tire, a 4-inch or a 5-incher. I could smoke the tire from one end to the other, just leave a black mark all the way down the track. Put on one heck of a show. Then they decided to turn it into a class called the Funny Bike class. And when they did, they took my bike and measured it, took all of the information from [it], and used the information to write the rules for that particular class. So I became what they called "the Father of the Funny Bike."
HB: Yours was the first nitro-burning Harley, then?RP: Well, no, the first nitro Funny Bike. Then I started running it in [class] competition. And when I put a little bigger rear tire on it, the bike would carry the front wheel all the way to the finish line. It became very, very popular. I won a lot of races with it. The fans really loved it, and it turned out to be a very successful setup. I ran it for a number of years, up until 1994.
I'd bought a Harley-Davidson dealership, and needed to spend time [there] to operate it, so I took a couple years off. I would build bikes for the different riders [I sponsored]. And then I started my own program again with someone else riding the bike, but that didn't work out as well as I wanted it to. So I started track riding again myself and rode all the way up through May 2003, when I rode off the end of the track at Las Vegas Speedway. It ran 218 mph in 6.48 seconds on that particular pass and ran off the end of the track. For some reason I couldn't get it stopped. It threw me down and tore the nerves loose in my shoulder, and my whole arm went numb. Since then, I haven't been riding anymore. [At that point] I was leading in the points, almost 200 points ahead.
Just to make sure I don't miss something that's very, very important-the early part of this year, Kenny Price of Samson Exhaust Systems and I got together, and Kenny graciously agreed to sponsor my drag bike in Top Fuel. And so that's been really, really good. We're really proud to have Samson Exhaust as a sponsor. They've been really good to us, and we're hoping that we can do a lot for them. We signed a long-term contract that we hope will be very successful in the future.
The rider is Tommy Grimes. He's about 36 years old, very aggressive, very alert, very respectful. He's come a long way since we brought him on in the middle of the season. You put somebody on a 900hp monster that's capable of running 6.3 seconds at 225-226 mph, and it's kind of difficult for them to really be able to handle the bike properly. It's kind of like we threw him in the middle of a bike that's been 36 years in development, and he's 36 years old-we started running nitro the year he was born!