Why Harley-Davidson Left King of the Baggers │We talk to H-D's Director of Global Race Programs

I think the first kind of knee-jerk reaction that a lot of people had, and justifiably so, is that, you know, Harley-Davidson no longer wants to compete with Indian.

Uh, their, this last 2026 season ended with Indian and Vance & Hines, you know, their team winning the whole thing points-wise, and the, the timing of everything with Harley-Davidson now leaving, there's more to it, but, you know, it looks like Harley-Davidson is exiting right now after a loss, and the optics are not good.

Yeah.

Uh, it looks like Harley-Davidson is leaving because they lost when, you know, really Harley-Davidson has, I mean, the Harley-Davidson motorcycles have won three years.

One of those was Vance & Hines' team in '23, uh, and Kyle Wyman has won the championship, uh, in two of those years, the factory Harley-Davidson team.

And factory Indian, they wanna tell you three times.

They wanna tell you four times, 'cause they wanna say that the exhibition race in 2020, they won that as well-

Mm-hmm

...

even though there was absolutely no factory involvement.

But, you know, this, this last year in 2026, the Vance & Hines Indian team won.

I have kind of my thoughts about whether or not it was a true factory team this year.

Uh, obviously Har, uh, Indian has gone through a lot of restructuring with the Carrollwood, uh, transfer of ownership from Polaris, uh, but we're gonna jump into all that, uh, in just a minute here.

We did ask Harley-Davidson's official spokesman, uh, some of these burning questions to hopefully have people understand a little bit more, uh, what goes on behind the scenes and why Harley-Davidson came to this decision.