1938 Indian Arrow Streamliner
The 1938 Indian Arrow streamliner was Hap Alzina's all-in answer to Harley-Davidson's beach-speed publicity. It was a fully enclosed, one-off Indian land-speed machine built around prewar racing parts, aircraft-style bodywork, and just enough optimism to send Fred Ludlow across the salt inside something that looked more like an aluminum egg than a motorcycle.
Harley's 1937 Record and Indian's Answer
In 1937, Harley-Davidson set a land speed record of 136.183 miles per hour at Daytona Beach. Joe Petrali made that run on a partially streamlined Knucklehead, and the number did not go unnoticed by Indian. Harley had proven that clean bodywork could turn a big American V-twin into a record-setting publicity machine.
That brand rivalry had older racing roots, from board tracks and dirt ovals to big road-race publicity at Dodge City. By 1938, though, the cleanest number was not a race finish. It was a speed record.
Indian's answer was more extreme. Instead of adding partial streamlining to a motorcycle that still looked mostly like a motorcycle, Hap Alzina's Oakland-based Indian operation built a body that swallowed the bike and rider completely. In the prewar vintage racing world, where board tracks, dirt tracks, speedway specials, and beach records all overlapped, the Arrow was one of the strangest American attempts to beat the air itself.
Hap Alzina and the Arrow Project
Hap Alzina was more than a dealer with a fast idea. He was a West Coast Indian distributor and former racer, the kind of man who understood both sales publicity and race-shop improvisation. Later accounts credit his sales manager Bill Meyer, a man with aircraft experience, with the streamliner shape, and mechanic Pete Anderson with much of the body construction.
The Arrow was not a normal factory production racer. It was a cobbled-together special built from useful Indian pieces and racing hardware. Alzina used parts commonly attributed to a Scout 101 board-track racer and a 61 cubic inch motor. Other histories describe a mixed Indian chassis with earlier Indian forks, a cut-down rigid frame, and Sport Scout-related pieces. Either way, the point was the same: build something low, narrow, and fast enough to put Indian back ahead of Harley-Davidson on a speed chart.
That same 1930s race-shop thinking also showed up in other specialized American racing machines, including Harley-Davidson's own short-track and speedway experiments. The Arrow was different because it was not built for a cinder track or a closed course. It was built for a straight shot across a dry lake or salt flat, where aerodynamics mattered as much as horsepower.
Building the Enclosed Streamliner
The Arrow's body was built in two halves that bolted around the motorcycle. It has been described as a framework of steel tubing and aircraft-grade spruce, covered with plywood and linen. Other accounts describe balsa or plywood stringers, light bulkheads, and hand-formed aluminum skin. Taken together, those descriptions point to the same general approach: aircraft-style lightweight construction adapted to a racing motorcycle by people who were learning as they went.
It was probably light and strong for what it was, but the rider's view of the engineering would have been less comforting. A full enclosure made aerodynamic sense, yet it also meant Ludlow was sealed inside a thin shell with very little room, limited ventilation, and no easy way out without help. The old joke about death by splinters still fits. So does the comparison to the plastic eggs that show up in stores around Easter. The body was a two-piece shell, and it is hard not to picture the rider hatching from it after a run.
The body shape was the real experiment. It enclosed the wheels and rider, reduced frontal area, and tapered toward the rear. Some accounts mention small support or skid wheels for low-speed handling and small tail fins that were tried for stability. None of that made the Arrow a solved aerodynamic problem. Alzina's crew did not have a modern wind tunnel program, computer simulation, or decades of motorcycle streamliner experience behind them. They had a bold shape, a fast engine, and the salt.
Fred Ludlow Takes the Controls
The rider looked forward through a small porthole set into the center of the body. That detail says a lot about the Arrow. It was not a motorcycle with a fairing; it was a body with a motorcycle hidden inside it. Normal sightlines, normal rider movement, and normal emergency reactions were all compromised in the name of streamlining.
Fred Ludlow was chosen to ride it. Ludlow had started racing on the board tracks in the 1910s with Indian, then switched to the Harley-Davidson racing team after World War I. By the time of the Arrow project he was 43 years old, a veteran with the experience and nerve to try a machine that younger riders might have looked at twice before climbing inside.
The engine details are reported a few different ways, but the Arrow is generally tied to a 61 cubic inch Indian racing motor. Later accounts identify it as an A-61 overhead-valve Indian V-twin connected to earlier Indian record work and tuned by Red Fenwick. Output estimates vary, and the exact specification should be treated carefully, but the goal was clear: combine serious Indian racing power with the smallest practical hole through the air.
Muroc Testing and Bonneville Trouble
Initial testing took place at Muroc Dry Lake in California. The Arrow proved roadworthy enough to justify taking it to the Bonneville Salt Flats, but the testing also showed how narrow the safety margin was. Later accounts say one Muroc shakedown hurt the engine at around 100 mph before it was repaired. That kind of problem was serious, but it was still ordinary racing trouble compared with what happened when the streamliner body started to misbehave at higher speed.
On its first day on the salt, the Arrow blew a tire during its second run. The crew repaired it overnight and came back for another attempt. This time the motorcycle reached about 135 miles per hour before it went into a high-speed wobble. That was painfully close to Petrali's 136.183 mph Harley-Davidson record, but close was not enough. A land-speed record needed a controlled, official result, not just a frightening number on the way to a handling problem.
Adjustments were made and the Arrow went back out again. Some accounts describe the team removing small rear fins while trying to cure the wobble. On the next serious attempt, Ludlow reportedly saw roughly 145 mph before the machine went into a violent tank-slap. The wobble was so severe that he lost hold of the handlebars. At that point the Arrow had stopped being an engineering gamble and had become a likely fatality waiting for one more run.
Why the Arrow Was Parked
After that fourth unsuccessful run, Alzina made the only sensible decision and sidelined the Arrow. The motorcycle had shown speed, but it had not shown stability. It had blown a tire, wobbled near record pace, and then gone into a violent oscillation at a reported speed above the Harley record. A fully enclosed streamliner that would not track straight was not a record machine. It was a trap.
The Bonneville trip was not a complete loss for Indian. Ludlow also made successful Class C record runs on more conventional Indian machines, including a stripped Scout and Chief. Those runs gave Indian usable racing publicity without asking a rider to climb back into the Arrow. The enclosed streamliner, meanwhile, was never raced again.
What Happened to the Arrow After Bonneville
The Arrow survived because it was parked rather than destroyed. It remained with Alzina for decades before moving into William F. Harrah's collection in the 1970s. Harrah's collection preserved many unusual motorcycles and automobiles, and the Arrow was exactly the kind of oddball record-attempt machine that could have disappeared if it had stayed in ordinary storage.
By the early 2000s, the Arrow had appeared in the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame's Indian centennial exhibit, often referred to as the "Century of Indian" display. Later descriptions indicate that the machine was preserved as a museum piece rather than revived as a running racer. That seems fitting. The Arrow's value is not in an official record it never earned, but in what it shows about the prewar chase for speed: dealer ambition, brand rivalry, aircraft thinking, Indian racing hardware, and one veteran rider looking through a porthole at the salt ahead.
The Indian Arrow did not beat Joe Petrali's Harley-Davidson record, and that failure is part of why the story still works. It was close enough to be fascinating and unstable enough to be terrifying. In a period when American motorcycle racing was still willing to try almost anything once, Hap Alzina's enclosed Indian streamliner stands as one of the boldest machines to reach Bonneville and one of the smartest to be parked before it killed someone.