Poteet topped 400 miles an hour at least 55 times, in a meticulously designed, carbon-fiber-clad vehicle called the Speed Demon—a so-called streamliner car that he commissioned at considerable expense and that resembles a jet fighter without wings. A parachute explodes out of its back when it’s time to slow down.

During Bonneville’s annual Speed Week in 2020, Poteet solidified his reputation by setting a new national record for piston-powered cars—which is to say, cars that are cars, with car engines inside them, and not cars with jet engines or rockets bolted onto their backs. (People used to race those at Bonneville too, but it’s no longer allowed.) The old record was 417 mph. Poteet obliterated it: 470.015.?

George Poteet’s vehicle, which he called Speed Demon.?Photo:?Michael Harrington

But Poteet actually went faster than that. Some complicated fine print: The Southern California Timing Association, which oversees Speed Week, logs official records not as a driver’s absolute top speed but as an average of the fastest mile from each of two consecutive runs across the salt. (The driver who goes fastest on a single run every year does get their name on a trophy, however—and Poteet’s name is on it 10 times. Meanwhile, a separate, international organization, the International Automobile Federation, operates its own sanctioned events according to slightly different rules; Poteet has set six of its world records, too.) Anyway, during one of Poteet’s record-setting passes at Bonneville in 2020, the Speed Demon hit 481.576.

At 481 mph, a car is traveling one mile every 7? seconds; you could drive the entire width of Manhattan in about as much time as it takes most people to sing the alphabet. At such velocities, even Poteet’s highly specialized, extra-burly tires basically became disposable. They were often torn up so brutally after a single run that they wound up looking like shredded black garbage bags.?

As it happened, right after Poteet did 481 at Bonneville, the next driver in line went faster than?丑别’诲?ever gone before too. But, this racer wrote in an online tribute, “We were still 310 mph slower than George.”?

Poteet was a conspicuously even-keeled man who spoke in a slow, imperturbable drawl. In real life, on real roads, he claimed to have never gotten a speeding ticket; he was frequently tailgated, impatiently passed. “I know people make fun of me on the express lane,” he told the Oil & Whiskey podcast in 2022.?

It started with a ’53 Dodge

George Roundal Poteet was born Feb. 22, 1948, on his family’s small hog and cow farm in Mantachie, Miss. Neither his father, a sharecropper, nor his mother, a garment factory worker, had even a high-school education.

“Back then,” Poteet explained on the Hot Rod Blues podcast, “you had three modes of transportation: a bicycle, a horse or a worn-out car…. I decided it would be easier to keep a car running than to try to catch a horse every time you wanted to go somewhere.” He became infatuated, working on his mother’s ’53 Dodge, swapping out and upgrading parts. “His goal was always to have it go faster, go faster, go faster,” said his sister, Betty Poteet Howard.

Poteet married while still in high school. (According to his family, the marriage ended after seven or eight years.) By age 18, he was working in a tire factory to make ends meet—and miserable. He tried a shoe factory and a meatpacking plant but hated them too.?

In 1970, he moved to Memphis to take a job with National Safety Associates, which sold fire alarms and smoke detectors, then water and air filters. Eventually, in 1993, as a vice president overseeing logistics, Poteet helped the firm transition into nutritional supplements, marketed as Juice Plus+.?

Poteet would work at the company for 50 years, retiring in 2020. The business made Poteet wealthy, and he channeled that wealth into cars, commissioning increasingly ambitious custom hot rods, re-creating all kinds of cars he had spotted in his youth and yearned to own. He kept roughly 120 vehicles on a several-hundred acre property near Holly Springs, Miss., which he called his “car farm.”

Poteet loved to find relatively unknown, young hot-rod designers and set them loose, without too many guidelines or constraints. Several won awards for the cars they built him, establishing their careers.?

“He gave so many guys like me a chance,” said designer and builder Troy Trepanier, one of several stars of the industry whose first paying customer was Poteet. He was, essentially, a patron of the hot-rod arts. The motor-sports writer Brandan Gillogly has called Poteet “the Medici of the Mississippi.”

Breaking the 400 mph barrier

Poteet went to Bonneville for the first time in 2001 as a spectator. Soon, he was returning year after year with a succession of roadsters that he tried, and failed, to push past 200 mph—the first big milestone chased by drivers at Speed Week.

He accomplished it finally in 2006, after commissioning from Trepanier a chopped 1969 Plymouth Barracuda that he named the “Blowfish.” From there, Poteet joined with a well-known Bonneville record-setter, Ron Main, and engine builder Kenny Duttweiler to create a streamliner called the FlatFire, soon redesigned into the EcoFire, and eventually retooled into the first Speed Demon in 2008.?

Meanwhile, Poteet had been going faster and faster every summer, ascending toward 300, then blowing past it, and gradually setting his sights on 400. He first made that breakthrough in 2010—but only barely. “I was ashamed of 404,” Poteet said.?

George Poteet with two Speed Demon models in 2021.?Photo:?Marc Gewertz

Longtime Bonneville racers were accustomed to rich men sweeping onto the scene with loads of cash and loads of bluster and trying to go as fast as possible during their first year on the salt. But Poteet earned the community’s respect by methodically working his way up the ladder and learning as he went, setting records for one class of engine type at a time. (He set more than a dozen Southern California Timing Association records in all.) “That’s the smartest way to go about it,” said Dave Lane of FastLane Rod Shop, who has built cars for Poteet. “You can’t pretend that just because you got a lot of money you know what you’re doing.”?

Poteet was also lending out roadsters to give other guys the opportunity to drive 200. If another racer’s engine busted during Speed Week, he offered spare parts. He quietly paid for generators, hotel rooms and other equipment to help the event run smoothly. Once, he sold a roadster for $5 to a longtime competitor whose grandson wanted to race at Bonneville. For years, Poteet kept the man’s five-dollar bill in his pocket—a private point of pride. (At work, a Juice Plus+ spokesperson added, he often privately paid for car repairs and even family funerals for employees who needed help.)

19 seconds of mayhem

In September 2014, during another event on the salt flats, Poteet lost traction in the Speed Demon while going 380 mph. (“You can get on the internet and google ‘Speed Demon Crash,’ ” Trepanier said. “You’ll s— your pants, I promise you.”) In the?, the vehicle yaws left, skids on its side, bounces, rolls around and around, skids more, flips, skids again, rolls a bunch more times—it’s difficult to count—travels upside-down for a while, then flips back on its side and eventually stops.?

This mayhem lasted for 19 seconds and unfolded over a stretch of desert roughly the length of a football field.?

“I basically just grabbed the steering wheel and sat there until it stopped rolling,” Poteet told Oil & Whiskey. He’d fractured a vertebra and broken multiple ribs but had no intention of going to the hospital until a crowd of concerned friends and crew members finally bullied him into it. The next day, he flew home.?

After the wreck, Poteet bought out his partner, Main, and commissioned a new Speed Demon. Then he quickly continued his climb, culminating in his 470 mph record in the AA Class at Bonneville in 2020.

From there, the only obvious goal remaining was 500. But Poteet was clear-eyed about the obstacles. The problem wasn’t horsepower, he insisted; he was more concerned with maintaining traction at that speed, the unpredictability of the course conditions every year and, ultimately, his own durability. He was in his 70s now. Plus: “Going that fast, it’s suicidal, to be honest with you,” he told Hagerty Media in 2019. “When you get into your 45th time [going 400 mph] you think, ‘This is pushing your luck.’ ”?

After topping out at 466 mph in 2021—only?466—Poteet expressed discouragement. It was crazy, he told Hot Rod Blues in early 2022: “Everybody thinks it was a horrible year for us!…I think you lose a little bit of the fun when you get to that point. I’m not looking near as forward to it this year as I was 10 years ago.” He’d be going back to Bonneville mostly not to disappoint his crew, he said, and a grandson and great-grandson who’d taken an interest in the scene.