Rennie Scaysbrook | August 5, 2021
An Indian Chief should make the perfect road racer, right? Err…
Photography by RS and Justin George
Roland Sands and his mob of motorcycle misfits have been making bikes that have no real reason to go fast or very fast indeed.
Using exquisite craftmanship and plenty of piss and vinegar, the RSD crew has created not just quick bikes but an entire motorcycle movement, one that’s spread its fangs out from the early days of Super Hooligan flat track racing to desert racing, and now road racing.
The bike before you is an evolution of what makes RSD tick. This machine started out life as your run-of-the-mill 2022 $14,499 Indian Chief cruiser before it was handed to Shop Manager and lead fabricator Aaron Boss and Project Manager Cameron Brewer, and turned into what can only be described as the most bad-ass Indian Chief ever seen.
And I was the first one to race it.
That opportunity came at the first (and so far, only) Bagger Racing League round held at Utah Motorsports Campus in June in the Big Twins class that supported the full-blown Baggers. But more on that later.
Roland Sands Design Indian Chief Build | Down Below
Taking an Indian Chief and turning it into a proper road racer is a massive undertaking, although probably not as big a deal for Boss and Brewer than it would be for you or me.
“You have all your foot controls, handlebars and everything in absolutely the wrong spots,” Boss started. “The seating position, wheelbase, and the overall the geometry behind it is all completely wrong. We know what is correct and what works after many years building things like FTRs and recently with the Challenger Bagger bike from MotoAmerica, so we had to figure out unique ways to put the right specs into this bike.
“The challenge is making a heavy bike still work good. Taking a lot of weight off definitely helps, but getting the suspension correct for the weight, the valving in the forks correct, the ride position, these are the main points.”
When you break the bike down, the two main structural components—the frame and swingarm—are stock units from Indian, with the overall weight of the motorcycle dropped some 150 pounds The motor is also pretty stock, save for an Indian Motorcycle Stage 2 camshaft, throttle body and injectors and a Stage 1 intake with a Loydz Garage ECU tune.
Running RSD’s own brand of cast alloy 17-inch front wheels wrapped in Dunlop race slicks and Brembo brakes, the team enlisted suspension partner Fox to modify a set of Harley-Davidson 15-inch Dyna shocks while GP Suspension put together the same forks as fitted to the team’s FTR racers that run in the Super Hooligans series but ran them in reversed S&S triple clamps from the team’s Challenger bagger.
From there, it was very much a matter of ground clearance.
“The absolute most challenging thing for these bikes is the lean angle,” Boss says. “They are already wide. The motors and the cases, everything down low is wide. We weren’t able to run the exhaust system in a standard kind of way that most people do, down the side and out the right-hand side. So, we did it forward and looped it and then went underneath the bike and out the left. Using stainless steel, the result is a beautiful snake of welds that goes from an inch and three-quarters to two-inch, mated to a barking-loud SC Project muffler that exits on the left side in front of the rear tire.
“We have zero lean issues with the exhaust system now,” Boss says. “All of our other bikes, it’s always like a little bit of the muffler, a little bit of this, bit of that, scraping here and there. This one has been perfect.”
The exhaust may have been a hassle to get right, but by far the biggest difference in ground clearance came from fabricator Guy Driscoll designer Brandon Reid in the machined primary cover that gave us back one and a half inches on the left side. It landed via an SOS flight from a friend of mine, Jasper Newman, in L.A,’ who just so happened to want to come to the race. Perfect timing.
That transformed the bike from my end, making it finally go around left-handers without feeling like I was going to rip half the engine off.
Cameron Brewer takes up the story…
“The clutch actuator goes out the bottom of the primary,” Brewer says. “On a street cruiser, you don’t want to look at that. Well, it’s the first thing to hit the ground on the stock cover. So, if that thing would have hit the ground, it would have just greased the track and our weekend would have been done. We had to build a guard to protect it. Meanwhile, Guy just kept cranking on the cover build. He got that thing done at like 7 p.m. on Saturday, and then we flew out Jasper with the piece.
“He showed up at the bar at 11 p.m. with it. I got up at 5 a.m. before everybody, got the doors shut and just threw this thing on its side like a dirt bike so I don’t have to drain the oil out of it.
“I couldn’t even believe it. When you put those actuators in, wear them into each other, you never get the alignment right. You’ve got to do them 10 times. This one, it was in the perfect spot. The cable hooked right up. Everything just fell into place. It was meant to be.
“There was about two inches of additional ground clearance and probably 10 degrees of lean angle gained. By race day, it was a different motorcycle.”
Roland Sands Design Indian Chief Build | Up Top
Boss’s handiwork can also be seen in the very multi-adjustable rearsets, and the subframe that can be raised or lowered in an instant via the threads behind the number plate.
“The subframe is super simple fabrication, just in case we had an accident where you could fix it on the track, bend it back, whatever it may be, and then duplicate it later to make a fresh one. Even with the subframe and tail section, it’s all adjustable. You could totally do different seat heights on this, super easy on the track setup, just like you would with foot controls.
“I had to pull a lot of the wiring harness out of the way away from the exhaust system, just because it was ran so differently with the exhaust. I needed to get it away from the heat,” Boss says. “We put the rectifier on the side to get it out in the air flow. But for the most part back here, shove a lot of the wiring harness in the back compartment area and then hide it. It’s always nice. It still looks good.”
The Chief’s tune was a collaboration between Ryan at Lloyd’s Garage in North Carolina, and another Ryan who works at Toce Exhausts in Manchester, Connecticut.
“Ryan at Lloyd’s was able to just make a calculation for how much more fuel and timing he thought it would need for the cams, throttle body and injectors we put in,” says Brewer. “So, it was kind of a shot in the dark, but Ryan [at Lloyds] knows so much and Toce knows so much. We also had help from OC Indian and their lead mechanic Damon York, who brought over his cam tool after work one night and installed the cams for us. With a shortage of parts due to current demand, their parts and service manager Ian Sherburn had a Stage 1 intake system and other small parts we broke in, which was a huge help.”
The teamed paired up with the master craftsmen at Saddleman to create the tail section, carbon-fiber belly pan, custom seat, and the part I was pretty insistent on before I raced it in—the custom tank pad, so I had somewhere to lean my fat gut while under brakes and cornering.
The only thing left to do now was take it to the track and see if it went as good as it looked.
Roland Sands Design Indian Chief Build | Race Time
I only got one run on the Chief before I rode it in anger at Miller Motorsports Campus. That was a quick trip to the stunt pad and back to make sure the brakes worked and to discover that the quickshifter was so sporadic in its workings that we decided to unplug it and leave it be.
I’d been to the RSD compound in Los Alamitos for an initial fitting a week prior and found a bike nowhere near race ready. Although, I didn’t doubt they would have the bike ready by Utah as they always seem to pull it off when it counts.
Our weekend started off well enough, aside from the fact the Chief didn’t really go around left-handers thanks to the primary cover extending about three inches past where we wanted. On the right-handers I could ride the bike as normal, but on the left I was having to hang so far off the bike to stop the case from touching down that it was really quite exhausting.
The motor is such a blast. Our redline was just under 6000 rpm and the usable torque window was about 1500 rpm lower than that, so although it’s a massive twin, you still need to keep it in its happy spot for the optimum performance.
Considering we were there for three days we did very little riding. The pomp and ceremony of the Bagger Racing League was more show than go, and we didn’t get onto the track until midway through the afternoon on Saturday for the first practice session.
After steadily cranking up the rear preload further and further, Cameron and I settled on gearing selection and went out for qualifying. Harley-Davidson’s Sean Ungvarsky and I were trading fastest laps over the session, but we ended up topping the times with a 1:47.294 using the stock primary cover. Ungvarsky was second on a ’48.398.
Late that night, at some random bar we were sitting in, Jasper appeared like some machined-primary-cover angel, having flown from LAX with the goods straight from Guy’s garage.
I was not privy to the fitment of said cover, arriving at the track with about 20 minutes before warm-up after many issues trying to get an Uber.
The difference in how the Chief rode was immense. Not only did it now go around left-handers, but the overall effort required to ride was greatly reduced now that I could ride each side like the other. A 1:45.399 was the reward, 1.744 up on Ungvarsky.
There was only one race on the cards for each class, so I had to make it count.
My start was rubbish and I nearly got out-dragged into turn one by Ungvarsky, although I let off the brakes just enough to close him out. From there, it was head down, ass up as I tried to get a bit of a gap by the end of lap one. By lap two, I looked behind and the Chief was charging clear. I had about four seconds in hand, so from there it was just a matter of bringing it home.
In the end, the RSD Chief and I took the win by 15.7 seconds over Ungvarsky, who admittedly would have been more of a threat if he, too, got a special primary cover flown in from LA overnight.
The RSD Chief was a wonderful bike to ride. For such a big thing, it handled well, although we did have persistent issues trying to get the chassis to finish the corner and not run wide, especially on long-radius corners. That was my main gripe but it’s also something the team will look at when we race it again in the future (if the BRL runs another race meeting).
Thanks very much to Cameron Brewer for all the donkey work he put in over the weekend. The man’s a trooper. CN
Roland Sands Speaks
The man behind the name, Roland Sands, lets us in on the build right from the new digs in Downtown Long Beach.
In the new shop. It’s happy days, dude. Been a long time coming, hasn’t it?
It has been. It’s epic being in this building, finally. It’s rad just seeing Chief sitting there just like, looking all pissed off in here.
Tell me about the background of this project. Did you look at the Chief and say, ‘we’re going to race this?’ Or did Indian approach in the hope you’d build something? How did it all come about?
We do several projects with Indian a year and knowing that they just launched Chief this year [for model year 2022], I had been pushing to build a performance Chief since I knew about the project, which was like three years ago. So, I kind of got a little bit of a head start in the thought process.
We worked on quite a few different projects that were in the same zone fairly recently. It took a minute for it to come around and become the project that made sense for both Indian and us with Chief, which was a road racer. We were already racing the bagger with Frankie Garcia in MotoAmerica. We’ve already turned the bagger into a road racer that works phenomenally well. So, it was like, well, let’s see what we can do with Chief. It’s 1900cc and 680 pounds delivered from Indian. It is still a middleweight, I guess, compared to their bagger. It was just a wild platform to do this project and turn it into a legit road racer.
The reaction out of that thing has been unbelievable.
Yeah, people like it. It’s so purpose-built. You look at it and there are certain things about it. When you requested to raise the seat up, it changed the seat line and the tank line. Originally, I wanted a really nice line off the tank, and now it’s a little bit more stinkbug but it’s for a reason—just like the tank pad. People might look at it and go, that thing looks odd. It looks odd until you know why it’s there or until you ride it. Then you really realize why everything is where it’s at. I haven’t ridden it. I rode it down the street, but I haven’t ridden it on the track yet. You’ve got more experience than I do, which is weird because pretty much anything I’ve ever put on the track I always ride. We just didn’t have time on this one.
What’s some of your favorite parts about that build?
I like the fact it’s so unapologetic. It’s like, I’m a f***ing road racer. I didn’t used to be a road racer, but now I’m a road racer! The performance parts that are on it definitely stand out. I love the primary cover and the wheels. Those are huge performance changes. The S&S controls that we made the rearset brackets for, the FTR fork, the fact that we use bagger triples reversed. It’s a bike of function. It really took form around what we knew would work. We had this group of numbers in our head that we tried to apply to a road racer. I think it worked pretty good for the first time out.
It seems like a lot of the theory behind the Challenger got put into that as well.
I would say Challenger was a learning process and has been a learning process, but it made building Chief a lot easier.
Have there been any people saying, ‘I want to buy one of these things?’
I don’t know if I’ve gotten that email yet. People are definitely interested in the bike. The media is really interested in the bike. This isn’t the bike that you would typically pick to go road racing on. You’re not picking an Indian Chief for that. I think it’s really playing out in how the Harley V-twin culture, the Milwaukee Softails, how guys are out really pushing the performance on those bikes. So, for us, we thought this is a very similar platform to those bikes. How fast can we make this thing go around a racetrack? Let’s build a true performance bike out of this bike that is unapologetic. It ended up working better than the field. So, I think to go out and to smoke 22 or 21 Harleys and have one Indian in there and show everybody what this bike is capable of—with a fairly stock motor, too. There’s barely anything done to the thing motor-wise. So, the fact that we were so much faster than everybody else at the first BRL race, it says a lot about the rideability of the bike, the fact that you could jump on it and go fast, and you felt comfortable.
When you think about how big bagger racing is now, it’s gone from nothing to pretty much the biggest thing in racing in the last two or three years.
It arguably is the biggest thing in road racing in the States, for sure. Baggers have cracked the seal on road racing for Americans. I think it’s helping bring American eyes to road racing. It’s a crazy idea, racing these bikes, but you can see that it’s the challenge. How hard is it to make a superbike go fast around the racetrack? Anyone can jump on a superbike and go quick. But to jump on one of these things and run a decent pace, it takes some ingenuity.
Do you think it’s the fabrication aspect that’s bringing them in?
It was the same thing as hooligan racing. None of the bikes are the same. All the bikes are different. Everyone takes a completely different approach. You can line up any of these hooligan bikes on the grid and they’re all completely different. Even the exact same bike will be built completely different, and that’s something that I think is just very interesting. That is what is missing from superbike racing. You can order the parts, bolt them on the bike. The Kawis on the grid are all the same. The Yamahas are the same. The Suzukis to the normal eye are the same. The Ducati is probably the one bike on the grid that is just mind-blowingly technical, but unfortunately, it’s always got bodywork on it so you can’t see it.
Are you seeing a lot of people coming from the dirt track side, the hooligan dirt track now getting into road racing?
That’s what we’re seeing. We’re hoping that that is happening. In the end, if we can just make better riders out of people, get them a much larger group of riding experience, I think that’s pretty special and cool.
Roland Sands Design Indian Chief
The full build list:
- 2022 Indian Chief
- 116 cubic-inch displacement
- Indian Stage 2 camshaft, throttle body and injectors
- Indian Stage 1 Intake
- Dunlop KR448 Front Tire 120/70 R 17
- Dunlop KR451 Rear Tire 200/60 R 17
- Loydz Garage ECU Tune
- RSD 17-inch Race Wheels
- RSD Custom Equal-Length Stainless-Steel Exhaust System 2-into-1 with SC Projects Muffler
- RSD Custom High-Clearance Billet Primary Cover
- RSD Handlebar Risers
- RSD Billet Gauge Mount
- RSD Custom Chromoly Handlebars
- RSD Custom Chain Idler
- RSD Custom Regulator/Rectifier Mount
- RSD Custom Adjustable Shift Linkage
- RSD Custom Front-Brake Lever Guard
- RSD Custom Adjustable Sub-Frame
- RSD FTR1200 Front-Brake Reservoir Cap
- RSD FTR1200 Rearstand Spools
- RSD Super Hooligan Front & Side Number Plates & Mounts
- FTR1200 Rear Reservoir with RSD Reservoir Cap
- FTR1200 Carbon-Fiber Front Fender
- S&S Triple Clamps
- S&S Chief/Challenger Hubs
- S&S Chief/Challenger Triple Clamps and Rear Caliper Bracket with Brembo P34 Caliper
- S&S Chief/Challenger Chain-Drive Countershaft Sprocket
- S&S Challenger Rearsets with RSD custom mounting brackets
- Saddlemen Tail Section
- Saddlemen Custom Seat
- Saddlemen Custom Tank Pad
- Saddlemen Carbon Fiber Belly Pan
- ASV Unbreakable Clutch Lever
- K&N Oil Filter
- Motul Twin 20W50 Oil
- Brembo P13 Rear Master Cylinder
- Brembo Serie Oro Rear-Brake Rotor
- Brembo 17RCS Front Master Cylinder
- Brembo M4 Cast Monoblock Front Calipers
- Brembo T-Slot Front Rotors
- Rizoma Foot Pegs
- Spiegler Brake Lines
- Vortex Rear Sprocket
- RK Pro DR 530 Chain
- FTR 1200 Forks with GP Suspension Cartridge Kit
- Antigravity Lithium Battery
- Stomp Grip Tank Traction Pads
- 15-inch Fox Dyna Shocks
- Speedymoto Crash Sliders
- Healtech Quickshifter
For more information the Bagger Racing League, visit baggerracingleague.com.