News: Indian Motorcycle take-up the “Cannonball” Challenge

Between the 1910s and 1930s, the legendary Erwin “Cannonball” Baker set 143 driving and riding records. His first in 1914 was to ride a 7 horsepower Indian V-Twin from San Diego to New York, aiming to beat the existing record for coast to coast cross-country travel by motorcycle. He and his beloved Indian Motorcycle did the trip in 11 days which was 9 days faster than the previous record. A newspaper of the time said he was faster than the Cannonball Express Train and the name stuck.

100 years later, Indian Motorcycle’s Robert Pandya took up the challenge to replicate the 11 day journey on a specially modified Indian® Chief® Vintage named Elnora, after Cannonball Baker’s wife. The donor bike was an ex-development motorcycle that had already seen thousands of unforgiving miles of engineering testing. Elnora was stripped, serviced and modified to remove weight. The team fitted a prototype Saddlemen springer seat and stiffened the suspension, off-road protection was added and a one-off high-level exhaust fabricated, as the route features hundreds of miles of gravel roads and some particularly tough sandy sections.

Looking back on the epic challenge Robert commented “Tough to say the best moment overall. Without a doubt my favorite time on the bike was in the dirt and sand. This is NOT an off-road motorcycle. She was never designed for that abuse and the scratches and dents on the skid plate bear that out. I will say that at one point, as we cruised down a graded gravel road, I got chills realizing that I was seeing the same vista as Baker did a century earlier. His ride was nearly impossible to fathom – all dirt and farm roads – riding ON railroad tracks. It’s all stuff you can never do now but I know I saw what he did as I rode the Apache Trail and it was humbling indeed.”