What Are Harley and Dorna Up To?

Jorge Martín became MotoGP world champion at Barcelona, the traditional finale venue Valencia having suffered record flooding. On the next day, at the same racetrack, a team of men wearing “Harley-Davidson Factory Race Team” clothing started and rolled out that company’s King of the Baggers racebikes from the popular series running in US MotoAmerica events.

Hailed as a breath of fresh air and a return to old-time racing’s deep rumbling exhaust sound, King of the Baggers has not only created an eager following, it has also inspired street riders to emulate the “Baggers look.” That is the stimulating marriage of the “heavy cruiser” look with the purposeful (and beautiful) luster of race hardware: the gleam of Öhlins rear shock reservoirs and forks, the functionalism of big Brembo brake discs and calipers, and all the little eye-catching details that make up racebikes of any category. And the Big Sound.

Thunderous as big aircraft radial engines at start-up, the Baggers bikes made demo laps in the hands of H-D riders Kyle Wyman and James Rispoli, then were ridden by Marco Melandri, John Hopkins, Simon Crafar, and the eternal Randy Mamola. A mature racebike is a racebike, not a gorilla on wheels, and those who rode them for the first time responded appropriately.

Dorna has expressed interest in the Baggers concept, but rather than bringing Harley and Indian KOTB bikes to Barcelona under MotoAmerica auspices, this has come together between Dorna and H-D alone. It is stated that there is no formal relationship at present, so what’s going on?

If you look at motorcycle sales worldwide you find that reverberations from 2008 (euphemistically called “The Great Recession” at the time) can still be heard. It’s also known that in the troubled 1930s, Harley benefited greatly from overseas sales—as much as 30 percent of production going overseas. Everyone with something to sell knows that nothing sits still. If you’re not expanding, decline has you in its clutches. Therefore every undertaking—including entertainment—needs new markets and new products. When I visited BMW’s test facility in the south of France at the end of 2019, they explained that the appetite for new products has forced them to extensively and ingeniously automate new product testing. The old way—a small flotilla of test riders with box lunches, setting forth every morning—gathers data too slowly.

MotoGP’s latest attendance figures are impressive, but that cannot become an invitation to linger over good lunches. Things are happening, and King of the Baggers is one of them.

Related: From Road Glide to Roadrace

What is Dorna doing with its electric class? Is it grooming it to take over racing, much as Harley planners of an earlier moment put big development money into the company’s excellent but largely unwanted “LiveWire”? No. Dorna’s electric class is a means of guaranteeing that if electrics somehow draw crowds in some future time, they will be Dorna’s crowds.

The model for “disruptive capitalism” proposes that the “Next Big Thing” begins by nibbling at insensitive parts of the established market. If the nibbling nourishes the “disruptors,” it simultaneously starves the establishment. Because the establishment is huge, it doesn’t notice the nibbling until it has been so eviscerated that it can no longer defend itself. Being eaten alive is a discouraging prospect.

Honda in times past developed new technologies, not because they solved an immediate problem, but because they might be needed in unknown future circumstances. Detroit calls this “contingency engineering,” which has been estimated to consume 40 percent of automotive R&D spending. At Honda, part of the product was stored in “Oguma’s refrigerator,” ready-to-use technologies held in anticipation of future need (Yoichi Oguma was an influential Honda research engineer).

King of the Baggers roadracing has become a powerful influencer in the US market. How far can its visceral influence spread? Is this another force that Dorna needs to monitor or control, lest some disruptor may in future turn it against them?

Related: Harley-Davidson’s Screamin’ Eagle Road Glide Factory Racebike

Brands require nourishing. When Packard, at the end of World War II, decided what every returning serviceman needed was a cheap Packard, it killed its brand dead. Packard, formerly America’s prestige car, sold itself short. GM/Cadillac gobbled its market. Corporations must remain awake and thinking lest they die in their sleep.

Back when a large block of Dorna stock was bought by Canada Pensions, major reasons cited for the purchase were:

Harley-Davidson must explore every avenue to greater volume, especially connections to new buying power. That is why the Japanese Big Four have downgraded US operations to less expensive locations—the better to focus on the new value creation taking place in Southeast Asia.

It is early days and surely the discussions are general. But both Dorna and Harley see possibilities for mutual benefit.