Hayden Gillim punched the clock first at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, and the rest of the King of the Baggers field is chasing. Friday's practice session for the MotoAmerica Mission King of the Baggers round set the tone — fast Indians up front, factory Harleys hunting — and if you've been watching this series grind through 2026, you already know every tenth of a second in that practice order matters by Sunday afternoon.
The Practice Order and What It Tells You
Gillim topped the session for the J&P Cycles/Motul/Vance & Hines Factory Indian squad. Teammate Troy Herfoss slotted into second, which means the factory Indian camp locked out the top two positions heading into qualifying. That's not an accident — that's a program with dialed suspension, sorted fueling and an exhaust note that sounds like it means business.
Behind the Indian contingent, Harley-Davidson x Dynojet Factory Racing's Kyle Wyman grabbed third. Wyman has been a consistent threat all season, and a top-three practice showing at a technical, high-speed circuit like Mid-Ohio keeps him right in the mix. James Rispoli was fourth for Big Diehl x Harley-Davidson Factory Racing, and Rocco Landers — the third J&P/Vance & Hines rider — rounded out the top five.
Three Indian Challengers in the top five, two Milwaukee Eight-powered Harleys. That spread tells you the competitive window between the two platforms is real but not insurmountable, and it also tells you that rider skill and machine setup at this specific track are doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
Why Mid-Ohio Is a Legit Bagger Test
Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course isn't a power circuit you can muscle through. It's 2.258 miles of technical elevation changes, decreasing-radius corners and a layout that punishes late braking and rewards corner-exit drive. For a 900-pound touring bike, that means suspension tuning is everything — you need compliance over the undulation but firmness on the brakes, and your rear has to put the power down without stepping out on the exits.
The bagger suspension upgrade you run on the street is not what these factory teams bolt onto their race bikes. But the engineering logic is identical: progressive spring rates, proper damping curves and geometry that keeps the contact patch loaded when it counts. If your street Road Glide or Street Glide is wallowing through corners, you're leaving speed on the table — and the factory race effort proves what properly sorted suspension can do.
Braking into Mid-Ohio's Turn Four and the Keyhole demands serious stopping power from heavy machines, which is why the factory teams obsess over performance brake upgrades. Upgraded rotors and pads give you the bite you need to carry deep entry speed without a white-knuckle moment.
The Vance & Hines Exhaust Advantage
You don't put Vance & Hines on the side of a factory race effort because they make nice-looking pipes. You put them there because they make power. The factory Indian team has run Vance & Hines exhaust through multiple seasons of King of the Baggers, and the results on the timing sheets back up what the dyno shows: proper exhaust flow, correct back pressure and scavenging characteristics that pull torque through the midrange — exactly where a bagger races.
On your own bike, upgrading your exhaust is one of the highest-return modifications you can make. A Vance & Hines exhaust system paired with a matching performance air cleaner opens the engine to breathe properly. From there, you're in a position to actually tune — and tuning without proper intake and exhaust is chasing your tail.
The Vance & Hines program at the factory level runs full systems — headers, collectors, mufflers — optimized for the specific displacement and cam profile in the Indian PowerPlus or the Milwaukee Eight. When you replicate that logic on your street build, you're pulling from the same engineering playbook the fastest baggers in professional racing use every weekend.
Fueling, Tuning and the Dynojet Connection
Notice the Dynojet name on Kyle Wyman's factory Harley? That's not a coincidence. Dynojet's Power Vision tuner platform is the backbone of serious Milwaukee Eight builds because it closes the loop between your hardware modifications and your engine's fueling map. Bolt on an exhaust and an air cleaner without retuning and you've created a lean condition — possibly a dangerous one at high RPM. Bolt them on and tune properly, and you've unlocked what those parts were designed to deliver.
A fuel tuner or power commander is non-negotiable on any performance build. It doesn't matter whether you're running a basic slip-on swap or a full cam, exhaust and head package — the factory fuel map is not calibrated for your modifications. The factory race teams prove this every session: they're not just throwing parts at these bikes, they're managing combustion events with precision.
For Milwaukee Eight builds specifically, getting on a dyno with a qualified tuner and a Power Vision tuner separates riders who have fast parts from riders who have a fast bike.
What the Factory Cam Packages Tell Us About Street Builds
King of the Baggers machines don't run stock camshafts. The factory teams choose cam profiles specifically to move the torque curve into a usable RPM band for a bike that races at speeds a touring machine was never designed to sustain. Lift, duration and lobe separation angle — those three variables determine where your power lives, and on a heavyweight bagger, you want torque delivered early and sustained through the midrange rather than peaking at a high RPM the chassis can barely manage.
Dropping in a Milwaukee Eight performance cam is one of the highest-leverage internal modifications available for touring riders. Paired with a quality rocker box upgrade to handle the added valvetrain stress, a cam swap transforms how your Road Glide or Street Glide delivers power — not just at the strip but in every corner, on every on-ramp, every time you roll the throttle out of a tight turn.
The race teams understand that displacement alone doesn't win races. The Indian PowerPlus and the Milwaukee Eight 117 and 131 are big, torque-rich engines — but cam selection, cylinder head flow and proper fueling determine whether those engines run like champions or like stock tourers.
Landers, Rispoli and the Depth of the Field
Rocco Landers in fifth is a name worth watching. Landers came up through MotoAmerica's junior ranks and has been progressively faster in the bagger class. The depth in the top five — three factory Indian riders plus two factory Harley riders — reflects how seriously the manufacturers have committed to this series, and that commitment filters down into the parts and engineering that eventually reach street builds.
Rispoli's fourth in practice for Big Diehl x Harley-Davidson demonstrates that the Milwaukee Eight platform, when properly developed, remains fully competitive with the Indian V-twin. The gap between a stock touring machine and a race-prepped one is enormous — but the gap between a properly built street bagger and a commuter-spec machine is nearly as large, and you don't need a factory budget to close it.
Cornering clearance, suspension response, throttle control and braking confidence — all of those translate directly to how much you enjoy your bike on a canyon road or a spirited highway run. The race series is the proof-of-concept. Your build is the execution.
Build Your Bagger for What Happens on Sunday
Gillim topped practice. Qualifying and race day will tell the full story at Mid-Ohio, but Friday's session confirms what the 2026 season has been showing all year: the King of the Baggers field is tighter, faster and better engineered than ever. Factory teams are wringing every tenth out of bikes that started as premium touring machines, and the hardware driving those results — exhaust systems, suspension components, fuel management, cam packages — is available for your build.
If the Mid-Ohio session lit a fire under you, the place to start is the same place the factory teams start: exhaust flow, fueling and suspension. From there, you go deeper into the valvetrain and the top end. Every step of that process has a corresponding product on our shelves.
Shop our Vance & Hines exhaust systems and bagger suspension upgrades at vtwinbikers.com and start building the machine the King of the Baggers field proves is possible.