Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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RIDE REVIEW I ROLAND SANDS DESIGN INDIAN CHIEF BUILD P96 T he 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 chang- es. 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 re- ally 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 learn- ing 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 inter- ested 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 pick- ing 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 race- track? Let's build a true performance bike out of this bike that is unapolo- This man has been at the forefront of so many movements he's lost count, with road racing on big twins the latest. ROLAND ROLAND ROLAND SANDS SANDS SPEAKS