Professional motorcycle racing in the United States has continually evolved over the past 125 years, creating modern manifestations that are nearly unrecognizable in comparison to the sport’s formative days.
By Chris Martin | Photography by Tim Lester
If you can, imagine V-Twins with no brakes and no throttle ripping over wooden planks on the 50-degree banks of motordromes at triple-digit speeds. Or an era of legend when the nation’s top racers would blast over the beach on a sandy 4.2-mile course vying for Daytona 200 supremacy.
Or how about a rider who, in the wake of a national-level race victory, bolted a license plate on his winning machine to partake in the festivities of Main Street Sturgis, only to get one-upped by a fellow competitor, who proceeded to trek across the United States on his race bike to the following week’s meeting?
Without doubt, motorcycle racing in America has a rich and glorious history. We’re taking dates and places like Beverly Hills, 1921, a pre-DIS Daytona Beach, 1948, and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, 2025.
2025?
It’s true. The last of those tales was only just penned, courtesy of the fledgling AFT AdventureTrackers class.
At least partially inspired by the breakout success of MotoAmerica’s King of the Baggers series, AMA Pro Racing was motivated to unearth a similar method of sparking Progressive American Flat Track.
As with the Baggers, AMA Pro identified a popular category of motorcycles, in this case, the surging dual adventure segment, that otherwise lacked a competitive outlet and then provided it with a stage where world-class racers could perform miracles previously thought impossible on the equipment. And if it just so happened to lure in the numerous manufacturers and legions of enthusiasts already invested in dual adventure bikes, all the better.
Somewhat ironically, while introduced as part of a larger strategy seeking a pathway forward for the sport, it also organically solidified Progressive American Flat Track’s connection to its Class C roots.
Now that wasn’t entirely by accident. For Progressive AFT, bridging the past, present and future of the Grand National Championship is an all-consuming task. The series kicked off in earnest as a full-blown championship in 1954 and boasts direct ties that stretch back decades earlier. While rightly proud of that heritage, series leadership is also well aware of a pressing need to remain not only relevant but vibrant.
AFT AdventureTrackers was designed to do just that. And while the Baggers were undeniably a ground-level influence, the ends were achieved by diametrically opposite means.
The Indian Challenger- and Harley-Davidson Road Glide-based race bikes that line a King of the Baggers grid are borderline prototype machines: 200 pounds lighter than stock while outfitted with high-spec suspension components, the extensive use of carbon fiber, one-off swingarms, and a six-figure price tag.
Oddly shaped Superbikes of a sort.
By contrast, AFT AdventureTrackers are shockingly stock, from bodywork to motor to frame to swingarm to fuel tank. And there were stories up and down the entry list to underline that reality. The Walter Bros. Harley-Davidson Pan America 1250 came direct from their Peoria showroom and was even run up from the track to the local gas station to refuel at one point. OTB Racing scored their BMW F 900 GSs from a dealer the Friday before the race while en route to Sturgis. Even the official Triumph Racing effort retrieved their Triumph Tiger 900 GT Pros from a Sturgis dealership and didn’t start making the few modifications allowed until they arrived at the Rally.
The teams and riders happily leaned into this fact, and perhaps counterintuitively, the very ordinary state of the bikes proved to be the secret ingredient in a burgeoning status as a modern-day myth maker.
Dual adventure motorcycles are commonly advertised as do-anything machines with marketing jargon that is mirrored from manufacturer to manufacturer: “…Go anywhere and everywhere…” “…Up for any adventure…” “…Every type of terrain…”
That’s so, is it? Well, go ahead and prove it.
Introduced in something of a one-off demonstration race at last year’s Sturgis TT, this season the class expanded to a four-race championship that played out in under two weeks. The compact series threw the bikes at a more diverse set of venues than ’24’s Supermoto-style course set in the streets of Sturgis, consisting of the Jackpine Gypsies Motorcycle Club’s diminutive Short Track (twice), the same venue’s hybrid TT circuit, and rounding out at the iconic Peoria TT.
Over these four events, the collective braggadocious brochure claims of the manufacturers were tested to their limits and pushed there by an impressive and diverse collection of talent.
The entry list was stacked with some of the most decorated and skilled flat trackers to be found anywhere on the planet, minus the elite few otherwise engaged in pursuit of the Grand National Championship.
Among others, it included Henry Wiles, the winningest TT rider in the history of the sport; multi-time Daytona 200 winners Danny Eslick and Brandon Paasch; AFT support class champions Dalton Gauthier, Dan Bromley and Jesse Janisch; and multi-time national race winners Chad Cose and Morgen Mischler.
While their combined accomplishments spoke loudly, so too did their availability. The list was effectively a who’s who of national champs with day jobs. Throwbacks with swagger and personality, they stood as characters in the mold of the barnstorming racers of a century ago.
2018 AFT Singles champion/construction worker Bromley said, “I kind of put my foot in my mouth when I said, ‘You know, it’s almost harder to win the AdventureTrackers class. But when you look at the stats, there are some good riders in the class.”
The competition was world-class but dressed up in a set of devil-may-care horns (and, yes, stock horns too, which were mercilessly beeped on the starting line). Bromley typified that outlaw mentality. He came armed with a Suzuki V-Strom 1050 that his dad, Joe Bromley, had acquired on Facebook Marketplace for $7000 (hence the team name “Big Momma and Daddy Deep Pockets”).
The Pennsylvanian then brandished $1 bills on his windshield for kicks (“Ron Belt told me I didn’t have the nuts to do a lap standing up, and I told him, ‘You want to make a bet on it?’ He was like, ‘Oh, I’m a poor racer,’ and I was like, ‘So am I. So let’s make it a dollar”), along with a 16-pound trailer hitch, cut in half and then zip-tied and duct taped under his seat, to make weight (at least until it flew off while negotiating a jump, at which point it was drilled and bolted to the bike).
The 2022 Mission Production Twins Champion/Parts Unlimited brand manager, Janisch, admitted that he was initially skeptical that the bikes were up to the task on the track, even if he very much enjoyed a race week spent logging some 1200 miles roaming the hills near Sturgis aboard a Harley-Davidson Pan America 1250 nearly identical to his WFORacingOnline.com race bike.
Janisch said, “The entire concept of adventure riding is more about how you get somewhere than the destination. It’s about really enjoying the scenery and having a comfortable ride while being off the beaten path.”
However, a stint of preseason testing resulted in excruciatingly slow lap times. “When I was testing, I was 100 percent super respectful of the motorcycle. And I was really far off of my 450. Like really, really far off. Like three seconds a lap, far off. Within two turns, I realized that was not the way to ride these things. Right away, I was behind Danny [Eslick], and he was just literally wide open, throwing a 30-foot roost off the back of that thing at the short track. It was like, ‘Holy cow, I’m giving this thing way too much respect.’
“We’re taking these 500-plus-pound motorcycles and just, I mean, there’s no nice way of putting it, beating the heck out of them. We’re racing them so incredibly hard. You just need to ride the heck out of it. What we’re doing on these things is pretty ridiculous.”
A stopwatch would confirm said ridiculousness.
Rather than embarrass themselves on a slo-mo tour of the track, the AdventureTrackers machines were manhandled and coerced to produce lap times that routinely overlapped with those of the established classes. In fact, the category’s top guns outpaced the backend of riders in SuperTwins and Singles more by rule than by exception.
From the outset, it was readily apparent that Bromley and Janisch were the class of this stacked field. Despite a half-foot difference in height to go with divergent riding styles and machinery, the two proved almost perfectly matched on track.
In the season-opening Jackpine Gypsies Short Track I, Janisch outmaneuvered Bromley for the win thanks to a secret weapon that Bromley’s flat track-wired mind failed to account for on these extraordinarily stock bikes: front brakes. Janisch used his right hand to both decelerate and accelerate, transforming the tiny 1/5-mile “O” into a “V”-shaped strike for the lead. The following day, Bromley escaped from the start, powering his way to victory while Janisch was busy fighting his way up to second.
Their rematch three days later at the Jackpine Gypsies Super TT proved pivotal. Bromley scored a second consecutive win aboard his Suzuki when Janisch crashed out of contention, finally asking too much from his H-D. While not ideal for Janisch or for championship intrigue, it was perhaps inevitable when pushing that hard.
If anything, however, it’s that eagerness to redefine boundaries, whatever the cost, that is the shared DNA that unites the AdventureTrackers with their Bagger brethren.
“Physically, I felt like I had never ridden the motorcycle harder,” Janisch said. “Some of it’s obviously due to the size of the bike and what you’re trying to force it to do around the track. But at the same time, the weird part was that they raced really, really well. It sounds contradictory and it’s hard to explain. But basically, in order to kind of get the extra tenth of a second out of the bike, you had to ride it crazy hard.”
Immediately after claiming the first of his two Sturgis checkered flags, Bromley added another chapter to the early legacy of the class by merging the celebrations of victory lane with those of Main Street.
“I mean, it’s a street bike,” he said. “I didn’t really have a way to get around other than in my aunt’s motorhome. So, after the race, we figured we’d just put the license plate back on the bike and go for a ride.
“I had a lot of people yelling and screaming downtown, you know, congratulating me after the race. It was just cool and helped to promote the sport. If you go to the race and you watch me on the track, that’s one thing. But when you’re down on Main Street, and there’s drunk people, there’s parties, there’s fights, and you see the race bikes down there on top of all that, it just adds that extra flair.”
William Harris took the baton from Bromley and ran with it—halfway across the nation.
Among the aforementioned collection of accomplished pros who lined the AdventureTrackers grid, Harris stood out as the exception. However, his relative anonymity didn’t prevent him from making a serious contribution to its primordial mystique.
Harris attended Johnny Lewis’ Slide School in ’21 and caught the racing bug big time. As a developing amateur racer, Harris eyed the new class and considered it a potential entry point for his professional racing ambitions, perhaps as early as 2026.
However, that timeline was accelerated when an x-ray revealed that Mischler had suffered a broken foot, leaving OTBR in need of a sub to ride their BMW F 900 GS at the Jackpine Gypsies Super TT.
“I was fairly nervous,” Harris admitted. “I didn’t want to go out there and just wad myself up and get embarrassed in my first race. I asked the team what their expectations were before I said yes, and they said, ‘We just want you to go have fun.’ That was good enough for me.
“My goals were all reasonable, and I feel like I achieved them in Sturgis.”
After finishing eighth in his maiden pro race, Harris hatched a plan straight out of the 1930s, back when Class C racers were expected to ride in on the race bikes, with hauling or towing the bikes prohibited by the regs.
Speaking to Mike Luczak, whose son Austin Luczak earned his first Progressive AFT podium aboard the Memphis Shades/Black Hills Powersports Honda Africa Twin at the Jackpine Gypsies II, Harris said, “Hey man, you want to ride these things [to] Peoria?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, you’re serious. Like, you’re in?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, but we have to make it fun.”
With Harris on the BMW and Luczak on the Honda, the two transformed the near-1000-mile trek from Sturgis, South Dakota, to Peoria, Illinois, into a genuine adventure, one that included a muddy slog through the trails of Deadwood during a rainstorm, a swing by the Sioux Valley Cycle Club for some practice, and a run through Lake View OHV Park just south of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The season finale at Peoria proved to be standard-fare insanity. Janisch survived a last-lap, last-corner Hail Mary haymaker from Eslick to hang on for the win. Bromley, meanwhile, happily inherited second in the chaos, claiming the position after Eslick took his Saddlemen Race Development Harley-Davidson Pan America 1250 for some impromptu off-roading following his desperate attempt to steal away the victory.
Bromley’s second was more than good enough to seal the deal and secure another Progressive AFT title on top of his ’18 AFT Singles crown. At the time, no one knew it would serve as a fitting send-off for a rider who’d already decided that 2025 would be his last as a full-time professional in the sport.
The newly crowned champ said, “This is a class that brings back that old-school fun. It’s getting a little serious, and rightly so; you know, we’re racing for a national championship. But at some point, you’ve got to make it fun and just enjoy it. It’s cool to know I have that number-one plate. I can be proud when I end my career at Lake Ozark knowing I’m a two-time champion.”CN
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