From the start, Victory has been a performance-focused brand. Sure, there has been gorgeous styling, comfortable touring features, and copious cargo space. But for 15 years outstanding power has also been built into every single Victory motorcycle – and will be forever.

One of the top priorities in the development of the first Victory motorcycle was to infuse the bike with a powerful, reliable engine. A noble goal, but also an immense challenge. While motorcycles can seem like relatively simple vehicles, it’s neither simple nor easy to develop a new engine from scratch.

Victory’s original engineering team devoted countless hours to engine development. From the start, they planned to utilize modern technology. The Victory engine would have overhead cams, not push rods. It would use electronic fuel injection (EFI) for efficient and reliable fuel delivery, and it would be counterbalanced so Victory engineers could control how much vibration the engine transmitted.

In the mid- to late-1990s, Victory engineering was housed in a Polaris facility in Osceola, Wisconsin. The building was located at the edge of the small town, near woods and open fields. On the outside, it was country quiet and peaceful.

Inside the building, though, there was an almost palpable sense of tension, pressure and determination. The Victory team was absolutely committed to building an engine that met their lofty performance standards, but as noted, that isn’t easy.

Here, from a 1998 book about Victory*, is an account of a pivotal point in the development of the original Victory test engine. That engine was nicknamed “The Hammer,” which would become a Victory model name starting in 2005.


The Hammer
It was the summer of 1996, and the clock was ticking. The deadline for the Victory team to build and test its first engine was approaching. Parts were coming in from vendors, including the all-important cylinder heads, but the crankcases were running late and wouldn’t arrive for another month. That was too long to wait, according to Mark Bader, who was in charge of engine design.

“Instead of delaying the start-up of the engine, we came up with the idea of creating a simplified engine: no transmission, just the crankshaft, balance shaft, oil pump, and the output shaft. We quickly designed up a very simple crankcase and got a CNC house to start hogging out big old chunks of aluminum.”

The test engine with the massive lower end received a powerful nickname: The Hammer.

“The crankcase started out as a 350-pound block of aluminum and it ended up weighing 30 pounds, so you figure out how many chips we ended up with,” Bader said. “A lot of beer cans that died for those cases.”

Walls that would be 5mm thick on a production casting were as much as 20mm thick in the Hammer’s cases. “You could light a bomb off inside of these things and not get hurt,” Bader said.

The Victory staff worked long hours assembling the Hammer engine – as well as preparing the brand-new engine dyno. There were struggles with the engine, the dyno, and the mating of the two prior to that hoped-for first start-up. Several 14-hour-plus days later, the crew finally believed the big day had arrived.

“I think we were zombies by that point,” Bader said. “Mike Ball was turning the key and I was in the dyno cell; I think it was me and Roger [Peterson] standing in there. Roger turned to me and said, ‘Man, I’m as nervous as when my kids were born.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but when your kids were born, there wasn’t the chance that they’d blow up and kill you.’”

The first time Ball tried starting the engine, it didn’t fire. The team checked for spark and for fuel, and determined that the injection system had to be purged so the fuel reached the injectors.

At 5:45 p.m. on Friday, September 6, 1996, Ball tried the starter again and the Hammer roared to life.

“It fired right up and I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house,” Bader said. “There were high fives and clapping and cheering. Probably what made it more emotional than it was, was that we were so doggone tired. It was an awesome feeling standing there. People were just dumbfounded.”

… It was a milestone, but one that came early on what the team called “The Road to Victory.” The bike was far, far from finished, but what a thrilling step they had taken that fall Friday.


That was in 1996, so it’s actually been more than 15 years that Victory has been building outstanding, powerful engines. The power unleashed by that original development engine lives on in Victory engines on the road today.

* Excerpted from “The Victory Motorcycle: The Making of a New American Motorcycle,” by Michael Dapper and Lee Klancher, scheduled for reprinting this year by Octane Press.



This is a Polaroid photo taken inside the Osceola facility during engine development in 1996. Visible through the doorway are Victory team members gathered around the engine dyno and awaiting the first test firing of “The Hammer.”


This Polaroid shows the Victory team members gathered around the engine dyno just before “The Hammer” was started for the first time.


The photo on a page from the Victory book shows the engine development team working on “The Hammer” in the engine dyno room.


This is a late-1990s photo of “The Hammer” test engine.


The original test engine, “The Hammer,” is now on display in the Osceola, Wisconsin, facility.