VOL. 55 ISSUE 38 SEPTEMBER 25, 2018 P117
the existing bike up on a shelf
in their Museum with a plaque
underneath it, and come out with
a brand new purpose-built racer.
That's up to them, but I do know
that they're fully committed to flat
track both now and in the future.
You brought AFT to the
Goodwood Festival of Speed
in July. Were you surprised at
how much people in Britain
already knew about the AFT
series?
It was just amazing—over-
whelming, actually. I guess today
the world's a small place, and
information is available read-
ily and instantly. But because
for Harley not being competi-
tive, and it's certainly not a lack
of competence, because Terry
and his team are really the best
in the business. I think you have
to go back to the planning stage
a couple of years ago to see
what their challenge is. At that
time, Indian up in Minneapolis
was sitting in a darkened room,
saying, "The way to win in flat
track is to build a race bike from
a clean sheet of paper." There
was another group of people in
Milwaukee just down the road,
sitting in a different darkened
room saying, "What a great idea
it'd be to promote our new street
line of 500s and 750s designed
for a whole new audience for
Harley, and use that as the basis
for an expert flat track bike." You
can't argue with either decision,
it's just that one of them so far
has been immediately success-
ful, and the other is much more
of a slow burner.
So I don't know what the fu-
ture holds for the Harley project,
because they can go one of
two ways, can't they? They can
either say, "Let's identify what
the barriers to success are with
this current platform, and let's
re-engineer those and R&D our
way out of it." Or, they can put
the 2019 AFT series."
Husqvarna will be
joined by fellow
Austrian manufacturer
KTM in next year's
Singles class.
