Wednesday ORT: Harley's USA Return, Indian's Parscale, Sir Lewis, UFC 250, CFMoto Goes Wild

All readers welcome

Apologies in advance for both the length and the motorcycle-centric nature of today’s post. I have other features to run this week so I couldn’t break the ORT in half like I wanted to.

sighs Gonna be a Harley owner after all…

Harley-Davidson, Inc. (”Harley-Davidson” or the “Company”) (NYSE: HOG) today announced that it is bringing production of the Revolution® Max platform for North America back to the United States as part of the Company’s Back to the Bricks strategy. The move brings machining, powertrain assembly, painting, and final vehicle assembly work back to Harley-Davidson facilities in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, supporting skilled union jobs and strengthening the Company’s American manufacturing footprint.

The production transition is expected to be completed ahead of the start of Model Year 2028 production in 2027. Harley-Davidson expects to manufacture over 100,000 motorcycles out of the Company’s York, Pennsylvania facility in 2027… The Trump Administration's changes to U.S. trade policy, combined with shifts in the global trade environment, have created new opportunities for companies to invest in domestic manufacturing.

This is what it looks like when a company decides to do the right thing. No doubt it is highly harmful to the stonks and the quarterly statements when you move production from Thailand to York, PA. I’m sure the Sherman McCoys of the world are retching at the possibility of lazy white-trash American citizens getting completely un-deserved make-work “JERBS” building 150hp V-twin adventure tourers while their hard-working moral superiors in Asia have to go back to making Groms for 29-year-old man-children Redditors like the dork-ass who parked his MSX125 near my SV1000 at the Hibachi restaurant yesterday, clomped in wearing full AlpineStars boots, and removed his two layers of body armor and GoPro-festooned HJC helmet to reveal a pair of full sleeve tats.

(For the record, I was very adequately protected by this shirt and a pair of New Balances.)

It might not make economic sense to build the Pan ____AMERICAN____ in the United States, but that’s like saying it doesn’t make economic sense to build the Lange 1 Zeitzone in Glashutte. Anything else, as the saying goes, would be uncivilized.

I’d like to think that the change came about because of feedback given to dealers by potential customers like your humble author, but in truth I don’t care if Artie Starrs was awoken from his coke-jittery sleepy by a giant American Eagle gleaming in the sky with the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES floating underneath it.

Around this time next year I’ll be able to order my USA-made Harley Pan American ST. This will greatly annoy my wife, who said to me a while ago, “I didn’t want to say anything before, but that Harley was the ugliest, dorkiest, most awful-looking motorcycle I have ever seen.” Well, now she is going to see one every day. I have waited 54 years to own a properly quick street-focused American V-Twin. Now is the time.

(And if Buell gets that Super Cruiser done, maybe I’ll have to own two.)

…But was their hand forced?

Everyone’s buzzing about the “attack ad” campaign being waged by Indian Motorcycle against Harley-Davidson. Indian, which was split off Polaris into the ownership of LA-based private-equity firm Carolwood LP, has come out swinging regarding Harley’s Thailand moves and general “wokeness”. Many gentle souls in the motorcycling hobby are quite upset about this, with this fellow being chief among them:

Yes, it’s the infamous Jonathon Klein, who just got a full sleeve tattoo to commemorate the fact that he couldn’t get his wife pregnant and therefore had to borrow three kids from a foster agency. While I admire his generous spirit — not only am I generally uninterested in my own biological son, I refused to even acknowledge the existence of my stepdaughter, Mini Danger Girl, until she won a 17-car spec class at Wateford Hills — I have to wonder if his Chinese adopted daughter will eventually feel a little weird about the whole “tiger tattoo” thing.

“Uh, Jonathon…”

“You can call me Dad, honey.”

“Uh, sure… Jonathon, why did you celebrate my Chinese-ness with a tiger-in-the-jungle tattoo?”

“Because the lady at the tattoo parlor flat-out refused to do my original idea, which was a manga version of Chiang Kai-Shek riding a wheelie on a CFMoto parallel twin with the Kung Fu Panda riding bitch.”

“…Okay, anyway, when you pick me up from my high school graduation, can you pretend like you don’t know me?”

“Too late, I already made a giant red ‘Year Of The Dragon’ banner.”

Let’s not forget, Klein is the mook who wrote this about having his foster kid yanked back away from him, probably because the agency was worried about additional tattooing taking place:

Thank you, Bentley! He couldn’t have done it without your giant rebadged Touareg. You gotta respect someone who uses authentic trauma to pimp for the VW Group and keep those free international trips flowing. It would be like if Joan Didion had inserted a “Special Advertising Section” for the Corvette Z06 in The Year Of Magical Thinking. Which she neglected to do, because she wasn’t a talentless piece of shit.

Anyway, I do feel bad for Klein, and offer him the following consolation:

Oh, back to Indian, I almost forgot. Klein believes that Brad Parscale, the former digital media director for Donald Trump, is behind the Indian attack campaign and a general “flash mob” of anti-Harley sentiment online that has also apparently led to MMA fighter Sean Strickland changing allegiance from Harley to Indian. The evidence of this is a now-deleted paragraph linking Parscale and his firm, Noise Media, to Indian.

This seems like a mountain-from-molehill situation, but I can understand why people are upset. The motorcycling hobby has endured a solid decade or so of watching its manufacturers, sanctioning bodies, personalities, and corporate leaders run themselves ragged attempting to set new standards for genuflecting to various left-friendly organizations and concepts. This served a lot of people very well, especially the PR people and paid hucksters for race or sexual grievances, even though most of them weren’t motorcyclists or genuine enthusiasts of any sort. But now the vibe has shifted and the gravy train has come to a halt.

There is something profoundly weird about bike companies going nuts for Pride and other gay-coded stuff. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t think motorcycling has a massive gay component to it? Was 12-year-old Jack Baruth not the only human being in the free world who failed to understand this image?

Note, too, the raw corporate-cowardly DEI aspect of Harley’s “PRIDE” picture being a man and a woman. Why not have two obviously gay men on bikes? God knows I saw it three dozen times at Sturgis. Motorcycling has always been accepting of gay people, sexual deviants, drug users, Van Hagar fans — it is, by definition, an outcast activity and it always will be. Remember that movie “Mask”, the real-life story of some poor kid with a horrible cranial condition? Remember which group adopted the kid and looked out for him, because they were also outcasts?

When motorcycling (or any other activity) adopts a self-consciously “woke” or “DEI” attitude, it does nothing but re-marginalize the people who had previously been part of it without being singled out. “Hey, gay person, we know you’ve been riding a Harley for 24 years and have 280,000 miles on the road, but now we need you to do the pride thing.” Infuriating. It goes without saying that the primary beneficiaries and proponents of this stuff are HR ladies and people like Klein who want the stolen valor of being social outcasts while at the same time being the most boring and submissive conformists possible. God save me from all the “allies” out there: You’re a pimple on the ass of a subculture that doesn’t like, want, or respect you. At least Rachel Dolezal had the courage to do the cornrows. Getting a full sleeve tattoo and wearing a little tank top to show it off might feel gay but it is not, strictly speaking, gay.

There’s also a nifty bit of misdirection being performed by Klein and the various (mostly Milwaukee-based) outlets that are picking up on the “Parscale story”: the vast majority of the Indian attack ad has nothing to do with DEI or woke. It’s about moving production to Thailand, which was a repugnant thing to do. Harley is fixing that mistake, at least partially because of criticism like Parscale’s campaign. The sleight-of-hand that Klein doesn’t want you to consider is this: positioning an anti-outsourcing and anti-offshoring campaign as an anti-”woke” campaign is providing air cover to the people who want to decimate America further. This is the kind of thing that Target and other demonic corporations do all the time. They wave a social-issues flag in front of you and make offshore decisions while you’re distracted.

Now for the supreme irony: York, PA has a pretty strong gay subculture and a higher-than-average percentage of gay residents. It has a pretty strong manufacturing gay subculture, even. This Harley move, prompted by external “anti-woke” criticism, will put gay men and women back to work. Which, if you ask me, is good news, even if it upsets Jonathon Klein.

Speaking of UFC fighters

I’m not sure what to say about the UFC 250 that isn’t being said better by Matt Taibbi:

Once upon a time Northeast liberals just didn’t know why people liked NASCAR or the WWE. Now they’ve moved all the way from, “I don’t know it and I don’t get it, but whatever,” to “That shit I’ve never watched and don’t understand must be somewhere between porn and lynching!” Here’s Substack’s own Cox Richardson comparing the UFC bash to “the impulse that really pushed lynching in the late 19th century”:

He is referring to the NYT piece, written of course by someone named Michelle Goldberg:

By this standard — that U.F.C. brawls, which John McCain once called “human cockfighting,” belong in the White House because lots of Americans like them — there can be no standards. Like Ultimate Fighting, porn is extremely popular, but I somehow doubt [a commentator] would defend a Democratic president who invited a bunch of OnlyFans creators to the Oval Office while he was losing a war.

I have never watched a UFC fight for more than thirty seconds and probably never will, but even I can see this for what it is: a level of deranged class hatred that has little or no place in our public discourse. It also lifts the hood on a profoundly unpleasant state of affairs regarding what kind of “culture” we get in America via the expenditure of public funds. Take the Kennedy Center, which was briefly the Trump/Kennedy center before a judge discovered a inalienable Constitutional right for John F. Kennedy to be the only adulterous, criminally-involved President named on that particular building It’s paid for with public funds. You can see the performance calendar here; it is about 80% the kind of stuff about which no human being outside the Acela corridor has ever given a single damn.

Most of the public culture and entertainment funding in this country amounts to welfare for rich people. The government takes your tax money and uses it to cover the cost of putting on an Aaron Copland night at the orchestra or a retrospective of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” installations. If we are exceptionally lucky we might get funding for something that poor people used to like but no longer do, like Robert Johnson blues or early vaudeville. This is the equivalent of having a “farmhouse table” in your co-op, it’s the vicarious thrill of possessing a completely neutered prolething, basically Kendall Roy rapping in the back of an S680.

Had President Obama, Biden, or (God forbid) McCain been in charge of the 250th birthday celebration, it would have been all Philip Glass and Alice Walker and Honore Sharrer. It would have been a live-action NPR programming schedule, the kind of thing that a Columbia grad can feel good about sitting through the same way your humble author endured a 196-minute Easter Vigil in church a few months ago. With Trump we got something that was dangerously close to “Idiocracy”, and the Decent People Of The Media have been fuming about it ever since.

Guess what? America is a country of low culture. Always has been. Go read a political pamphlet of the 1800s if you don’t believe me. Which doesn’t mean there is no room for something more elevated in the national discourse — but Trump’s profoundly gauche “UFC 250” was, if you ask me, a nice counterbalance to decades’ worth of Presidential programming and media that, collectively, have generated essentially zero sincere interest.

Incidentally, the same people who were upset by the “Michelle Obama is a MAN!” comment will trip all over themselves to praise the “wonderful comedy” of “Druski” humiliating and parodying Erica Kirk before her husband’s body was five months cold in the grave. Dignity for me, but not for thee.

Like Singapore, with Alonso on the other side of the coin

Three podiums in a row without making a single pass: this is a great year to be Sir Lewis Hamilton. Indeed, it might be a great season. Although I don’t have a lot of respect for Hamilton as a driver, I do readily admit that he can reliably win in the best car, which is not something you can say, for example, about Danny Ric. And now Sir has it. Russell’s qualifying margin over Lewis at Barcelona was about half his average qualifying margin over Lewis when they were in identical Mercedes-Benzes, which suggests that the Monaco paddock wisdom of “Ferrari is the best car now” was more true than the Monaco result suggested.

The mind-boggling stupidity at Mercedes, though… how do you not let one of your two drivers cover Hamilton’s pitstop? George could have beaten Lewis with the same strategy, as could Kimi (prior to Toto hitting the Valtteri Blow-up Button). Yes, it’s true that Lewis needed a VSC in about a ten-lap window to win… but since when has Lewis not gotten that kind of luck? Note that Hannah Schmidt immediately followed the Ferrari strategy — but she and Max didn’t have the car they needed to win.

Not only does Ferrari have the best car, they are also going to get more engine upgrades than Mercedes going forward. Don’t get me wrong — I still think Kimi Antonelli will be the World Champion this year. But it won’t be as easy as it would have been otherwise. It doesn’t help that the Mercedes engine keeps blowing up, either.

Just for fun, however, I’ve bet a little bit of money on Lewis to win the whole thing. If I have to listen to the announcers blow this dude up all year, I’m at least going to have a nice dinner out of it.

Further observations:

• Man, Kimi really has Princess George mogged, doesn’t he? Toto should have swapped them out and let Kimi run Lewis down… at least until the engine blew up.

• Lando is drastically outperforming Oscar this year. Is it the confidence of being the World Champion, or has Oscar finally gotten the message that the team doesn’t want him to win?

• It seems obvious that bringing Flavio back was a good idea, but I feel sorry for any organization where the most clued-in person is 76 years old.

• The sad irony of Alonso’s car failure leading to Lewis’s win is almost too much for me to bear. Lewis has done nothing but complain since 2021, while Fernando has put his head down and driven tractors to the podium. His reward is to sit trackside while his old rival picks up yet another win.

• On the other hand, look at their women.

“The test rider was a Chinese prisoner… it was this or be sent to the BODIES exhibit.”

The Chinese have been giving Porsche a thorough beating at the Burgerkingring lately, to the point that a “Manthey kit” had to be cooked up for the purpose of reclaiming the “production car” record. (They’re all still slower than a Radical SR8, but you do get a better stereo.) Still, it’s kind of reasonable that in the battle of “fastest electric blob” you will see YANGWANG and Xiaomi as top competitors. The whole purpose of the EV is to shift manufacturing and technical know-how from Europe to China.

(If that’s wrong, you can’t tell from the actual effects.)

The recent record set by CFMoto, however, is very different. Their V4 SR-RR is a 209-horsepower V-4 superbike that competes directly (on the spec sheet) with the 213-horse Ducati Panigale V4 and 216-horse Aprilia RSV4 Factory. There is nothing electric or alt-propulsion about it. And they have run it up to 196.6mph, without killing the test rider.

(The jokes on Instagram regarding this are next level, by the way.)

It takes serious engineering to make a 200mph bike. It’s not something you can do just by throwing battery capacity at a platform. And the consequences for failure are, of course, inherently deadly. CFMoto has long been a sort of joke, they make parallel-twin bikes and Grom competitors that look like baby Yamahas. But there is nothing jokey or unambitious about the new SR-RR, even if the name is painfully derivative.

Now, let’s place this 196.6mph top speed into perspective. The 1999 Suzuki Hayabusa, with its 1299cc engine and no aftermarket tuning, hit 194.0 mph for Cycle World, the fastest top speed ever recorded on the magazine’s radar gun. The ZX-12R reliably hit 197mph in Kawasaki’s internal testing, but the “gentleman’s agreement” that the Japanese government strongly suggested tuned the production bike down to187mph, or 300kph. The ZX-14 was factory limited to 300kph, as is the ZX-14R. The Gen2 Hayabusa was noticeably more powerful than the original but, of course, could not go as quickly.

Four years ago, a pair of dudes with a normal used-bike 2013 ZX-14R got it to 198.6mph after removing the limiter and fitting an aftermarket exhaust. In just 1.5 miles, with a 180 pound, six foot tall rider. I can’t say how fast my ZX-14R would be without the restrictor, but I can say that it gets to an indicated 185mph on Ohio freeways without anything like difficulty.

That being said, it’s not quite fair to compare the Busa, ZX-12R, and ZX-14R to the CFMoto. The latter is a superbike/road-race form factor, which makes it shorter and (especially compared to the slippery Hayabusa) aerodynamically worse.

Overall, however, I would say that the most encouraging thing about the new CFMoto superbike is what it says about the future of motorcycling. Chinese companies tend to get their direction from the government, thus the EV/sustainability focus. Someone in some Party committee somewhere told CFMoto, “Internal combustion bikes, even 209-horse ones, are here to stay.” Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?