Polaris is thinking aggressively with Indian brand

Polaris Industries has made a big effort this year in a sport so obscure that even ESPN doesn't televise it, sponsoring a team in the American sport of flat-track motorcycle racing.

It's more evidence of something that's become ever more apparent: Polaris hasn't jumped into the motorcycle business just to carve out a profitable little piece. Now, with its growing Indian brand, it has the confidence to be in the motorcycle business to win long term — against Harley-Davidson and anybody else.

Harley-Davidson has a flat-track team, too. If you happened to be in the Phoenix area this weekend, you may have seen the action between Harley's lads and the "Indian Wrecking Crew" at the Arizona Mile, as the first season unfolded with an Indian-sponsored team.

Polaris has characterized this initiative as a "return" to flat-track racing, and by doing so it's referring to the racing history of the old Indian, the Massachusetts company that built motorcycles until it went out of business in the 1950s.

Flat track as a sport has been around since the 1920s. It's basically dirt-track racing at speeds up to 140 miles an hour on tracks that include the horse-racing track in Phoenix, where Saturday's races were run. The appeal to motor sports enthusiasts seems obvious after watching videos of a "draft" of eight or nine bikes in a row, inches apart, roaring down the track.

The appeal of flat-track racing to a motorcycle owner who rides at the posted speed limit is less obvious. And manufacturers of cars, motorcycles and other vehicles have long wrestled with whether to play the racing game, jumping in and out of racing as their own business strategies change.

When Medina-based Polaris acquired the Indian business six years ago, creating a racing team would have been a waste of time and money. "We always talked about it," said Gary Gray, vice president of Polaris overseeing motorcycle product planning. "But first we had to have a manufacturing base, which of course we do in Polaris, and then we had to have distribution, and we had to have a great, profitable product line. Once you've established the foundation then it's time to expand and grow the brand."

Indian's colorful past includes lots of racing wins, cross-country speed records set by a driver nicknamed Cannonball and the "Indian Wrecking Crew" of racers who did very well on their Indian bikes after World War II.

"It's a compelling story," said Reid Wilson, Indian director of marketing. "And we've got a lot of material to work with."

Here's the best part for Indian — this is a story of a heated rivalry with Harley-Davidson, long the market leader in heavy motorcycles in the United States.

Developing a strong rivalry with a competitor can be such a good thing for a business that there are even strategy articles on how to do it. One benefit is organizational focus, and another is getting employees more motivated to help beat in the brains of a hated competitor than they ever will be reaching some corporate financial goal.

And a great outcome, for a smaller competitor, is watching a rivalry pull perceptions of the two companies in the marketplace onto the same plane, making the two competitors seem like peers even if they are not actually that close in size.

Harley-Davidson sold fewer motorcycles in the United States than it did in the same period last year, yet it's been maintaining its share of the heavyweight segment at more than half the U.S. market.

One way to get the attention of a market leader is to do what Indian did when building out its team of drivers, and that's "hire the podium," as one magazine writer put it, by grabbing the sport's top riders. Two of the three came from the Harley team.

Professional drivers don't quit on a proven manufacturer like Harley to race with machines they don't trust. "Those guys wanted to go with Indian because they could clearly see that Indian was investing the technology and the money to do this right," said Mark Hoyer, editor-in-chief of Cycle World magazine. "You couldn't have hired those guys unless you had the product."

Hoyer described the new Indian Scout FTR750 as a thoughtful combination of the best attributes of very capable Kawasaki and Harley-Davidson racing bikes, and the Scout should do well on both short and long tracks. As for the results so far in the season, the Indian Wrecking Crew looks like the 1927 Yankees of the sport. One of its riders has won all three events so far, and at one race the Wrecking Crew swept the podium.

The reappearance of Indian, Hoyer said, "has reanimated a rivalry that really hasn't existed since the '50s."