Here’s How an Indian Challenger Beat a Pack of Harleys to Be King of the Baggers

Part of the MotoAmerica Superbike Speedfest, the race pitted no less than 11 Harley-Davidson motorcycles against just two Indian Challengers. As you might already know by now, one Indian emerged victorious.

Over the past few months, we’ve kept you in the loop on work conducted on a Challenger by S&S and Roland Sands with the goal of creating a machine worthy of taking on Road and Street Glides on the twists of the Laguna Seca. Apparently, Indian was making two of them, and the story of how they managed to snatch two of the three podium spots is captured in the freshly released images attached in the gallery above.

At the end of the bagger race, Indian ended up winning the race with an S&S prepped Challenger ridden by Tyler O’Hara, while Frankie Garcia, the man seated on the Roland Sands Challenger, finished in third position. O’Hara’s win, however, was not easy or incident-free.

“Three or four laps in, I was going into (turn) two and I didn’t have any moments going into turn two the whole weekend and just ended up tucking the front,” O’Hara said according to MotoAmerica. “I saved it and then actually went all the way off into turn two.”

“Actually, at the start Frankie (Garcia) was telling me my bike was smoking and I was like, ‘You’re full of it. What are you trying to psych me out?’ But he was serious. I looked at the bike and looked down and I saw a little brake fluid on the pipe."

“I said, ‘Okay, well we can figure this out. Don’t pull me out of here. We’re just going to figure it out.’ We didn’t have any rear brakes at all either, so that was a little interesting. We just did our homework and I was very fortunate that I was able to keep it on two wheels in the sand.”

You can watch (or re-watch) the entire race in the video attached below.