Racing Indian Motorcycles For 50 Years

It's fair to say Doc Batsleer has been actively and continuously racing Indian motorcycles longer than anyone else in the world, having raced the original, Massachusetts-made machines for more than 50 years now. Batsleer, from New Smyrna Beach, Florida, started racing on a Harley-Davidson Sportsman 125 in 1960 and had his first ride on a hand-shift Indian around that same time. A stint in the Navy soon saw him inspecting radar stations around the world, and he would put his Bultaco Metralla on the mail plane and fly to tracks across Europe on weekends. He returned to the US a very proficient racer who went on to win number-one plates in a half-dozen different series riding every kind of bike, but nowadays, he races exclusively on his fleet of beloved, hand-shift Indians.

“Indians are my real passion,” Batsleer says. “I’ve raced modern bikes in Battle of the Twins, and I’ve raced GSX-Rs around Daytona; unless there’s a brake marker, you don’t know how fast you’re going. You’re just an automaton. With hand-shift racers, and all their frame flex, wheel hop, brake fade, and missing gears, it’s truly man versus machine. It’s much more of a thrill to run one of these at 115 mph than anything else at 180 mph. There’s no comparison.”

Batsleer has around 20 Indians in his collection—“maybe more, I haven’t counted,” he says—all mechanically perfect but cosmetically untouched survivors from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. “When a bike needs to be repaired, I fix it,” he says. “But how can you repaint it? That’s destroying history! You can never un-restore it.”

Besides, Batsleer would rather his bikes circulate a racetrack than shine in some museum, which is why he brought a trailer full to Mid-Ohio for himself, his friend Michael Weesner, and Indian’s own Gary Gray to race in the Pre-War Hand Shift category. Giving Gray a bike to race was more selfish than selfless, Batsleer explains. When Batsleer met Gray at a bike show at Daytona a few years ago, he jumped at the opportunity to put Indian’s product director on a racebike.

“I want the guys at Polaris to know how we’ve kept the Indian brand alive for all these years, maintaining and racing these old bikes,” Batsleer says. “We’ve protected and respected the brand. I wanted them to respect that. We need to keep Indian a family, so I offered Gary a ride.”

It turned out to be a mutually beneficial arrangement—tearing around a racetrack on an original Scout gives Gray a unique perspective that informs of the development of Indian’s new-generation, liquid-cooled Scout motorcycle. It’s paid off for Batsleer, too, regarding his desire to protect the Indian legacy.

“I wanted to connect the old and new and give these guys passion,” Batsleer says. “This is the second time Gary has raced my bike, and he’s doing great. I hope his enthusiasm keeps his bosses in line!”