Bert Le Vack, who had been thoroughly depressed by not becoming the first to do 100mph in Britain, on which he had set his heart, had thought of giving up motor-cycle racing altogether, but Billy Wells managed to persuade him to have another crack at the kilometre record. Bert could not understand why his Indian, which he knew to be capable of over 100mph, had failed to respond to his tuning. Then the penny dropped! He had been using austenitic exhaust valves which, because of their high expansion rate, needed larger working clearances than the valves he had previously encountered. Of course! The valves had been sticking in their guides as soon as his motor warmed up, due to his not allowing sufficient clearance! This accounted for the broken cam levers.
On Friday the 29th, Bert Le Vack once again brought out his eight-valve machine, this time with the correct exhaust valve clearances and with its valve operating gear repaired. He straightaway demolished Davidson's record of the previous day with a fs kilometre time of 21 seconds, giving a sizzling average of 106.5mph! Here was the answer to the Harleys' speed claims, but too late to matter unfortunately. Le Vack now had a crack at Davidson's one-way fs 1-mile fs 5-mile and ss 10-mile records and secured these at 99.45, 89.50 and 86. 14mph.
It was fortunate that Bert LeVack did not give up motorcycling altogether after this disappointment, because in 1922 he switched from Indian to a Zenith-JAP 1000cc V-twin after landing a job in the JAP experimental department, and went on to become the greatest British rider-tuner of his era.
Chapter 3 of Peter Hartley's book is entitled "1922 - The resurgence of the British big-twin", and that pretty much sums up the situation from then on. Never again did Indian figure greatly in Brooklands track results. JAP released their famous OHV 1000 v-twin in 1923, and the rest is record-making history.
Indian had just the device to match JAP in the form of the Franklin-designed OHV hillclimb motors made in 1925, but they were made in very small numbers and hardly any ever came to Britain or Europe. If only Indian had developed that hillclimb engine into a streetable OHV 1000 hotrod like the JAP-powered Zeniths or Brough Superiors, instead of wasting all their effort on the Indian Four which was more expensive to manufacture but had less tuning potential? This is another of those "what if's" that make Indian history so fascinating.
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