Indian FTR 1200/S Born On The Dirt, Built For The Street

First road test on Southern California’s racer roads inland from Malibu of the production Indian FTR 1200 Street Tracker derived from the all-conquering FTR 750 AFT champion, after exclusive early test of bike in prototype form six months ago

- Alan Cathcart

Every so often a manufacturer conceives a new model that’s mostly 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 Tenere - 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, till 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 US 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 off-road vehicles since 2014. This will enable Indian to assemble CKD kits of bikes manufactured in Iowa then shipped to Poland for completion, and so hold prices down by thus circumventing the 31% EU taxes currently applied to complete motorcycles entirely manufactured in the USA as an anti-Trump measure, which are set to rise to 66% in June 2021 – well, unless someone blinks first.