Long before electric motors, American racers were pushing stripped-down bikes to their limits on wooden oval tracks. Meet the ancestors of the Greaser.
In the early years of the twentieth century, before motorcycles became a form of everyday transportation, they were weapons of speed. The board track racing circuits that sprang up across America were unlike anything the world had seen — steeply banked wooden ovals where riders on stripped-down machines screamed past spectators at speeds that terrified and thrilled in equal measure. There were no brakes. There were almost no rules. There was only the machine, the rider, and the board.
These tracks — built from two-by-four planks nailed together in massive banking curves — gave birth to a style of motorcycle design that has never truly been equalled for purity. The bikes were long and low. The tanks swept back in elegant teardrop forms. The engines were exposed, raw, and powerful. Everything that wasn't essential to going fast was stripped away. The result was a silhouette so visually perfect that it has been copied and reimagined by designers for over a hundred years.
The riders themselves became legends. Names like Erwin 'Cannonball' Baker and Lee Humiston were household names in a time when professional sports as we know them barely existed. These were rough men on dangerous machines, and the machines they rode looked as dangerous as they were. The board tracker was the first motorcycle that people didn't just ride — they fell in love with.
By the 1920s, the tracks were beginning to disappear. Rising insurance costs, the increasing danger of the sport, and the shift toward road racing all contributed to the end of an era. But the design language of the board tracker never died. It influenced the café racer movement of the 1950s and 60s. It shaped every custom chopper build that followed. It lives in every bike that prioritizes form as fiercely as it prioritizes function.
When the designers of the Greaser began their work, they didn't look to contemporary electric bike design. They looked back. Further back than most people bother to look. They looked at archive photographs of those wooden ovals. They studied the proportions of the machines that raced on them. They asked a simple question: what made those bikes look the way they did, and how do we capture that in something built for today?
The answer was in the details. The long, swept fuel tank — purely aesthetic on an electric bike, but essential to the silhouette. The teardrop headlight mounted low and forward. The low-slung stance that puts the rider in a commanding position. The absence of excess. Every component on the Greaser serves either a functional purpose or an aesthetic one, and most serve both. Nothing is there just to fill space.
The Bafang motor sits where an engine would on a vintage board tracker — central to the frame, defining its architecture. The Shimano 7-speed gearing gives the rider the same sense of mechanical connection that those early racers had, the feeling of being part of the machine rather than simply operating it. The hydraulic Tektro brakes are the one significant concession to modernity — the original board trackers had none, and riders paid for it.
What the Greaser captures isn't nostalgia for a dangerous era. It's respect for a design tradition that got something profoundly right the first time. The board tracker was perfect because it was honest. The Greaser carries that honesty into a new century — and onto every road, trail, and city block where riders who value form as much as function choose to ride.
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The Greaser
The bike at the heart of this story. Shimano gearing, hydraulic brakes, and a design that turns heads on every street.
Explore the Greaser
