VOL. 50 ISSUE 25 JUNE 25, 2013
dian engines?
As I mentioned before, we clearly considered many different options. We just
settled on this design
as the right way to
bring Indian back to
the market – but in
the future anything is
possible.
Indian was by
some way America's most successful racing brand up
until the mid-1950s.
Do you envisage Indian going racing
again under Polaris
ownership?
Yes, I think that we do indeed
envisage Indian going racing, but
I'll quantify that by saying sometime in the future, so not just yet.
Right now, if we were to deviate
from our business plan and put
our engineering resources into
going racing, it wouldn't do any
service to what the product plan
needs, and our dealers and customers want. So we're presently
focused on getting the best product in the world out to market,
and then as we start growing our
brand we are clearly going to enjoy recalling some of our racing
heritage in a modern context. So
Indian does indeed have a racing
future – but not just yet.
Will Indian only ever make
traditional-style
air-cooled
V-twin engines, or will you
embrace more modern technology? Could you envisage
making an Indian Superbike?
Here's the honest answer to
that one. There's a good percentage of our potential customers who would actually like us to
make only classic cruisers. But
in studying the brand and spending a lot of time with our product
development team, I understand
that Indian has the opportunity to
go wherever it would like to go
in terms of product. So I'd like to
see Indian stretching far beyond
its classic cruiser heritage, and
getting into being technically innovative, and going into different
market segments. I think it'll be
exciting, and I think it'll be welcomed by customers.
Finally, I need to ask you what have you got in the future
for Victory?
We have some really exciting
stuff in Victory's future – just wait
and see! We think that this brand
P87
can play to quite different market
segments than Indian. We know
we already have a high quality
motorcycle, but we can make it
better still, especially in its NVH
qualities – noise, vibration and
harshness. It's about time that
Victory had a new powertrain,
and we have some things coming
along that can make for a very interesting package.
Is one of them a production
version of the acclaimed Victory Core concept bike you
released two or three years
ago?
We've been asked that – a lot!
Let's just say that if we can make
a case where we could sell a
good number of examples of that
bike, I think that'd be an interesting model to bring to the market.
We could have some pretty good
fun with a production version of
the Core…
CN
