In 2001, Mark Gardiner gave up his career in advertising, and moved to the Isle of Man to live out his childhood dream of racing in the TT. After returning to the U.S., he wrote a memoir of that experience, Riding Man, which is now in development as a feature film. His column, Backmarker, looks at everything from the motorcycle industry as a whole to intensely personal 'inside stories.'
While there had been a number of powered two-wheelers, including things like the Daimler Maybach and steam-powered high-wheel 'penny-farthings', the first practical motorcycles evolved out of those pacer bikes. Hendee, as the promoter and business genius, and Hedstrom as the engineering genius, turned their Indian 'motocycle' company into the first big motorcycle company in the U.S., though Harley-Davidson was hot on their heels.
The two were very innovative; they were quick to adopt chain drive, gearboxes, and mechanically-operated inlet valves. As board track racing for motorcycles themselves became a major sport, they produced some ferocious eight-valve race bikes. The first time the Isle of Man TT races were held over the Mountain Course, in 1911, Indian totally dominated the Senior race, placing first, second and third.
An example of 'derny' motorized training bike. The first practical motorcycles evolved from vehicles like this. It was quite an advantage pedaling behind it; check out the gearing on that bicycle!
Still, the wigwam didn't stop trying. Charles Franklin, an ex-TT racer came over from England to replace Hedstrom, and designed the very good 101 Scout. In 1927, Indian bought the assets of the Ace motorcycle company, which produced a brilliant in-line four-cylinder bike designed by Arthur Lemon. The Indian Four was the BMW K1600 of its day, and remained in production until the early '40s. But the Depression was hard on Indian. This period established a bit of a trend for the company; good bikes, bad business. In 1930, E. P. DuPont bought the company, but sales fell to a couple of thousand units a year.
Franklin died in '32, but luckily the company found another great chief engineer in Briggs Weaver, who designed the 750cc Sport Scout. While the 1200cc Chief may be the Indian most remembered today, the Sport Scout was perhaps the marque's defining machine. It was the GSX-R600 of its day, and did very well in Class C competition.
By the '40s, Indian the company was pretty much on its own trail of tears. Du Pont sold it to a guy named Ralph Rogers, who grasped the superiority of the lighter and nimbler bikes coming out of the UK at the time, but the smaller bikes Rogers made weren't very good. Rogers needed investment and got some from the UK, from Brockhouse Engineering.
In the late '40s Rogers left the company in the hands of John Brockhouse, who continued to produce a few Chiefs a year, while attempting to market the UK-built Indian 'Brave' without much success. I think that Chief production stopped in '53, but that a few bikes were assembled out of stockpiled parts for a couple of years and that since there were some fleet customers - police departments - that specified they had to buy American, they sold a few of the last Chiefs for that purpose.
That was the end of anything that could be thought of as a continuous line tracing back to the original Massachusetts company. But it wasn't the end of the Indian brand by any means...
The eccentric and opportunistic Floyd Clymer acquired the rights to the name and imported a few machines from the UK and Italy (made by Enfield and Italjet) which were badged 'Indian'. When Clymer died, his lawyer ended up with the rights and he, in turn, licensed the name to a minibike maker in Taiwan. Then, for a while, he actually owned a factory over there, producing really horrible, chintzy Indian minibikes.
In the mid-'90s, there were intriguing rumors that an Australian investor planned to buy up the Indian trademark and hire John Britten to design a new Indian Chief.
The only time, through all of this, that I ever didn't think, Just let Indian die, so we can remember the good years, was the brief shining moment at the 1995 BEARS races in Daytona, when the talk of the paddock was that an Australian entrepreneur named Maurits Hayim-Langridge planned to acquire the rights to Indian and had contracted with John Britten to create an all new Chief. Since Britten's only designs so far had been for iconoclastic race bikes, he might have seemed like an unlikely choice. But John's very first motorcycle had been an old Indian Scout pulled from a New Zealand irrigation ditch, which he restored as a teenager. The thought of a new Britten-designed Indian stirred up some buzz amongst motorcyclists, but within six months, Britten died of cancer.
In the late '90s a court in Colorado tried to sort it all out, and the rights ended up going to a company in Gilroy, California, which immediately began assembling bikes from brought-in components. The motors were S&S Harley clones – which given the fierce historic rivalry between the wrecking crew and the wigwam, made real Indian fans roll their eyes. The Gilroy operation briefly tried to produce a new Indian from scratch and hired great designers like James Parker and Tim Prentice. But the company never reached critical mass and never got beyond 'novelty-alternative-to-Harley' status.
The Gilroy company's trademark rights were acquired by a UK-based investment firm, Stellican, which was probably hoping to pull off the sort of coup that Texas-Pacific Group achieved when it acquired Ducati, revived the company and sold it at an enormous profit between 1996 and 2005.
Stellican worked to keep the Indian brand alive, producing retrostyled cruisers since 2006.
Phew! This is the company that Polaris just acquired. I wonder if Stellican's deal was all cash, or do they now own a little piece of Polaris? That's what I would have advised, because there's lots of potential in a revitalized Indian brand.
My point in writing this long story is to get here...
Polaris is an interesting company. Since my focus is mostly on motorcycle sport, I've had little exposure to the Victory line, but what I've seen, I like. I think they've gone about the business of establishing Victory as its own brand - not just a Harley-Davidson wannabe - in a measured, realistic, intelligent way. Especially at both ends of the line, with the Vegas 8-ball and the striking Vision touring bike, they've created machines that Charles Franklin and Brock Weaver might have approved.
But Polaris' CEO has already referred to Indian as a 'heritage' brand, and an internal Polaris presentation has leaked out which makes it clear that a revitalized Indian will basically go head-to-head with Harley-Davidson.
I have a different hope for this Indian incarnation. (Oops, my allusion's gone from North American Indian to Indian sub-continent Indian with that choice of words. I'm probably still thinking of those curry shops in Toronto.)
My hope is that Polaris asks itself this question: If the great Indian designers, from Hedstrom to Franklin, from Lemon to Weaver, were alive today what kind of motorcycles would they be making? I know this much is true: Not one of those guys would be looking to the current Harley-Davidson lineup for inspiration. Neither should Polaris.
Ace custom builder Shinya Kimura rode his 1915 Indian big Twin almost all the way across the U.S. in last year's epic 'Cannonball' motorcycle rally. By the time this bike was built, Indian's best years were already behind it.
Where is there a future? In the future.
I'm not saying that a revived Indian should get straight into an arms race with BMW, Kawasaki and the rest of them (although on the 100th anniversary of Indian's dominant Senior TT win, it's worth remembering that in the wigwam's heyday, they led the sport-bike arms race.)
Maybe the revived Triumph is a good model; it's produced several unique designs and many motorcyclists who were skeptical of that brand's resurrection have come around to approving the Hinckley output. Heck, even Motus has set off down a new and uniquely American path.
Polaris needs to find the next generation's Hedstroms and Franklins, and hire them to make an Indian for the future, not one for the past. It's time to get off the reservation.
