Dorna and Harley announced a MotoGP collaboration on Monday, but collaboration for what? It’s not quite certain. So what’s going on?
Factory Harley rider James Rispoli after turning the first-ever bagger laps in Europe, at Barcelona on Monday. The thunderous sound of the two-litre behemoth didn’t quite bring the grandstands tumbling down
Harley-Davidson baggers sharing the MotoGP paddock with grand prix prototypes? Heresy! Sacrilege! Blasphemy! It’s like allowing a herd of hairy old carthorses into the paddock at the Kentucky Derby, where sleek, thoroughbred racehorses show off their beauty to admirers.
But perhaps this is a case of it’s so wrong, it’s right – baggers seem to be such a bad fit with MotoGP that they might make a great fit.
Think about it, Dorna has two international motorcycle racing series – MotoGP and WSBK – and every class basically looks and sounds the same, at least to the uninitiated. Baggers look like they come from another planet – Planet America! – so just maybe their weirdness will work.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter if you’re totally into the idea or totally against it, because Monday’s Dorna/Harley launch of a MotoGP/baggers collaboration revealed… exactly nothing. The MotoGP rights-holder and the veteran motorcycle manufacturer have entered into an agreement but there are no plans to have baggers racing at MotoGP events. Not yet anyway. Maybe in the future. But definitely not in 2025. What about 2026? They’re not sure.
Baggers have already raced at a MotoGP event, at last April’s Americas Grand Prix at COTA, so presumably that will become an annual event at the US MotoGP round, because bagger racing is so popular in the States? Er, no. Baggers aren’t even in the 2025 Americas GP schedule, because their place will be taken by the MotoAmerica Talent Cup, a new series created to help American youngsters climb the racing ladder towards MotoGP.
So what exactly is going on, apart from Harley paying Dorna a substantial amount to climb aboard the MotoGP bandwagon?
“We are exploring all opportunities and we think there’s something in the making here that could be quite substantial, but we want to take it one step at a time and not get ahead of ourselves,” Harley CEO Jochen Zeitz told me on Monday. “For us it’s a good time, also with Liberty Media likely to come into the picture, we have a mutual interest to get race fans exposed to the brand and create something new. We have a strong intention to work together [with Dorna].”
Dorna chief sporting officer Carlos Ezpeleta, Harley CEO Jochen Zeitz and Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta at the MotoGP’s Harley baggers ‘launch’
Oxley
Zeitz was CEO of sports brand Puma before he joined Harley a few years ago.
“When I was at Puma I decided to enter Formula 1 with the brand and people laughed: why would a sporting company go into F1?” he continued. “We signed a deal with Lotus and then with Ferrari and this became the biggest-ever business for the brand.
“I’ve always believed in racing as a great opportunity. F1 took a while to catch on in America and maybe now we can bring something from America that could catch on internationally. The trifecta of MotoGP, Harley and Liberty Media could be a great opportunity, and even without Liberty we think there’s a lot of interest, so why not try something new and exciting?”
The factory Harley baggers – Screamin’ Eagle Road Glides, to give them their full name – are vast, ungainly behemoths but you can’t say they’re not impressive.
“People said, ‘What’s he doing winning on a BMW?’. Then I pissed them off more by adding saddlebags!”
Let’s start with the minimum weight: 288kg, which is 26kg less than the minimum weight of TWO MotoGP bikes. The hopped-up 2146cc v-twin makes around 150 horsepower at the rear wheel, which has these monsters nudging 180mph around the Daytona banking.
Bagger frames must be standard but the Screamin’ Eagle Road Glide uses superbike-spec Öhlins forks, finned Brembo race calipers and Öhlins twin shocks with remote reservoirs mounted alongside the panniers. Swingarms don’t have to be standard and they aren’t – the Glide’s swingarm is probably its trickest feature: CNC’d from a 180kg aluminium billet into an 8kg swingarm.
They’re not slow either. The COTA superbike record stands at 2min 8.6sec, while these v-twin barndoors get around at 2min 14.6sec. Difficult to imagine how that’s even possible.
Although bagger racing only started officially four years ago, it’s nothing new. Not many people know this, but it goes back to the 1970s – decades before US 250cc champion-turned-custom-legend Roland Sands created the King of the Baggers series in 2020.
The Harley bagger’s swingarm is a work of art – CNC’d from a 180kg aluminium billet down to an 8kg swingarm
Oxley
Back then, legendary German-born American tuner Udo Gietl was getting so much speed out of BMW R90S boxer-twin sports-tourers that his number-one rider Reg Pridmore was winning open races against full-on race bikes.
“When I started winning open races on those things, people started saying, ‘What’s that guy doing winning on a BMW?’,” recalls Pridmore. “Because nobody was on BMWs! Then I pissed them off some more by putting a pair of saddlebags on the bike!”
By the way, Gietl and Pridmore have interesting backgrounds: Gietl was injured in an Allied bombing raid during the Second World War, while British-born American Pridmore was injured in a Luftwaffe raid in East London. He and his mother had to be dug out of the ruins of their home. Gietl was a genius: before tuning BMWs he worked on the Apollo rocket and Polaris nuclear submarine projects.
MotoGP is going racing with motorcycles specifically engineered to go racing. The USA’s King of the Baggers, underbones in Asia and the earliest superbike racing are the exact opposite. So what’s the attraction?
By
Mat Oxley
Not many people know this either… in the early 2000s Harley planned to enter World Superbikes (WSBK) with a radical v-twin engine designed by race-car engineer Ilmor. The company took this decision because sports bikes had taken over the world and bosses were worried that the Route 66 cult might not go on for ever.
The VR2 WSBK venture was only the first step, with a move into MotoGP next.
The VR2 engine was like nothing seen before or since. The upper cylinder vee stood upright, immediately behind the front wheel, with the lower cylinder pointing towards the rear wheel. This configuration positioned the heaviest part of the engine – the crankshaft – as far forward and as low as possible, to increase front-tyre contact for better grip exiting corners and to reduce wheelies for improved acceleration.
Harley’s radical VR2 WSBK bike, which was intended to precede a move into MotoGP, before the project was cancelled in 2001
Kar Lee
By August 2001 Ilmor had completed rapid prototyping of the WSBK engine and were about to start manufacturing engine parts.
“I think that the v-twin was viewed as a sort of a practice project and the management were expecting the call any time to switch to designing a MotoGP engine,” says Patrick Ilmor, whose father Paul established Ilmor with Swiss engineer Marien Ilien. “But when the call came it was to cancel the whole project.”
Let’s hope that Harley management are more committed this time. Some purists may hate the idea of baggers on GP grids, but I think they will add something weird and freaky to the show, which is a good thing, the way I look at it.
The big question last weekend in the Barcelona MotoGP paddock was where will Dorna find time to squeeze baggers into the already packed schedule? There are Red Bull Rookies or MotoE rounds at most European events and there’s already talk of the Women’s World Championship moving from WSBK to MotoGP.
May I make a humble suggestion? MotoGP can roll them all into one: Harley Livewire electric Baggers with riders and pillions — woman rider and rookie pillion one weekend, rookie rider and woman pillion the next — and a mighty sound-system inside the saddlebags pounding out a huge V-twin roar.
