The Week in V-Twin: Baggers Make History, SEMA Talks Future & Builders Get to Work

Some weeks the V-Twin news cycle gives us corporate appointments, earnings reports and 47 press releases about things nobody asked for.

This wasn’t one of those weeks.

Harley-Davidson baggers were doing something completely unreasonable on a MotoGP circuit in Spain. SEMA reopened a nine-year-old conversation about where the motorcycle industry is headed. Riders in Oregon put their money behind high-school students learning to weld, fabricate and actually build motorcycles. Women in the Black Hills were rebuilding carburetors, welding and learning the trades. And one of the most sacred pieces of dirt in American motorcycle racing is getting a Route 66 sendoff with Jared Mees.

That’s a pretty damn good cross-section of the motorcycle world we care about.

Iannone Sweeps Aragón and Harley’s Bagger Experiment Gets Very Real

When Harley-Davidson announced it was taking bagger racing global, there were plenty of people who wondered whether the whole thing was going to be racing or spectacle.

At this point, the answer appears to be both.

Andrea Iannone delivered the first two-race weekend sweep in the young history of the FIM Harley-Davidson Bagger World Cup at MotorLand Aragón in Spain. Riding for Niti Racing, Iannone won both races and collected the maximum 50 points available.

The championship picture got even more interesting behind him. Archie McDonald left Spain as the new points leader with 174 points, just seven ahead of Eric Granado. Oscar Gutiérrez sits third with 148 and Iannone is one point behind him with 147.

That means four riders still have a mathematical shot at becoming the first Bagger World Cup champion when the series wraps up at Austria’s Red Bull Ring September 18–20. 

Now, you can argue all day about whether racing touring motorcycles around European road courses makes any damn sense.

That’s probably part of why it works.

The bigger story here is that an American V-Twin touring platform is sharing weekends with MotoGP, being ridden by world-class racers and attracting enough legitimate competition that the championship still has four guys fighting for it going into the final round.

Ten years ago, tell somebody that Harley-Davidson baggers would be banging bars on international road courses in a world championship and they’d probably ask what you had been drinking.

We’re here now. And it’s pretty entertaining.

SEMA Wants the Motorcycle Industry to Give a Shift Again

Here’s one that’s less exciting visually but may be more important long-term.

The GiveAShift project is coming back.

The original independent GAS report was put together in 2017 by people from across the motorcycle business—OEMs, aftermarket, dealerships, media and actual motorcycle enthusiasts—to have a fairly unfiltered conversation about problems facing the industry.

That report landed on five major issues: motorcycling had a desirability problem rather than simply a product problem; the industry needed more women riding; dealerships needed to evolve; enthusiasts needed to promote motorcycling themselves; and the coming world of autonomous vehicles presented challenges motorcycles couldn’t ignore.

Nine years later, they’re reconvening.

A new 20-person GiveAShift roundtable will meet November 3 during the 2026 SEMA Show in Las Vegas, and the resulting report will be released free to the industry in December. SEMA is also making a deliberate push to expand powersports inside the show, including a new Powersports/SXS/lifestyle section. 

We’re interested.

Because motorcycle industry meetings have spent a lot of years asking some version of the same question:

Where are the new riders going to come from?

There isn’t going to be one answer.

Some of it is price. Some is accessibility. Some is dealership experience. Some is culture. Some is getting younger people around motorcycles early enough that this becomes something they want to be part of.

And maybe part of it is remembering that motorcycle culture can’t be manufactured by a marketing department.

You have to give people a reason to want in.

Which brings us to the next story.

Want the Next Generation of Builders? Put Tools in Their Hands.

While people in conference rooms debate how to attract younger riders, they’re doing something a little more direct in Oregon.

They’re teaching kids to build motorcycles.

On August 29, Steelhead Harley-Davidson hosted a charity poker run benefiting Alliance High School’s motorcycle education program.

Last year, with support from Harley-Davidson, Alliance students built a custom motorcycle that was eventually displayed at The One Motorcycle Show. Along the way, students got real-world experience in fabrication, mechanics, welding and problem-solving.

This year’s poker run raised support for continuing that program and even included a stop at the school’s student motorcycle shop. 

This is the kind of story we’d like to see a hell of a lot more often.

If we’re serious about preserving custom motorcycle culture, we need more than Instagram followers and kids who know how to swap parts from a catalog.

We need people who know how to make things.

Weld. Machine. Fabricate. Paint. Wire. Troubleshoot. Look at a pile of parts and figure out how to turn it into a motorcycle.

Not every student in a program like this is going to become a professional motorcycle builder. They don’t have to.

One might become a machinist. Another becomes a welder. Somebody becomes a technician. Somebody else gets a completely unrelated job but spends the next 40 years building motorcycles in his garage.

That’s how the culture keeps going.

Give them the tools. They’ll figure out what to do with them.

Babes Ride Out Puts the Emphasis on Hands-On

That same idea showed up in the Black Hills this week.

Babes Ride Out Deadwood, presented by Harley-Davidson, ran August 27–30 with riding through the Black Hills, but one part of the schedule caught our attention in particular.

Real Deal Revolution brought two days of hands-on motorcycle and skilled-trade workshops to the event.

And we mean hands-on.

There was welding with fabricator and motorcycle builder Carolina Paredes. Carburetor rebuilding with CNC machinist and builder Bobbi Pruter. Pinstriping with Theresa Contreras. Leatherwork with Sarah Winslow. Roadside preparedness. Motorcycle safety checks. The RDR-built Harley-Davidson Pan America called ETHOS was there for test rides as well. 

That’s good stuff.

Not another seminar about “empowerment.”

Here’s a carburetor. Take it apart. Here’s a welder. Strike an arc. Here’s a brush. Pull a line.

Confidence tends to show up pretty quickly when somebody discovers they can actually do the thing.

More of that, please.

Route 66, Jared Mees and the Springfield Mile

And finally, we’re looking toward next weekend.

With the Springfield Mile approaching, Harley-Davidson and 10-time American Flat Track Grand National Champion Jared Mees are bringing a little extra history into race day.

On September 5, riders will leave Conrad’s Harley-Davidson in Shorewood, Illinois, and travel Route 66 to the Illinois State Fairgrounds for the Springfield Mile. The ride is officially part of the Route 66 Centennial celebration.

Mees has a little history with Springfield himself.

He won the Springfield Mile 10 times before retiring from full-time competition and is now promoting the event. The Mile returns September 5–6. 

Think about that sentence for a minute:

Harley-Davidson. Route 66. Jared Mees. Springfield Mile.

You’d have a hard time putting together four things that say American motorcycling any louder than that.

And while this industry spends a lot of time looking for the next big thing, there’s still something to be said for taking the pieces of motorcycle history that already matter and putting people back in the middle of them.

Don’t just tell them Springfield is important. Ride there. Let them smell the race fuel and dirt. They’ll understand.

What We’re Watching

There was a theme hiding underneath most of this week’s stories.

Participation.

Not watching motorcycles on a screen. Doing something.

Iannone is wrestling a race-prepped bagger around Aragón. Students are learning to fabricate a motorcycle. Women are rebuilding carbs and learning to weld. Riders are heading down Route 66 toward the Springfield Mile.

Even SEMA’s GiveAShift project is ultimately asking how the motorcycle industry gets more people to stop observing motorcycling from the outside and actually become part of it.

Maybe we’re making the problem harder than it needs to be.

Motorcycle culture has always worked best when somebody opens the garage door and says:

Come on in. We’ll show you how.

That’s worth remembering.

— Cycle Source