King of Indian Baggers
Chuckwalla Raceway is my local track in California. It’s a bit of a goat-like track, but it has some pretty quick turns, and the elevation changes always keep your eyes peeled.
With caution, I’d say I’ve completed 3000 laps here in the last eight years, more than any other track I’ve ridden. I know this place like the back of my hand, but in Tyler O’Hara’s Mission Foods/S&S Cycle/Indian Challenger, I might as well be on Mars.
O’Hara’s beast bagger is like half a NASCAR and runs almost as fast, but that’s not the scary thing. It’s the way the chassis moves beneath me like it’s permanently got a tiny drop of oil on the Dunlop Sportmax Q4 rear tire for the street—you know, just enough to keep you steady but not enough to throw you down the street— that worries me.
“It’s like a bicycle with a distinct personality,” O’Hara told me. “You can ride hard, shift hard, and accelerate hard, but you have to be really careful with it. She likes to go fast, but there is a method to help her go fast.”
The secret to making it all work is to comfortably use the thumb-controlled rear brake, first to really help slow down the 275kg chestnut monster but second, and more importantly, to helps control the suspension bounce after the throttle is re-applied. you can keep everything on its intended path.
“You absolutely must use the rear brake,” said O’Hara. “Otherwise, you will have a hard time cornering and you will lose too much time between braking and accelerating. Alternatively, you can use the rear to reduce frame curvature, which was a problem with our bike.“
The auto throttle on a bagger like O’Hara’s 1835cc American V-twin race car requires a combination of raw aggression and finesse to get all that torque out. down to the ground.
The frame, modified as much as possible to MotoAmerica King of The Baggers rules (basically not), flexes in a ready-to-use fashion more like a 1983 Honda VF1000R, front, center and rear. of the motorcycle twisting and weaving around Chuckwalla with me more or less just a passenger.
“As a rule, we can’t really modify any chassis parts,” said S&S Chief Engineer, Jeff Bailey, who was primarily responsible for the creation, maintenance, and improvement of O’Hara and teammate Jeremy McWilliams’ racing car. “We got a subsidy from MotoAmerica to slightly machine the crossbars of the front frame for clearance, but that’s really the only modification we’ve made to the frame. This is still essentially a street bike. Its core is not a racing bike.”
Compared to the rigidity of a modern sportbike, the bagger feels like it’s from another era, but as I dig into its oddities it all starts to make sense – part any.
Running Brembo billet brake calipers, Galespeed 19 x 19 master cylinder, 17 x 6 inch rear and 17 x 3.5 inch front wheel, and modified Ducati Multistrada 1260 Pikes Peak 48mm fork, braking capacity and The rotation speed of O’ Hara’s bag is huge.
It’s too long with its extended swingarm and braced, and it’s also so tall and heavy that you can completely bury the front end under the brakes.
It’s like a superbike style taken to the extreme—you brake hard and very late, rush past where you thought you should turn, wait a bit, then slam it aside, pick it up as soon as you see it. Conveniently, keep the chassis on the road. brake the rear and pull the muffler and let that S&S engine roar towards the 7700rpm red line on the AiM DL2 dashboard and data logger. It’s like riding on the back of a lion chasing its next meal.
The Mission Foods/S&S Cycle Factory/Indian Challenger Team of Tyler O’Hara and our favorite Northern Irishman, Jeremy McWilliams, is not a single entity but a partnership between the commercial strengths of Polaris’ (parent company of Indian Motorcycle) and legendary tuning specialist S&S’s.
Unlike longtime rival Harley Davidson with former champion Kyle Wyman and brother Travis on board, the HD show is run entirely in-house, which is something you can do when you have a workforce (and budget). ) is almost four times that of Indians.
To create O’Hara and McWilliams racers, S&S started with an antique fake Challenger and ripped it up. Custom parts from S&S include adjustable triple clamps, billet front axle, fully modified induction system, billet clutch, rear fork, handlebars, rear axle, belly and one There are a few small details like the Saddlemen-made carbon fiber saddle and, of course, the side pockets, but it’s clearly the engine that gets the most attention.
“We really put a lot of emphasis on airflow,Bailey said. “It’s all top work, basically: we make the camshafts, CNC machined cylinder heads and 110 mm large diameter pistons. We also machined some swingarms, just for the higher rpm limit. All four swingarms are different and machined from a solid block of steel. The intake manifold on these bikes is actually 3D printed aluminum, which is pretty cool, and then the outer running unit is plastic, and this combines with the giant 78mm single throttle body we took. from the Chevy V6 automobile engine to replace the Chevy V6 automobile engine. set up the double throttle body of the stock engine.“
Despite my harassment and possible bribery, Neil refuses to reveal any performance numbers from this monster engine. Ut.
A lighter crank of unspecified weight, allowed by the rules in 2022 but required to be 10% less weight than stock by 2023, helps this V-twin spin at the same speed as the original. Many V-twin cruiser owners will kill for.
However, like any bike with tons of torque, the game doesn’t release it as much as harnessing it. That’s why Jeremy McWilliams was brought on board in early 2022 to help the team work on the UK-designed Max ECU throttle map prior to Daytona.
“Hop on the bike, it’s a real wake-up call because it’s the first bike they’ve hit the market with all this extra horsepower and torque compared to the 2021 bike.,” McWilliams said. “We don’t even have a throttle map. We just run one by one. So, to say the least, jumping into this with a one-on-one ga map is pretty cool.
“We worked closely with the calibrators. They quickly figured out how to transfer all that torque to the rear tire. Then, during the day, we made such great strides that I wanted to go back and do some more.“
Jeremy’s feedback helped Indian technicians get the kind of performance out of the bike they needed after Kyle Wyman and Harley-Davidson took a round kick at them during the 2021 season.
McWilliams was then hired not only for the season opener at Daytona but also for the rest of the year and this year. The fact that he rode a bagger made me laugh out loud in the media room.
“You know what happens when you ride this car? You think you’ve mastered it,” he says. “You come back after putting it on the platform, come home, come back a week later and you say, “I know this bike. I know how I finished it two weeks ago, I’ll get back to it in no time. And you are not. You can’t go fast until the bike starts coming towards you. You don’t just get in the car and go, “Okay, I’m ready to go.”
“After a session, it starts coming to you, but you’re constantly tweaking and messing with it, instead of just going on and trying to ride it. You’re like, “What did I change? Or what have they changed? What’s happening?” It can mess with your head.”
It can make your head spin just watching these things in action. I was in the first round at Daytona last year and watched McWilliams and Co. hit the first shore, where instead of going at full speed, you are constantly accelerating and thus putting all that force through the chassis.
You know, when you see a supersport pedaling at 200 km/h, it looks like it’s running at 200 km/h. Looks like it has to go 200 km/h.
When you see a bagger running at 200 km/h, especially one at 37 degrees like the Daytona’s, it looks like it’s going 400 km/h. It winds and glides around the bank while making a sound that really reminds me of being in Bathurst in the 90s when Craig Lowndes was almost no longer wearing diapers and kicking people’s ass. It made me shiver. I’ve attended countless MotoGP races and seen the gods riding, but the first glimpse of the bagger doing its job at Daytona will stay with me forever.
As well as those five short but memorable laps at the local track that I may not have driven before.
O’Hara’s bagger requires a more finely tuned riding style than even Manx Norton to get the most out of it and to see that he, Wyman, McWilliams and the rest can pull lap times in A five-second lap over Jake Gagne on WorldSBK Yamaha YZF-R1M at Laguna Seca tells you that while they may seem silly, bulky and heavy, these are serious racing machines driven by racers. There are balls so big that they need a wheelbarrow to move around.
