Racing Against Life: Going Full Throttle with Max Wrist
Zooming through the sandy slopes of southern California, the man in red flies on the back of his bike. He skirts between the two lanes and lifts into a wheelie, flying past one sportscar after another as he stares down each driver.
The engine roars as he twists the throttle back and pops the bike into another wheelie, the speedometer flickering past 100 mph. Suddenly, he speeds alongside an old green Mini Cooper while approaching an upcoming turn and loses control. The bike collides with the rail guard, launching the rider into a double somersault.
“Oh shit!” Someone screams as the rider lays unconscious. “Wristy! Are you there?”
“I’ve always been into ‘fast toys’”
Max Wrist hasn’t always done wheelies while passing sportscars.
In fact, before he conquered the canyons of California and the southern US, his very first bike was a modest 250 Honda Rebel that he rode to the motorcycle safety course. But Eugene McMahel — the man behind the helmet — has consistently fueled an enduring need for speed.
Although he may often quip about blazing past a $200,000 supercar in a $20,000 bike, McMahel was previously the proud owner of both a Chevy Corvette and a Honda S2000. “I’ve always been into ‘fast toys’” he openly admits.
For most speed junkies, cruising around in a Corvette is more than enough to experience the thrill of going fast. After all, going 0-60mph in 4 seconds is enough to take out a decade’s worth of wrinkles.
But for “Wristy,” McMahel’s other riding alias that he goes by, this was merely approaching the tipping point that would give birth to a whole new level of “mindblowing” power.
The Real-Life Ghost Rider
Like many heroic origin stories, Max Wrist’s beginnings came about following a painful change in his life. Following his divorce from his first wife, McMahel headed out straight to Daytona Powersports in Daytona Beach, Florida, where bought his first sportbike in May 2012: a Honda Fireblade (CBR 1000RR).
Several hundred miles away from his home in North Carolina, with leather loafers on his feet, he accidentally tried his first wheelie on the same day he rode off the lot after wanting to “see how fast this bike goes.”Back home, McMahel began honing his riding skills in the western mountains of North Carolina, taking on famous twisty roads like “The Devil’s Whip” and the “Tail of the Dragon.”
However, within 2 months of buying his bike, he’d crashed on I-95, spilling into a ditch and flying off his bike. “Everybody on I-95 could see me do it.”
Over 100 million YouTube views later and with 600,000 followers on Instagram, Max Wrist inspires fans around the world on a daily basis with his skillful stunts and action-packed videos. For riders and non-riders alike, he’s come to represent not only an intense style of riding but also a “racy” approach to life. “This is the only way I ride. Full throttle. Full power. Full aggression.”
But Wristy isn’t without his fair share of detractors. Haters all over the globe — from the Italian Polizia to the broadcasters at Fox News — have been just aggressive in condemning Max Wrist for being crazy and reckless.
Among the thousands of comments that each of his videos receives, there are as many compliments as there are jabs, with some commenters calling him “the worst rider I’ve ever seen.”
Yet in spite of the mass attention that Max Wrist has captured in the last 4 years, few know the true identity of this real-life Ghost Rider. And even fewer know why he chooses to risk life and limb at 183 miles per hour.
Where DIY Art Meets Superbike Stardom
Shortly after purchasing his first sportbike in 2012, Wristy began riding with Triangle Sport Bike Riders, a riding group based in Raleigh, NC. At the group meets, he would take pictures of his Fireblade and post them on Facebook — “you know, doing what everybody else does online.”
After realizing that using his phone to take photos of his bike “wasn’t doing it justice,” he went out and bought a DSLR camera to upgrade his shots. But it wasn’t until a fellow rider introduced Wristy to the magic of Photoshop that he began to devote more time to working on his photos.
From there, he began to gain popularity on Facebook for his “outrageous” photos that uniquely expressed his love of riding through graphic art and edited backgrounds. A simple switch in social media platforms then skyrocketed Max Wrist to the top of the superbike world.
“I started Instagram and I had over 20,000 followers in the first 6 months,” he casually confesses.
But unlike many of today’s social media influencers, Wristy wasn’t posting content with an eye to sponsorship deals and monetization. At a time when followers can be bought by the thousands, McMahel earned his fame organically through word-of-mouth and raw appreciation of his work. “It wasn’t a daily ‘I’m trying to make money off this or anything… It was just fun to be popular, I suppose.”
Grinding from Zero: The “Instant” Success of Max Wrist
Like most comic book heroes — including the Ghost Rider himself — the persona of Max Wrist was borne out of a desire for anonymity. Calling to mind any number of superhero “suit up” movie scenes, McMahel completely overhauled his appearance in an attempt to disguise himself under a new name.
“I bought all-new everything: bike, suit, gloves, boots, helmet,” he recalls, “thinking that nobody would know that I was the same guy.” But whereas most heroes manage to hide their identities behind their masks (and helmets), Wristy’s dicey antics were too dare devilish to fool his social media following.“They knew it was me right away, just by my style of riding.”
For McMahel though, the changeover was a way to separate his day-to-day life from his passion for fast bikes. After several years of accidentally learning how to build his online following through trial and error, it was time to start from scratch — this time with a plan.
“I wanted to go away from my old social media and do something incognito.”
Wristy subsequently began posting videos on his YouTube channel “Max Wrist,” relocating to Italy in the meantime for work. And over the next 4 years, Max Wrist grew from 1,000 subscribers to just over 895,000 subscribers and hundreds of millions of views.
Little did he know that his videos would bring him as much trouble as they did successfully.
“Then the police came and took my bikes”
In September 2015, the prosecutor’s office in Schio, Italy released a notice denouncing Eugene McMahel and a fellow rider for reckless driving and “crazy races.”
Weeks earlier, images and videos of Max Wrist’s feats had begun surfacing all over Italy’s online and local TV news reports.
Now working and living in the Italian Province of Vicenza, McMahel had taken to racing Ferrari test drivers through the hills of Maranello in his spare time.
He began sharing footage with fans on YouTube and garnered over 6.4 million views in just one video featuring a street race against a Ferrari F40. Local residents were slightly less enthused.
After receiving multiple complaints and letters, authorities were able to identify McMahel as the infamous “road hog,” linking scenes from his Max Wrist videos to different roads and highways in the area. By this time, Wristy had begun making headlines back home in the states, receiving criticism from the likes of Fox News for his risky maneuvers along the streets and highways of Italy.
Then in early 2016, units from the Schio Polizia and Carabinieri arrived outside McMahel’s home in Vicenza, Italy and towed away his Honda CBR and BMW.
Although both bikes were eventually returned to him, Wristy had grown tired of the biking scene in Italy. Max Wrist was up for a new challenge that would see him fly back to the States into the heart of the “Motorcycle Mecca.”
Full Throttle on Film
According to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, you are 29 times more likely to get killed in a motorcycle collision than you are in an accident involving any other type of vehicle. So when you witness a speed-hungry rider like Max Wrist survive a full-throttle crash for the first time, you assume he’d feel lucky to be alive. And when you see him getting carried away on a stretcher, you’d think he’d know better than to get back on that bike.
But when he keeps crashing one bike after another, year after year, you begin to wonder if this man simply has a death wish. Or if he’s already made a pact with the Grim Reaper.
While most people would jump out of the way of a madman bent on cheating death, Zoey Tur and Beth YoungBlood have chosen to tag along.
No strangers themselves to high-speed chases and reckless maneuvers, these award-winning filmmakers look to explore the mastermind behind Max Wrist as he zips through California canyons in their upcoming documentary Max Wrist: Killin’ the Game.
As Wristy would say, this is a story “for people who like to twist the throttle all the way back.” So if you enjoy living on the edge, come along for the ride and discover what swerving through life at 183 mph looks like.
