Appeared in Cafe Racer Magazine's August/September 2024 issue.

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BY ANTHONY CONROY, Cafe Racer Magazine

 

The old adage goes: win with it on Sunday, sell it on Monday. At Harley-Davidson, they’re flipping the script. Instead, it’s more like: sell it on Monday, then race it on Sunday.

 

The Motor Company, whose brand is synonymous with American muscle and machismo but not necessarily high performance in the world of motorcycle racing — at least not contemporarily — is beginning to turn heads, including in its own offices.

 

While the Motor Company has had success in flat-track and drag racing and single-manufacturer classes — meaning it competes only against other Harley-Davidson motorcycles — it has ventured outside its comfort zone in the past few years, battling on racetracks throughout the U.S. against other manufacturers, including old rival Indian.

 

And winning.

 

And it’s doing so by adhering to a simple corporate philosophy: race the motorcycles it knows it can sell in the real world and in categories it can compete rather than building bikes simply to go racing. No longer interested in homologated specials like the VR1000 — a bike the company built enough of only to meet the requirements needed to go racing in the former AMA Superbike championship but never generated much buzz outside its customer base — the company is focused on the motorcycles it builds really well and then finding the right class to race them. 

 

Fortunately, MotoAmerica, the U.S.’s top racing series, has provided that opportunity in the form of the King of the Baggers and Super Hooligan classes.

 

The platforms for those classes are the Road Glide and Pan America 1250. One is Harley-Davidson’s top-selling motorcycle. The other is the company’s entry into the adventure-touring market and the “top-selling, big-bore motorcycle in North America since its inception,” according to Paul James, Harley-Davidson’s spokesman.

 

Sadly for CRM readers, the success of those two bikes means the Bronx — the streetfighter concept Harley-Davidson unveiled alongside the Pan America and Sportster S a few years ago — may never see production.

 

“The product planning team is always looking at options and different products within the market space, and looking at opportunities to succeed,” he said. “And at this point, we’ve chosen not to enter the street fighter segment. It’s a very competitive segment, which I’m sure you know. So it’s very competitive and relatively low margin. That’s a challenge for a company in this business to make money. So we decided our focus was better spent on bikes that we felt we had more space to compete.

 

Harley-Davidson has a factory racing team in King of the Baggers, but in Super Hooligan, it’s product is in the hands of independent teams such as Kyle Wyman Racing  (KWR) and Team Saddlemen. With only factory support, the Pan America-ridden bikes at Daytona International Speedway in March finished third in Race 1 and swept the podium in Race 2.

 

“We’ve seen that with Kyle’s team and the other Super Hooligan Harley-Davidson teams do so well at Daytona, that definitely opened some eyes at the senior leadership level and light bulbs went off, and people got excited about it,” James said. 

 

Could that mean the possibility of the Bronx project being resurrected?

 

“I don’t want to go that far,” James added, “but I can also say there’s a lot of excitement in the potential for Harley-Davidson to be competitive in the class. So we’ll stop there.”

 

James said the company “has interest” in other classes and forms of racing, but Harley-Davidson’s current focus — at least on the track — is King of the Baggers. That point was reiterated by Wyman, who in addition to owning the KWR team in Super Hooligan also races for H-D’s factory team in KOTB.

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“We’re racing the bikes we sell,” he said. “And that connection is more established in this racing than arguably any motorcycling racing in the world. When you look at MotoGP, they’re prototypes and don’t resemble anything on the showroom floor. When you look at World Superbike, they’re 1000cc, fully faired sportbikes. Not a single one of those manufacturers will tell you that’s their bread and butter as far as product sales go. So that’s definitely a fringe product now.”

 

With the Road Glide in KOTB and now the Pan America in Super Hooligan, The Motor Company is rediscovering its place on the racetrack.

 

“Harley having a factory internal program for racing is a relatively new development,” James said. “When I came to the company in ’98, we were campaigning the VR1000 superbike, and that program ended in 2001. After that, we introduced the V-Rod, which had a production motor that was loosely based on the VR and then we went drag racing. We did that through a partner through Vance & Hines. Shortly after that, our flat track program was outsourced to Vance & Hines and factory racing as we knew it kind of disappeared. 

 

“Really, in King of the Baggers — and Kyle’s been involved from Day One with us — as a factory we are regaining our form in racing, having it be internal, and having the people who be in the program be engineers who are well-versed in Harley-Davidson and, in some cases, have dual roles at Harley-Davidson,” he continued. “So that’s a long way of saying factory racing is back at Harley Davidson, and to a certain extent, the sky’s the limit in terms of where we take it.”

 

James, who said the Bronx prototype is likely now residing at H-D’s product development center in Milwaukee, acknowledged why CRM’s readers continue to be excited about the prospect of seeing a Bronx on the road and even the track. If the company made a mistake, it was showing “a motorcycle (to the public) that early before production. That very unusual for Harley-Davidson,” he said.

 

“I recognize why that bike would be very interesting to Cafe Racer, for sure, and I know that enthusiasts for that style of motorcycle are frustrated that we showed something and didn’t do it,” James said. “At the time for Harley-Davidson entering these new categories, we felt we had to show what our intent was at that time in order to prep the market and our dealer network to sell those kinds of bikes. In the end, we ended up focusing on adventure-touring and I think that was the right call. Certainly, it has a much larger market space worldwide and one that we can be competitive and shown we can be competitive in.”

 

James added that the Revolution Max 1250, the engine that powers the Pan America, was designed “to be modular and serve multiple needs in the marketplace,” so it’s entirely possible a new model featuring that powertrain could see the light of day.

 

Roland Sands, the designer and custom builder who created the Super Hooligan class and has a relationship with Indian, hopes Harley-Davidson’s desire to go racing goes beyond the Pan America.

 

“In the end, (racing) means a much better bike for the end consumer. And for H-D, it probably means a bad-ass production streetfighter could be in the cue to go up against the current King of the Hooligans, the two-time championship winning Indian FTR 1200.”