Harley-Davidson’s forgotten grand prix glory reached far beyond today’s King of the Baggers

Everyone knows Harley-Davidson doesn’t do racing motorcycles. The venerable Milwaukee marque appeals to a different tribe of motorcyclists, selling them machines christened Low Riders, Road Glides and Fat Boys. It’s the opposite vibe to going around in circles as fast as you can.

On the other hand, history has taught us there’s no such thing as a vehicle that cannot be raced. Witness the unlikely success of truck racing.

Now motorcycling has its own version of truck racing: the King of the Baggers championship. Bagger racing originated in the United States – yes, where else? – a few years ago. It takes monster V-twin touring motorcycles, equipped with saddlebags (hence ‘baggers’), and drags them kickin’ and screamin’ to the racetrack.

King of the Baggers is all-American: Harley-Davidson versus Indian, out of Minnesota. Harley’s bagger weapon is its air-cooled 2147cc Road Glide. Indian’s is its water-cooled 1834cc Challenger. These motorcycles make over 200bhp and weigh around 280kg, which isn’t far off twice the weight of a MotoGP bike. They also sound glorious – rolling thunder bellowing from their pipes.

“The bagger thing was just a crazy thought,” says Harley-Davidson bagger racer Cory West. “Some people were building these custom Harley and Indian baggers with all these performance parts on them. And then there was a guy that said, ‘You know, we should try racing these things instead of just looking at them in a parking lot.’ So we went and raced them!”

What started out as a novelty race at Laguna Seca in 2020 has become the biggest deal in the MotoAmerica championship, eclipsing even superbike racing, which had topped the bill since the 1980s. Why is this? It’s because people love something a bit different and because bagger racing brings the Harley crowd to the racetracks, where they’d never usually venture.

“We should try racing these things instead of just looking at them”

Inevitably, purist racing people hate baggers. They see them as a sop to the lowest common denominator of race fan, an affront to the art and science of racing.

All this may be true, but baggers aren’t slow. King of the Baggers recently spawned the Bagger World Cup, a Harley promo series that runs at half a dozen MotoGP rounds, including the Italian Grand Prix at Mugello, run in May, and the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in August. BWC’s biggest star is former MotoGP and World Superbike race winner Andrea Iannone, who established the Mugello bagger record at 1min 56.8sec, 6sec off the circuit superbike record.

Ironically, this year’s Italian GP marked half a century since Harley-Davidson actually did make racing motorcycles, in a roundabout way. During the 1960s Harley wanted a slice of the US’s booming small-motorcycle market, so it bought 50% of Italian brand Aermacchi, famed for its small-capacity road and race machines.

In 1972 Aermacchi sold Harley the remaining 50% of its motorcycle business to concentrate on making aircraft, so Aermacchi’s 250cc Grand Prix bike became a Harley-Davidson. This didn’t go down well with the Harley brethren, who reserve a special disdain for little Italian two-strokes.

And yet the newly named Harley 250’s engine was a work of beauty, created by Italian engineer William Soncini. Although similar to Yamaha’s dominant parallel twins, Soncini’s attention to detail made the Harley a finer machine – lighter and more powerful.

The brilliant Renzo Pasolini rode the Aermacchi/Harley to second in the 1972 250cc World Championship, a single point behind Yamaha’s Finnish genius Jarno Saarinen. Soncini added water-cooling for 1973 but before the system was fully developed it caused one of the worst accidents in grand prix history, when Pasolini’s engine seized at Monza, triggering a multiple pile-up that killed both the Italian rider and Saarinen.