INDIAN FTR 1200/1200 S

Every so often a manufacturer conceives a new model that’s unlike anything anyone did previously — and in doing so invents a new kind of motorcycle. Think BMW with its dual-purpose GS models, Ducati with the Monster or Yamaha with the original Ténéré — all of them so immediately and hugely successful that they ended up being copied by other manufacturers, and proved to be prototypes for a new generic type of bike. Now, with its new FTR 1200 Street Tracker, Indian may well have joined that illustrious club.

That’s not to say that nobody else ever tried to build a volume production street legal version of an American oval-track racer before — just that nobody yet showed how this could be done in a modern context, while getting it as indisputably right as America’s oldest motorcycle manufacturer has now done with this new model. OK, Harley tried once before with its flawed and hence short-lived XR1200 back in 2008, but nobody else, until now. The FTR 1200 made its global debut last October at Intermot, and is now in production — with initial 2019 manufacturing projections already doubled in response to massive worldwide customer demand. Initially, this will exclusively be built at Indian’s U.S. plant at Spirit Lake, Iowa — but later this summer a second assembly line will kick off at the massive factory in Opole, Poland, where Indian’s parent company Polaris Corp. has been making offroad vehicles since 2014. This will enable Indian to assemble complete knockdown kits of bikes manufactured in Iowa