The Hogslayer: How Two Wisconsin Bench Racers Took on Harley-Davidson — and Won

VivaMoto first visited the Hogslayer story in 2013 and again in 2016. Revisited and substantially expanded in September 2026.

Why we cheer for the underdog

Most of us have a weakness for the underdog. We cheer for the smaller team, the unknown fighter, the person with fewer resources who somehow refuses to accept the place everyone else has assigned them. Perhaps we learn it early. The Little Engine That Could somehow gets over the mountain. Dickens filled his stories with characters struggling against circumstances larger than themselves. Later, Rocky stood across the ring from Apollo Creed with almost no sensible reason to believe he belonged there — which is precisely why generations wanted him to.

Motorcycling has its own versions. John Britten comes immediately to mind: a New Zealander working far from the established factories who decided that building his own racing motorcycle was a perfectly reasonable response to machines backed by some of the biggest manufacturers in the world. These stories endure because simply being smaller isn’t enough. What fascinates us is what happens when limited resources meet imagination, stubbornness and the suspicion that the accepted way of doing something might not be the only way.

Which brings us to bench racers — not the fellow at the café who can add another ten horsepower to his motorcycle simply by talking about it, but bench racers in the best sense: people who sit around a workshop discussing what might work, arguing over something mechanical, sketching an idea, machining a part and eventually deciding there is only one way to find out.

T.C. Christenson and John Gregory were those kinds of men. They worked out of Sunset Motors in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while the established benchmark in American motorcycle drag racing was Harley-Davidson. The sensible response would have been to recognize the difference in resources and adjust their ambitions accordingly. Christenson and Gregory had another idea: build a motorcycle with two Norton engines, feed it nitromethane and go looking for Harleys.

They called it Hogslayer.

It started at Sunset Motors

Christenson’s path into motorcycle racing began about as informally as possible, racing friends on rural Wisconsin roads. By 1963 he had moved into sanctioned competition at Union Grove Drag Strip, where he won his first official race, and before long he was racing Nortons and working at Sunset Motors, the Norton dealership owned by John Gregory. Christenson bought the dealership from Gregory in 1969, but their racing partnership continued.

The combination worked because the two men brought different things to the motorcycle. Christenson was the rider; Gregory possessed the sort of engineering mind that seems happiest when presented with a problem everyone else has learned to tolerate. Their first twin-engine Norton appeared in 1970, and by 1972 the concept had evolved into the motorcycle that would establish their reputation.

It is easy today to look at Hogslayer and see only the spectacle: two big British parallel twins sitting one behind the other, enormous exhaust pipes and a rear tyre that looked almost comically wide by the standards of the day. But simply adding another engine wasn’t what made the motorcycle extraordinary. The real achievement was figuring out how to use all that power.

Two Norton engines were only the beginning

A contemporary Cycle World examination from March 1973 is revealing because it shows just how much thinking was hidden beneath Hogslayer’s outrageous appearance. The engines remained surprisingly close internally to the Nortons Christenson and Gregory had been racing for years, but they were fed by Hilborn mechanical fuel injection adapted from equipment intended for an Offenhauser racing engine. Running a 95-percent nitro mixture, the combined engines were estimated at approximately 260 horsepower, and a single quarter-mile pass could consume around 1.5 gallons of fuel.

Getting that power to the pavement was another matter. Gregory used what Cycle World called a “slider” clutch, an arrangement that intentionally slipped as the motorcycle launched before progressively locking as speed increased. Behind it sat a two-speed planetary transmission designed and built by Gregory using gears from a Rambler automobile overdrive unit. None of this was bought as a Norton drag-racing kit because no such thing existed; these were solutions assembled from whatever parts and ideas could be made to work.

Then there was the rear tyre. Hogslayer used an M&H slick roughly twice the width normally seen on drag motorcycles of the period, dramatically increasing the amount of rubber available to put the power down. Even the frame itself was intentionally offset in the fore-and-aft plane to counteract the torque of the two engines and help the motorcycle track straight under acceleration. The complete machine weighed about 410 pounds.

That is the part of Hogslayer I admire most. None of these ideas arrived in a crate marked Factory Racing Department. They came from people looking at what was available, borrowing ideas from automobiles and other machinery, making parts do jobs they had never originally been designed to do, and then going to a drag strip to find out whether the stopwatch agreed. Two Norton engines made Hogslayer spectacular; the thinking behind them made it fast.

And then the Harleys began losing

Harley-Davidson machinery represented the established force in American Top Fuel motorcycle drag racing, which made Milwaukee both the benchmark and the obvious target. Even the name Hogslayer grew out of the Norton team’s ability to beat the Harleys that had dominated the class.

By 1972, the little operation from Kenosha was no longer simply experimenting. Christenson won the NHRA U.S. Nationals in the first season Fuel Bikes were included in the program. In 1973 he set an A/Fuel Bike elapsed-time record of 7.83 seconds while winning the NHRA National Motorcycle Record Championships at Bowling Green. A contemporary Cycle World report also records the Norton reaching 180 mph during the 1972 season, placing Christenson among the fastest motorcycle racers in the world.

From 1972 through 1975, Christenson rode Hogslayer to four consecutive world titles, the only motorcycle drag-racing world championships attributed to Norton. He subsequently won the official NHRA Fuel Bike National Championship in 1976.

Seven-second quarter miles and 180 mph are extraordinary figures for a motorcycle more than half a century ago. But those numbers become much more interesting when you remember where the machine came from: not a manufacturer’s experimental racing department, but a motorcycle shop in Kenosha.

“Get the Hogslayer”

One detail has followed the motorcycle ever since. The story preserved around Christenson, Gregory and James Cutting’s documentary Hogslayer: The Unapproachable Legend is that Harley-Davidson’s research and development people became sufficiently preoccupied with the troublesome Norton that a sign appeared inside the department:

“Get the Hogslayer.”

It is a wonderful piece of racing folklore, and I think it should remain exactly that rather than being presented as though someone has uncovered a Harley-Davidson corporate memorandum. VivaMoto’s original 2013 story repeated the recollection, and it remains part of the mythology surrounding the machine.

What matters is what the story represents. Harley-Davidson was the giant in this particular David-and-Goliath contest; Sunset Motors very definitely was not. Yet the little operation from Kenosha had become troublesome enough that the giant knew its name. For a bench racer, there cannot be many better compliments.

Kenosha came along for the ride

The more you learn about Hogslayer, the harder it becomes to see it simply as two clever men working in isolation. Christenson and Gregory were unquestionably at its centre, but around Sunset Motors grew a network of machinists, racers, friends and supporters who could make something, modify something or help solve a problem when an unconventional racing motorcycle demanded it.

That atmosphere matters. Great garage-built racing machines rarely emerge entirely from one pair of hands. There is usually somebody who can weld, somebody who knows a machinist, somebody who turns up after work and somebody else willing to stay late because the motorcycle has to be ready. The supporters travelling with Christenson and Gregory in Hogslayer shirts weren’t an anonymous corporate hospitality operation; they were part of the culture that grew around the team.

That makes the underdog story richer. This wasn’t merely two men versus Harley-Davidson. It was a small ecosystem around a local motorcycle shop producing something none of them had much business producing: a world-beating drag bike.

Every good bench-racing session probably needs someone sensible enough to say the idea will never work. What matters is having somebody else in the room who hears that as encouragement.

Then Hogslayer crossed the Atlantic

The Norton soon escaped Wisconsin and then America altogether. Christenson and Gregory brought Hogslayer to Britain in 1974, where the machine clocked the first eight-second motorcycle runs in Europe and caused the sort of sensation you would expect from a twin-engined, nitro-burning American Norton appearing on a British drag strip.

This is another reason machines such as Hogslayer matter beyond their trophies. A timing slip tells us who was quickest on one particular afternoon. It tells us much less about the influence a motorcycle has on the people standing behind the barriers watching it.

The early 1970s were a period when motorcycle drag racing was moving from something gifted amateurs and independent builders could still attack with ingenuity into a much more professional sport. Hogslayer sat beautifully between those two eras. It had the audacity and improvisation of early drag racing, but its engineering and performance pointed toward what the sport was becoming.

Records eventually fall. Ideas travel.

The film lets us sit at the bench with them

This is where the second of VivaMoto’s original Hogslayer stories belongs. When we featured Hogslayer: The Unapproachable Legend in 2013, James Cutting’s documentary was still relatively new. More than three years in the making and originally released in August 2011, the film preserves the Christenson/Gregory story in a way specifications and race results never could. A tenth-anniversary edition followed in 2022 with additional archival material.

The documentary matters because Hogslayer needs voices around it. Written down, the recipe can sound almost clinical: two Norton engines, Hilborn injection, nitromethane, a wide slick, a slider clutch and a home-built two-speed transmission. Put Christenson and Gregory back into the workshop and it becomes something else entirely — part engineering story, part racing history and part very good bench-racing session.

That is why the old documentary article and the old Hogslayer article belong together. The motorcycle is the subject; the film allows the men who created it to remain part of the telling.

Eventually even Hogslayer became quiet

Racing motorcycles have an awkward second life. The very things that make them important — noise, heat, movement and risk — are the things museums cannot ordinarily reproduce.

Hogslayer eventually travelled permanently to Britain and entered the collection of the National Motorcycle Museum in 2004. For roughly twenty years it became what most historically important racing motorcycles eventually become: something we could stand beside, photograph and study, but no longer experience as its creators intended.

By then Christenson had been inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame. He remained closely associated with Sunset Motors for the rest of his life, and when he died in September 2023, the motorcycle world lost the rider whose name had been inseparable from Hogslayer for half a century.

Leaving the Norton safely in the museum would have been the obvious thing to do. Fortunately, Hogslayer has never had much of a relationship with the obvious.

In 2024, they put nitro in it again

Following Christenson’s death, a small group of British drag racers began discussing how they might honour both T.C. and John Gregory. The original idea was to ask the National Motorcycle Museum whether Hogslayer could be displayed at Dragstalgia, Santa Pod Raceway’s celebration of historic drag racing.

Museum director James Hewing agreed, then offered a considerably more interesting suggestion: if the team could get it running again, that would be even better.

Hogslayer had been on static display for roughly twenty years, so this was not a matter of filling the tank and checking the tyre pressures. A small team recommissioned the motorcycle with historical information supplied by Gregory, who turned 90 while the project was underway. By July 2024 the old twin Norton was again running on nitro and had performed a short burnout in preparation for its return to Santa Pod.

Nobody expected it to chase a modern Top Fuel record, nor should they have. That wasn’t the point. People wanted Hogslayer back on a drag strip because they wanted to see it somewhere other than behind a barrier and hear those two Norton engines again.

That may be one of the most satisfying chapters in the entire story. A motorcycle created to move violently and make an enormous amount of noise had spent two decades being asked to do neither. Then, half a century after its glory years, somebody gave it nitro again.

And in 2026, Hogslayer still isn’t finished

This is what gives us a genuine reason to revisit the story today rather than simply polish an old VivaMoto article. The National Motorcycle Museum has confirmed that Hogslayer will be among the historic drag motorcycles brought to life at Museum LIVE on October 24 and 25, 2026. The programme lists it alongside The Hobbit, Olympus and the Double Norton, with the machines due to be fired up in the museum’s Fountain Courtyard.

Think about that for a moment. More than fifty years after Christenson and Gregory sat at Sunset Motors trying to work out how to make a Norton beat the dominant Harleys, people are still arranging their weekend around the opportunity to hear their motorcycle run.

The championships mattered enormously. The records mattered. But longevity like that tells us something a timing slip cannot.

David won, but that isn’t why the story lasts

We tend to tell underdog stories as though victory is what justifies them. David has to defeat Goliath. The little engine has to get over the mountain. Rocky, interestingly, gave us a slightly better version of the lesson: sometimes what matters is proving that you belonged in the contest in the first place.

Christenson and Gregory did considerably more than that. They won. But the part of their story I find most compelling happened before anyone knew they would.

It happened at the workbench, when two men looked at the established way of doing things and decided they had another idea: mechanical fuel injection borrowed from car racing, an enormous rear slick, a clutch designed to slip deliberately, gears from an automobile overdrive and two Norton engines where one would already have seemed adventurous.

That is bench racing at its best. Not merely talking about what might make a motorcycle faster, but being curious enough to build it and stubborn enough to keep working when the easy answer is that the bigger teams probably know better.

Perhaps that is why we keep cheering for the underdog. It isn’t because the underdog always wins — usually there is a perfectly good reason he is the underdog. We cheer because every once in a while somebody with fewer resources sees something the establishment has missed, refuses to be intimidated by the difference in scale and gives the rest of us permission to wonder what else might be possible.

Harley-Davidson was the target, and the trophies proved that Christenson and Gregory had built something extraordinary. But more than half a century later, the stopwatch is no longer the most interesting part of their achievement.

Two bench racers from Kenosha believed they could build one of the fastest motorcycles in the world, and for a while, they did. In 2026, people are still gathering to hear what that kind of belief sounds like.