Sammy Pierce's P-61 American Rocket
(Page 2 of 3)
September/October 2007
By Margie Siegal
The engine assembly was bolted to a skid plate, which was bolted to the frame. The engine could be removed by simply pulling out the skid plate’s cross bolts. Pierce claimed the Rocket’s rubber mounted engine (using modified car engine mounts) was the first practical vibration isolator for a motorcycle ever built. The forks were from an Ariel, and the foot shift assembly was improvised by Pierce using Indian parts. The brakes were Indian, reinforced by Pierce, and the horn was from an Olds 88. “You can blast anyone off the road,” he boasted.
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Two Rockets were built — a show bike that was used for publicity, and a test bike. Machinist Dick Renninger, a friend of Pierce’s, was enlisted to ride the test bike, and Pierce told him to do what he could to make it break down. Renninger cheerfully complied, and improvements resulting from Renninger’s testing were added to the test bike. “Sam never had any plans,” Glenn Pierce, Sammy’s son, says. “He could see what something was going to be before he built it. He never had a blueprint — it was all trial and error.”
Gunning for Indian?
So what was Sammy hoping for with the Rocket? Louis Fisher, the Rocket’s current owner, thinks Sammy was trying to get Indian to buy his design as competition for Harley’s K Model and the British overheads. Or maybe he just wanted to show Indian what could be done with a little R&D. Either way, Indian wasn’t interested, and it’s possible that Sammy didn’t know how badly the company was doing at the time. In the late Forties and early Fifties, Indian was working hard to hide its problems. After a change of ownership, the company had staked its future on a line of lightweights, which were rushed into production without adequate testing. This proved to be a disaster: Indian was taken over by a British organization, Brockhouse, and ceased building bikes in 1953.
Sammy tried to get other investors interested in producing the Rocket, but finally admitted failure. “Father was, at heart, a pragmatist,” Glenn says. “At a certain point he cut his losses. He moved to Merced [Calif.] and got on with his life.” Sammy went on to own several British motorcycle dealerships, selling Triumph, Ariel, Norton and Sunbeam motorcycles. He also had an Indian dealership for a short time, but despite his love of the brand, he sold it to his friend Ed Kretz (winner of the first Daytona 200 in 1937). His last enterprise was American Indian, where he assembled his own “Super Scouts” from NOS parts, adding a bit of his own flair with special body work and performance upgrades. He sold American Indian in 1971 and in his last years Sammy was the curator of Steve McQueen’s extensive motorcycle collection. He died March 27, 1982, shortly after McQueen died from cancer.