Annotations will appear as you listen
0:00
29:20
Term
dyno
A dyno is essentially a giant treadmill for vehicles. A car or motorcycle is strapped down onto rollers, and as the wheels spin, a computer measures how much power and force the engine is actually putting down.
Term
performance bagger
This is a type of large touring motorcycle (the kind with big storage bags on the back) that has been modified with racing parts to make it incredibly fast and agile, turning a heavy cruiser into a high-performance machine.
Car
Kawasaki Ninja H2
This is an extremely fast, high-tech motorcycle made by Kawasaki. It uses a special air compressor called a supercharger to force more air into the engine, allowing it to make over 200 horsepower, which is as much power as some small cars.
Concept
big bore kit
This is a kit of parts used to make an engine's cylinders wider so they can hold larger pistons. This increases the overall size of the engine, allowing it to burn more fuel and make more power.
Part
inverted forks
This is a type of front suspension on motorcycles where the thickest, strongest part of the suspension tubes is at the top near the handlebars instead of down by the wheel. This makes the steering feel more precise and stable when cornering or braking hard.
Brand
Brembo
Brembo is a famous Italian company that makes top-tier brakes for fast cars and motorcycles. Seeing their name on a vehicle's brakes is a sign of high quality and excellent stopping power.
Term
ECU
The ECU is the brain of a modern vehicle. It is an onboard computer that constantly monitors sensors to decide exactly how much fuel and spark the engine needs to run smoothly and safely.
Car
Chevrolet Corvette
The Corvette is a famous two-seat sports car made by Chevrolet. It is designed to go very fast, look sleek, and offer the thrill of a race car that you can legally drive on public roads.
Car
Plymouth Roadrunner
The Road Runner was a powerful, two-door American car from the late 1960s and 1970s. It was designed to be cheap to buy but very fast in a straight line, and it even featured a horn that mimicked the 'beep-beep' sound of the famous cartoon character.
Car
Toyota Prius
The Prius is a highly fuel-efficient hatchback made by Toyota that uses both a gasoline engine and an electric motor to save gas. It is widely known for being incredibly reliable, practical, and environmentally friendly.
Place
Road America
Road America is a very famous, historic race track in Wisconsin. It is known for being very long, fast, and challenging for both sports cars and motorcycles.
LIVE
Hello, Jamie and Lucas here with the Fuel Throttle Podcast.
And today we're gonna talk a bit about are Harleys really fast and why do we modify them?
It comes up a lot on social media and groups with people and friends discussing whether Harleys are really fast or not.
A little different perspective here because you got me, I'm in my early 50s, and you got Lucas is in his mid-20s.
So he grew up in a little different time than I did, and my background was in non-Harley Davidson for forever, and that was like through the 80s and 90s, and a lot of Japanese sport bikes, and then I had a i different Universal racing career there for 12 or 15 years, uh traveling throughout the country, road racing and motorcycles.
We did that for a long time, and so speed is pretty relative to us, I would say.
Yeah, and how things have changed, it's really pretty age-based, I think.
The communities and the subcultures of motorcycling.
Because I I'd say most people probably at some point, if you've had two wheels or you've owned it or ridden, whatever, probably had times where you were big on sport bikes, and then a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times when people are aging and stuff, they kind of move on to the Harleys.
I think a lot of it has to do with money too, but definitely uh changing and shifting demographic always, and uh how we define going fast has changed a lot too, right?
We've all grown up, like especially.
I mean, I it's easy for me to look at your past because I'm your father and such, but kind of the same thing.
I grew up on mini bikes and dirt bikes, and then it turned to street bikes and cars, and same thing about you, you know, you had all that stuff growing up because it's just our family culture, right?
Yeah, these bikes are fast now too, what you can do with them, and they've advanced a lot recently.
And for sure.
Speaking of the relativity of speed, before we get into the Harley side, I think we like I said before, we got a pretty good handle because of my background racing, but we also have some pretty fast stuff.
I got a thousand horsepower streetcar.
Lucas, how many horsepower does your daily driver have?
What without being on a dyno, hard seven, eight hundred, maybe tough to say.
But I mean, yeah, it's definitely she drives a legitimate nine-second streetcar.
Right.
You have a good baseline when we had a pretty good idea.
It was fast, not top fuel funny car fast or anything like that, but it's relative to the street-driven vehicles.
I mean, the performance baggers that we're gonna talk about here, I got a Kawasaki H2 as well, besides the Harley stuff.
So, and it does have bags on it, right?
Is that's a performance bagger, I guess, right?
But that one's over 200 horsepower.
It's really cool talking the relativity of speed, and it's something that really comes up a lot, and that's why we're doing this episode.
Are Harleys really fast?
Are they or aren't they?
Well, here's where we're gonna start.
So take your stock Harley.
That's one really great thing about these bikes, is you can grab a bike off the showroom floor, like the big twins, the M8 bikes, they're you know, between 80 and 100 horsepower, pretty easy.
Right off the showroom floor, put a pipe on it, not to mention a cam.
You're you know in a 130s for horsepower on those, and that makes those bikes really fun.
Yeah, it's a lot different comparing Harley's now to what they were.
The ramp of how much they've gained just in power and performance is huge, but not just engine power, but also their ability to handle and how well they ride brakes.
And well, that's the difference between my generation and yours, really, is when I was in my twenties, Harley's had 60 horsepower.
Right.
You never even thought about it.
It wasn't fast.
I mean, there were some, like when I was racing, there were classes for Harleys.
They had a Sportster class that they raced in the AMA Pro and some of that other stuff in club racing.
But yeah, if you had a Harley going racing back then, you had its own class because there wasn't really anything it fit into.
Because, you know, back then even the big twins were they were 60 horsepower.
Not that they weren't great bikes, but they just had a different intended purpose.
So that's where things changed.
We have seen that in our 20-some years of business really change where we set our bar in our builds, like when 88 and 96 inches we started making those big boar kits and a lot of 107 kits for a long time.
And I very much remember there was a time when we would do a big boar kit, and when we'd get, I mean, over 100 horsepower would be really good, and then it was 110, it was 120.
And then as development and the motors got better and the parts got better, the twin cams went from 96s to the 103s was a big jump for us because we could get close to 100 horsepower putting a cam in.
And there was a lot of controversy.
I talked about the early podcast.
Right.
Like they thought, no way, can you get 100 horsepower in a Harley, bolt a cam in, and have a 100 horsepower street bike?
Like that that did make things really fun to work on these bikes and see those games.
Right.
Yeah, it was pretty impressive.
Like on some of those, and then when we got a little bit further along in the twin cam stuff, I remember having uh the black street glide we had was uh like uh street trim was uh like a 10-second bike.
Yeah, your mom, your mom's favorite bike, and talked about we call it Black Betty.
It was the 2010 Street Glide, and that thing was cool.
It was like one of the original performance baggers.
In fact, I remember very much eight, ten years ago when the performance baggers thing first started.
We had been doing this before 2010 already.
Um, but our 2010 bike got PM wheels and brakes, then it got carbon wheels.
We were one of the first people to put carbon wheels on BST wheels on a Harley.
And I remember I took that to the drag race a few times.
Lucas was a teenager going out there.
I got that in the tens on just at the time, I think it was a 124 on motor, and that was just a really, really nice bike, and that thing got piss-pounded for a very long time.
That's the one we did all our engine development on big motors with twin cam stuff on that bike, and uh just plane almost wore the thing out.
And then actually, Todd that works here, remember he bought that, had that for a while, and he rode some longer.
But uh, that's what really came.
I mean, we were doing that with those bikes, and at that time it was pretty darn impressive.
I remember being down there somewhere.
I got a video I should dig up.
A guy on a on a ZX10, couldn't ride it very well, probably, but I remember being at the drags and lining up at WIR.
And when I beat that guy on that ZX10 running in tens on a Harley, that's the first time I really saw it.
People open their eyes to these things, they are actually pretty fast.
And I remember when uh MJK they were kind of coming with some of the really cool parts like swing arms and bigger brake kits and all that stuff.
They actually thought that that bike, our bike, was their bike or was ours, or vice versa, for a file there.
That was pretty neat.
That was 10 or 15 years ago.
So by today's standards, I mean that's a pretty fast bagger, especially something that's on all motor, and I mean, for all intents and purposes, really a street bike.
So to now have bikes that are making 50 more horsepower on that.
That was a big deal.
I remember that when that when I run that bike, I started that had uh like a custom exhaust we built really based on our jackpot two into one, but bigger.
And I remember leaving the house, that thing was idle, gnarly.
That thing was it vibrated and rattled and it was wicked, it was totally wicked.
And back then it was right 150, 160 horsepower, which was a ton for a twin cam.
And now it's easy to do m8s right now.
So that's came such a long way.
Now the engine kits, it's not uncommon on the especially now the new Gen 2 bikes, sky's the limit, really.
You know, are CV OST, for example.
Yeah, that one the Gen 2s in particular.
I think M eights, honestly, uh just because of how they sound and how they perform and the chassis they're in and stuff, they're already really, really good on street manners, but like that Gen 2 bike, I put a couple hundred miles on that uh a month ago at Road American.
That's a 180 some horsepower bike it made here on the Dino and pump gas.
Pump gas, yep.
One hit starter, no engine codes, no issues, doesn't do anything.
Literally, I mean, if you didn't twist the throttle wide open and it didn't sound a little bit more gnarly, you'd think it was a stock bike.
So that's a super cool, too.
Yeah, that's the thing, too, is these bikes are coming at such a level now that you can take these bigger motorbikes.
Even the 143s that we're doing, they were pretty tame and pretty drivable.
And uh, I remember one time I took that 143 in Road King on this cancer ride, and we got like 80 miles out and a group of people, and we were talking, and the guy's like, Uh, what's the deal about the 143?
And we started talking about it.
He says, Well, is it actually streetable?
Can you actually ride it on the street?
And I go, Well, I got it here today, and me and my wife are riding it, and that was really cool.
But it's neat building these streetable bikes.
One thing we really want to talk about is the difference from some of the street parts to the race parts, and on the drive line parts and some of the stuff like making the drive line clutch, chain drive, belt drive, there's a lot of controversies and opinions there on what you should do.
And you really got to look at what you need or what you're gonna use the bike for.
That's really something that we try to put a lot of emphasis on when you're choosing your build or your parts, really deciding what you're gonna do.
And we'll do a podcast further on just that subject, but that's really cool.
On the highest levels, like king of the baggers and now the world GP, the bagger cup, that stuff trickles down back into the street bikes, right?
You know, it does, it really does.
Not even just the aftermarket, but look at the bikes, look at the CVORR, look at the CVO ST, look at a lot of the stuff that's coming on these.
I mean, even just the standard CVO bikes have inverted forks and really good brake Brembo calipers, all that stuff on them.
That 100% came from the racing.
We get a lot of people say, Why aren't you guys doing the bagger racing and doing this?
Well, just we're too home-based, we're too home focused here at doing what we do day in, day out, and making sure you guys all get your parts and your stuff and keeping our RD program going versus the racing stuff.
And we were involved with a few teams early on, King of the Baggers, with kind of in the background with helping on some parts and components and some of the tuning side of stuff.
But uh at the level they do that at, that is really fantastic and unbelievable.
Same goes too with the street racing, like the street drag racing.
Yeah, well, we don't have that much up here, not up here, we don't, but yep, down south, there's some pretty cool grudge racing stuff going on, and that's kind of a good uh bridge between like what you see for race components and street bikes, too, though, because the average guy, if he builds a whatever, say a take an M8 with a relatively streetable build, you know, 130 to 150 horsepower range, maybe just for example.
If the average guy's not stunting or doing a bunch of hard launches and things like that, they may not necessarily need a chain drive or an upgraded trans and some other things.
Um but a guy who's gonna do, you know, not necessarily road race.
There's not really much road course you do with baggers, but if you're gonna do drag racing and stuff like that, a lot of that road course technology has trickled down.
One cool thing too about the the bikes themselves, rider controls that the stock ECU has and the vehicles.
You got different modes, different things.
You have the wheel slip control, traction control all built into that.
That really is helpful, especially now.
We're building some of these bikes that have 150, 70, 180 horsepower for street bikes.
They will, without traction control or some of the other rider controls, that really makes a big difference in there for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's come a long way in the I mean that mainly in the last couple of years when that stuff got really advanced upon.
But yeah, and it's really like you said, about comparing a street bike to a race bike, you really got to determine what you really want.
And one thing is an absolutely awesome subject because we see a customer context.
Hey, I seen this dyno charter that bike, maybe it's something we did, maybe we didn't, and they go, I really want that.
Well, is it really something you want?
Because there's different things that you have to consider along with that from maintenance, from freshing the parts up for how you're gonna use it.
And a lot of people say, Hey, why aren't you all racing, or why aren't you guys involved in racing or doing this or building these kind of engines or suiting those kind of customers?
Because by far the most important thing to us is delivering a premium product for street bike and guys, the way they're gonna use the bike.
Because plain and simple, I mean the bikes and the customers we have, they're street bikes.
The guys that come here, they want a really good performing bike for the street.
You're not gonna find us.
We don't, I mean, we don't do E85, you do in your cars, right for sure.
Yeah, all alternative fuels and uh that's a good example of tires and all that.
E85.
No, I mean that's it's it's just we make we want to make it realistic for our for our customers.
Most guys are on the street.
I mean, how many bikes are how many Harleys are at the track compared to the street?
But I guess that goes with anything.
But and our tuning forum too is it for the street.
Right.
Yep, exactly.
And we can see that in other people's tuning, not to pick on anybody too bad, but we can tell the guys that focus more on the drag strip or street racing stuff because some of the stuff in the tunes, like either the light throttle or idle or starting or riding the controls, that stuff isn't set up really very well.
Yeah, like a light stuff.
But yeah, that's wide open.
But that's what we specialize in is delivering stuff for a street-friendly rideable bike, you know, something you can get on and have killer performance, but also be able to ride the thing cross-country and do what you want to do with it.
So that brings us to the second part of the episode, and this is probably gonna be a little more fun.
Is why do we modify these Harleys?
Why do we do it?
Why do you take a stock bike that already has 80 or 100 horsepower or more or less?
And why do you make them have more?
Why do you think?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's the same question: why does anyone take a 50-year-old carbureted small block or whatever it might be with 200 and some horsepower, and they want to start with that instead of a modern 500 horsepower fuel-injected V8 or all the rest of it?
The muscle car uh analogy is really good because it's really the same thing.
It's what drove muscle car sales in the 60s and into the early 70s before they uh crushed it.
But it really goes back to what is the allure of making something that's not inherently fast fast.
Why is it sometimes cooler to watch a family car go faster than a sports car?
Like, why were people buying roadrunners instead of Corvettes?
Right.
Because a roadrunner was a cornet or you know, a base B-body car or whatever versus something that's meant to go fast.
On top of it, too, it's a unique platform.
The Harleys have a different character completely than you know, like the inline bikes and stuff on the market, which pretty much dominate obviously the sports segments.
So if that's what you want, something that sounds like a Harley, you want something that looks like a Harley and rides like one, but you want something that's fast and makes whatever 150 horsepower.
Your choice is to modify a Harley now.
So I think it's really cool because it's taking something that is not necessarily designed or on the surface and making it do something that's not designed to do making it do something very well.
It's like a thoroughbred horse.
You see a thoroughbred horse, you know that thing is gonna run fast.
But if they go a horse race, what if they brought a donkey out?
Right.
And what if the donkey won the horse race?
You'd be like, that's the craziest, coolest thing.
It's no different than sitting there watching YouTube videos of a Prius with a Hayabusa or LS engine in it doing that stuff.
Sure, there's faster cars, but it's the uniqueness of making that stuff your own, making it how you like it, and being able to customize your modifications, I think, is really cool.
Yeah, I imagine that's kind of the draw why so many people are interested in King of the Baggers, too.
Is absolutely not.
I mean, the viewership and attendance at those events is just skyrocketed for AMA.
And it's crazy too that baggers, I mean, on a side note, are within like 10 seconds of a fast bike lap.
Oh, they're faster than that.
The King of the Baggers are like a detonator, they were knocking on 190 miles per hour, right?
But on tight road courses, they're on super sport times and they're not that far off, honestly, off super bike times.
Right, yeah.
But the super sport times, they're actually doing segmented videos of where it's really pretty neck and neck.
It's really impressive.
They're taking these 800-pound bikes and lighting them up and making them do that stuff, you know.
It's super, super cool.
The other thing that it really has done for us, especially, is and for the entire aftermarket, there's entire companies that are dedicated to making your Harley's better.
Yeah, isn't that so awesome?
Like, not even just distributors like us and dealers and shops that build them, but there's manufacturers that that's all they do is build parts.
Right.
That's not really something that every segment has.
Right.
So it's it's very unique to us.
Uh it's a big subculture too.
It's not a small amount of people.
Obviously, the amount of people that have Harleys is pretty big relative to the motorcycle market, regardless.
So the Harley aftermarket is uh pretty significantly sized.
Yeah, it's really so than anyone outside would realize.
And we're fortunate to be where we are in Wisconsin and upper Midwest here.
We got Seness right here.
We do a lot with those guys.
The motor company is right here too, and some of the others, like dark horses, yeah, that we all can work together.
But having the motor company here is really cool.
Right.
This is a good area, and it's also cool since we've been talking about King of the Baggers, that we have a really good venue.
There's lots of car stuff that goes on at Road America that's really awesome.
But yeah, world-class racetrack right here.
Right.
And that brings up the lifestyle thing with the Harleys, that's why people modify their Harleys.
Right.
If you like rock music, if you like gatherings, you like being around people that are like-minded.
Yep.
What else can you do that's as big as a Harley thing?
There's events all over.
You want to see a band from the 80s, 90s, all the way back to the 70s, probably.
Yep.
You can hear that.
And that is super cool to get out and have that community be like that.
And like I said, I was Japanese bikes around those circles for a long time.
And there was some pretty cool stuff.
Yeah, I'd really go to a big weekend like Daytona.
Right.
Um even the spring Daytona and the fall Biktoberfest stuff.
Uh actually, I was in Daytona for the first Bike Toberfest.
I was racing down there when they did the first one because they did that in the fall.
They made a pretty big deal on it, and it really wasn't much at the time.
But that's done something.
There's a fair amount of metric bikes there.
Yeah, right.
They've grown so much because of the Harley involvements.
That's a big, an abnormally large subculture of the like the kind of the power sport stuff.
And yeah, like places, some people don't realize how much of business in the aftermarket it it takes up.
But yeah, exactly.
That's what you get.
If you want to modify the bike you have and make it faster or cooler or sound better, it's the bike that people have because they you can see by the flags they buy to hang up in their garage or the t-shirts they buy at every dealer.
I mean, they're involved and they like the brand around that.
Having a Harley is is pretty cool, right?
I mean, it's way cooler than having like a goal pick on these guys, but having a Goldwing, I mean, what do they do when they get together?
Right.
What do they do?
Yacht rock, right?
Or you know what's going on there.
But cool thing about Harleys is you got a lot of like-minded people.
You do that.
Yep.
And then going back to our Harleys are fast for a minute, like they are pretty fast.
Like, you rode in the soft tail.
Yeah, that thing honks.
That's got 135 horsepower.
Exactly.
And to be honest, like I have pretty sizable motorcycle collection.
I I think I'm under 50 bikes now, but a lot of that stuff is Japanese bikes.
The majority is Japanese bikes.
The other bikes are shop bikes or company bikes.
But USA, I have an H2.
I got tons of leader bikes from the 90s into the 2000s, some back in the evening, some stuff from the 80s.
But I get on some of those bikes, and I guess like almost like rose-colored glasses, where I remember some of those bikes being so fast and so gnarly, and gnarly they are.
Uh, but getting on uh some of these new Harleys we're building, yeah, a lot of those old bikes got nothing for these Harleys, man.
I mean, it proofs and it's riding them, you know.
So it's really cool.
And I think how it's lending so well is the people that are my age, especially.
Like if you got somebody from their 40s to 50s that was a sport bike guy, yep.
Grew up riding sport bikes.
Well, you still ride a sport bike, but you grew up riding sport bikes.
Now you're not aged out.
A lot of these guys, too, are skilled riders.
You gotta remember, like through the 90s, that was a really big time where there was stunting, there was wheelies, and God knows I love doing wheelies.
So there was times through there where a lot of people were sport bike guys.
Yep, and it's funny because a lot of our customers from Wisconsin here, they're people I knew back from racing 25 years ago.
Them guys are back, now we're friends again on Harleys, and and it's funny because they got a Harley, put their wife on the back, they go do the events, go do the stuff.
Uh some of these guys are even going to the drag races a bit, doing some of that.
A lot of these guys are like we do a stock bike for them, they bring it here, we do the mods, maybe they do some of the stuff along the way.
They're like, Jamie, this thing is freaking fast.
But it isn't that easy, but to get a bag of Harley into the tens, it's completely doable.
And I mean, that is legitimately fast.
GSXR 1100s and CBR 900 RRs, like that stuff was no joke.
And now we have Harleys with touring with bags on them with your wife, and not to mention soft tails, yeah, and dinos and some of the other Pan America, perfect example.
Yep, yep.
150 horsepower.
Yeah, yeah, there's a whole catalog, and I mean there's bikes and segments within Harley alone of different things and different ways you can put them together and build them.
But right, exactly.
Now you have street bikes from Harley, cruisers, two baggers, whatever it might be, are relatively easy to crack 130, 150 horsepower plus.
And yeah, now these are running 10 second quarter miles, and that's it used to be something that was difficult for even these lighter bikes and sport bikes to run and stuff.
Like some of the stuff on social media, like somebody will post a picture of their bagger and they're like, My 87 hurricane would have smoked that thing.
Oh, 87 hurricanes had 70 horsepower and less torque than that.
And these things make double the torque at twenty.
2500 RPM.
So again, until you've ridden one, it's no joke.
It's almost like the jokes on us because it's so fun to do this and to see the controversy behind it.
It's really, really fun.
And it's that's really what I enjoy.
It's the super cool community and just the motorcycle people in general from all walks of earth, from everywhere.
I mean, it's like you never see a group or a segment that can come together like motorcycle people.
And that's just really what I like.
And the best part of that is customers.
That's one of my favorite things here is for 25 years, being able to talk with customers and take them from start to the finish line.
Yeah.
Getting them there.
And that's really what we pride ourselves in here is not doing half the job, doing the whole job.
And and whether we do the build in-house or help you modify it, or you do it at home.
It's really the same thing.
And then on that side of things, too, as far as the tuning side, because that's obviously our major forte here is we are able to do that really well.
Like a lot of times, customers will call in.
This happens many, many times every day.
They call in, they want this cam, this pipe, this throttle body, these injectors, this stuff, and they have nowhere to do it.
They have nobody to help.
And the great thing about these engines is they're so easy to work on.
So many people will take these together or have an indie shop that's maybe doesn't even have experience with late model Harley's, put it together, or maybe even the dealer.
But that's one good thing that we're able to take them to the finish line with help with the tuning.
And we do so much of this without even a bike seeing a dyno here because we have so much experience doing it and doing that.
That's really what Lucas does all day is helping these people and uh undo that.
That's really a big part of what you do.
Yeah, it's part of why we have such a big reach and why we're able to help so many people.
I mean, obviously it's not feasible to have every single person in-house for us to work on, tune their bike, et cetera.
But when you've uh dealt with it enough and you kind of know what to expect and you are used to seeing certain things and tested a lot of parts, it's not super difficult to put some stuff together and really help these guys remotely with.
Tell them how you normally do that.
Like say I was a customer and I bought, let's just say it, uh 22 Street Glide, put a fuel motor 128 or maybe somebody else's 128 in with a common camshaft and injectors, throttle body, and say a two into one exhaust, and you got them a base tune, loot us through the process, how you would normally do that.
Right.
Well, usually it starts with giving them the most applicable base tune.
And even if it's not something exactly that we've worked on, there are certain things about a combination that you can use to determine what you may need to change in the tune before you send it to them.
So regardless, once that's established on our end, we send them the tune.
And yeah, from there, I mean, assuming everything hardware checks out and the combination is one that we know should perform, it's pretty simple for guys to put some miles on, record some data with their tuning device, and send that back to us so we can make some changes.
And depending on the combo, obviously.
One guy may be like, hey, this is so close.
I mean, there's not really much room for improvement.
And other guys, it might be a couple iterations back and forth before we get it uh really to the point where we don't want to make any further changes.
But yeah, overall, I mean, it really just consists of riding, recording some data, and sending that over to us.
It's a pretty easy process.
Especially when we have a lot of experience seeing these bikes, because as we're doing that, we're also building and tuning in-house every day.
So we see so much of this stuff, and it's one of those things if your bike does something different than what our bike did or something we see here day in, day out, that's something that we go, okay, literally had that happen just this week.
The intake.
Yeah, plenty of things.
When you work on a bike so many times to deal with a certain combination of parts or send a certain tune out to so many people that works and is consistent, there's only so much that can be different from bike to bike.
So it definitely the experience and having first hand data and work done with certain components and bikes and everything else is really what makes it way easier for us to provide tune support, but also which unfortunately I guess is a huge part of tuning, able to troubleshoot hardware and that sort of thing.
At the end of the day, when you're tuning, especially remotely, it's not really just about being able to understanding what to change in a tune to make a bike run right.
A lot of it really is taking what you can infer from certain data and and telling someone what they may need to look into if there's an issue or you can sugarcoat it and make it how you want, but I can see an exact example of when you're looking at so much data and you see you have certain ways you look at the data, how you interpret it, what you look for, what seems right or wrong.
And that's one attribute that Lucas really has.
Uh, I'm gonna say that part of it is above and beyond what I know is and can do proficiently.
We just had a guy that had a tune-related issue with some parts.
I could hear him talk, and then he asked me, bought some stuff off me, and I said it just doesn't sound right.
Doesn't sound right.
So after going back and forth, back and forth, so finally he tells the guy, like, you really need to check this or check.
So one way or another, either him or his dealer, right?
Yep, they found the issue.
Yeah.
And it was exactly what Lucas thought it was from looking at the data.
End of the day, we're not doing this once or twice or 10 or a dozen times.
It's that a day, the bike, the bummer bikes are right now, this time of year, just in terms of for people you're going back and forth with, maybe doing more than just simply sending a tune and saying, hey, like start with this, whatever, it's a couple hundred unique customers a week.
And if we include every last customer that, you know, just got a new device or just added something to the bike that and purchased or got a new tune from us, whatever it might be.
I mean, it's over a thousand.
I use the term common denominator a lot.
So that's one thing when you have the reach of say a thousand tuning-related customers a week.
There's certain outliers that we can figure out and see just based on the amount of bikes we see and customers work with.
And that is really awesome.
That is something I'll never forget.
When I first started doing this, I had a vision for what it probably could be someday.
And one of the big things is when a cloud-based tuning, the ability for us to be able to work with customers, not you don't even have to email a lot of it, you know, the tunes and such.
Uh, and if I could envision that 25 years ago or more or whatever, that I would never believed it, you know.
Like, but that's awesome.
But I mean, even back then, when we first started, I mean, gangbusters right out of the dig, man.
And you know, 25 years ago when we started, it was a lot of people right then because I was already doing dyno tuning at the dealer and doing all that stuff.
I got my dyno and turned the switch on, and it was it was go.
The remote stuff was always pretty big because we were doing like eBay and then after that website and all that stuff too.
But it was still a lot.
And I remember I had to do all the tuning and all the maps and all the distribution.
Now Lucas does the majority of the electronic side of that, like communications with customers and things where I'm more of the hands-on tuning type and working with the net, but it's really great.
But again, that all has tied into what makes modifying these Harleys so fun and what making them fast.
And don't let the guy on Facebook tell you that is 600 inches faster, you know.
So we'll hope it was a fun podcast.
We enjoy doing it as always.
If you have any questions, comments, whatever, hit us at the post below, and uh, we'll give you back with you soon.
Thank you.
About this episode
Jamie and Lucas debate whether Harley-Davidsons are truly fast and explore the evolution of modifying them. Drawing on their racing backgrounds and high-horsepower street cars, the father-son duo compares older 60-horsepower twins to today's high-performance Milwaukee-Eight engines. They share stories of "Black Betty," their pioneering 2010 Street Glide drag bike, and discuss how professional bagger racing has brought track-ready technology like Brembo brakes and inverted forks to everyday street riders.
Original notes
Are Harleys really fast? The answer depends on what you're comparing them to.
In this episode of the Fuel Throttle Podcast, Jamie and Lucas discuss one of the most common questions in the motorcycle world and why the answer isn't as simple as a horsepower number or quarter-mile time.
Drawing from decades of experience—from road racing and sport bikes to modern Harley-Davidson performance builds—they explore how our definition of "fast" changes over time. The conversation covers the evolution of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, why today's Milwaukee-Eight engines are capable of incredible performance, and what motivates riders to modify their bikes in the first place.
The discussion also compares modern performance baggers to sport bikes, muscle cars, and high-horsepower street cars, putting Harley performance into real-world perspective. Along the way, Jamie and Lucas explain why building a motorcycle isn't always about chasing the biggest dyno number—it's about creating a combination that fits the rider and delivers the experience they're after.
Whether you're new to Harley performance or already planning your next upgrade, this episode offers practical insight into why riders modify their motorcycles and what "fast" really means.
In this episode:
- Is a Harley-Davidson actually a fast motorcycle?
- How our definition of speed changes over time.
- Comparing Harleys to sport bikes and performance cars.
- Why modern Milwaukee-Eight engines have changed expectations.
- Why riders modify their motorcycles beyond horsepower.
- Finding the right performance combination for your riding style.
Fuel Throttle Podcast
Fuel Moto USA
0:00
29:20