The FTR was already an adventure bike. Indian just never finished it.

On May 14, 1914, Erwin Baker rolled into New York City on an Indian motorcycle, eleven and a half days after leaving San Diego. He had crossed twelve states on anything from dirt roads to railway beds, on a bike suspended by a pair of steel leaf springs. He had planted fuel cans along the route ahead of time because there was nowhere to buy gas. The newspapers called him Cannon Ball.

I named this company to capture the spirit of that journey. Baker looked at an Indian and decided it could cross a continent, then made it happen on a bike that turned out to have more in it than anyone expected.

What Indian built in 2019

A hundred and five years later Indian released the FTR 1200. If you own one you already know what I am about to say.

The FTR was designed as a flat tracker. Underneath the styling is a 1,203 cc V-twin with a flat torque curve, a red trellis chassis that looks like it came out of Bologna, and on the first-generation bike nearly six inches of suspension travel with a 19-inch front wheel. That is not a street bike's travel. That is more than most scramblers, and within reach of the more street oriented adventure bikes.

I bought a 2019 FTR 1200 S because it was one of the best-looking motorcycles I had seen in decades. I rode it into the Pisgah Forest and found out what the chassis could do. It holds a line through the twisties like a sportbike, and it roosts easily off road. Fire roads, two-track, the national forest routes, the backcountry. It was always this bike. It just shipped without the equipment.

The middle that was missing

Go look at what the industry offers a rider who wants to leave pavement with luggage. At one end you get the big adventure bikes, which are enormously capable with massive presence and look like transformers. Every surface is a plastic panel, every panel has a vent, and the whole thing reads as technology with, at best, hints of legacy. Harley's Pan America went after a fresh aesthetic and is exceptionally functional, yet someone on a forum still summed the design up with a southern double-edged euphemism: “Harley built an ADV bike. God bless 'em.” At the other end you get the scramblers, mostly stylishly adapted street bikes without the legs for long-distance travel off road. The Desert Sled and the Triumph 1200XE are the exceptions.

The FTR looks like a scrambler, but with its low center of gravity, big torque and decent suspension travel it performs closer to an ADV bike than you would think. Nobody, including Indian, built the parts to close the gap. The aftermarket ignored it because the installed base is small and the tracker emphasis was the goal. So the bike sat there, half-dressed for the job it had the chops for.

Why I could not leave it alone

I am an architect by training, riding since the 1990s. Year-round commutes into Manhattan on a BMW GS. Rally rides through the Shenandoah forests on a KTM 640 Adventure. Sand and dirt on the North Carolina coast on an XR650R rally conversion. The mystique of the adventure ride has always been with me.

The FTR has some magic in the design. It has a distinctly Italian vibe, a strong American root, and all the requirements of a cult bike. It loves a third-gear pull up a mountain service road. The tank shape and the frame speak to the history of riding rather than the tech of it.

I live with the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Pisgah and DuPont forests, and the BDR routes through North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia as part of my backyard. The FTR has what it takes to explore all of these and go further, but it needs some hardware to make it happen. So I started sketching concepts that would turn this engine and chassis into something more unique than any other ADV bike I could buy, and still hang with the crowd.

What finishing means

Sketching is how an architect or a designer asks questions, and the first question was about the rider and the ergonomics. The FTR dash makes you take your eyes off the road, and the bars, even on the Rally, are too low to stand through fifteen miles of rutted road. So I designed a nav tower to move the dash up and give a Garmin a home, both of them visible while standing, plus bar risers for comfort and control.

After the ergonomics, the next questions are protection and luggage. So I designed a beefy 4.75 mm skid plate, with crash bars in the works. Then a luggage rack, and a frame for panniers. Every part sketched, modeled against the others in Fusion, prototyped, ridden and refined. Made here in Asheville, and ridden on my own FTR through local trails and BDRs.

These parts keep it an FTR and give it the range to really explore. You are not doing Ophir Pass on this bike, and the GS probably is not either. But you can explore hundreds of miles of fire roads and twisties with the wind off your chest and a week of gear on the back.

The FTR is first

The FTR is the first platform for Cannonball. The Ténéré 700, the Transalp and the R 12 G/S are on the bench, and each one is a bike where I think the factory left an opportunity on the table.

If you have an FTR and you have been told to sell it and buy something with a beak, these parts are another answer.

Design