Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1541594
ence in the championship, in large part thanks to Latus Motors. Terry Vance, Vance & Hines co-founder and the man who oversaw H-D's works SuperTwins effort, spoke of the program back in 2022 in something of a post-mortem. At the time, he ad - mitted, "We tried everything that we could possibly try to make our bikes competitive at the top level, and, you know, we never solved the mystery. The Indian is just a very well-designed, well- balanced motorcycle. "When you think about what we've gone through with the XG, I mean, we build our own cyl - inder heads. We build our own camshafts. We build our own cranks, rods and pistons. We was far from total. Thanks to the multi-stage efforts to make production-based bikes more competitive in the preceding years, many teams and riders had already pivoted to the well- proven Yamaha MT-07, the pow - erful and trendy KTM 790 Duke, and the turnkey Kawasaki Ninja 650, which went bar-to-bar with the XR750 in the days before the FTR's introduction. However, two of the series' three biggest names stood as free agents in the SuperTwins sweepstakes. Mees' retirement left Bran - don Robinson as the leading ex-Indian rider in the field, fresh off a championship runner-up campaign. Also on the hunt for spent a lot of money trying to be competitive with our program, and I'm very proud of what we accomplished with the bike and that we were able to get on the box the few times we did." And that could have been it. Story told. History settled. But as you know, it's a history that is now being actively rewritten. As the 2025 Progressive American Flat Track season made clear, the XG750R was not, in fact, a mistake or a misfire, but merely a bike ahead of its time. While there was some reshuf - fling in the wake of the deci- sion to make the FTR and other race-only platforms ineligible for the '25 season, the upheaval Bauman's race-winning 2025 XG750R. P78 FEATURE I AFT HARLEY-DAVIDSON XG750R