MOONSHINE HARLEY-DAVIDSON: HARLEY-DAVIDSON’S PERFORMANCE KINGS

RideNow had Harley dealerships, so Jamie started paying attention to how they were performing. What he saw changed everything.

“Guys were buying their first Harley and they loved it,” he says. “But they were missing performance. I wanted to build these things and make them f*cking monsters.”

He took his race engineering background and started applying it to Harley-Davidsons. What came out the other end looked more like a physics experiment than a motorcycle build.

He started at Orlando Harley-Davidson, working under Steve Deely, and spent the next several years moving between stores, helping them hit number-one rankings for new bike sales.

In 2015, he became a minority partner in a dealership outside Nashville. Two years later, he rebranded it to Moonshine Harley-Davidson. By 2019, he bought it outright. And that brings us to now.

“I have a really sturdy ship,” he tells me in his office, above the sales floor with a bird’s-eye view of Moonshine Harley-Davidson’s day-to-day operations. “And we’re gonna sail when it’s rough outside and we’re gonna sail when it’s calm. We navigate everything that’s thrown at us.”

One of the most impressive parts of that ship is Moonshine Horsepower, the performance and custom-build arm of the dealership.

It’s where the magic happens. Where big-inch motors get transformed into snarling, fire-breathing monsters that somehow still behave like street bikes. Most shops build customs, and many of them do them extremely well.

But the people at Moonshine Harley-Davidson build monsters with manners.

While the industry was still wrapping its head around the M8, Jamie and Mike were already building 128s. Then came the 131s, 135s, 139s.

Today, they’re squeezing out 143-inch pump gas terrors. That kind of power takes more than a wrench and some wishful thinking. It takes science. Precision. And a refusal to settle for anything less than total mastery.

Their secret sauce? They do everything in-house. That includes machining. That includes finishing. Jamie and his team don’t rely on outsourced work or third-party shops. They spec, build, and tune everything under one roof.

And they’re doing it with equipment many folks don’t even know how to pronounce, let alone operate.

Their Rottler machine shop setup includes a CNC hone, a surfacer, and a Trace Boss precision profiler that allows them to map multiple points along a cylinder wall and tune the finish to get the exact crosshatch and ring seal they want.

Just changing the surface finish on a cylinder wall can unlock four to seven more horsepower. Jamie told me he’s witnessed it.

And he showed me the process up close.

They’re not guessing, and they’re definitely not eyeballing. Every detail is measured, refined, and tested. Each build is pushed closer to the edge of what the M8 platform can handle.

According to Jamie, the safe limit for pump gas is around 100 horsepower per cylinder head, or 200 total. That’s the line they ride and the zone they live in.

“We’re building NASCAR-style engines for Harleys,” Jamie says. “They’re not cheap, but they really are the best.”

Their ST Dominator build, for instance, features a stripped-down, murdered-out, carbon fiber-laden beast they call the “CVO RR Killer.”

It puts down 193 horsepower and 168 foot-pounds of torque. Read that again.   It’s not bravado. It’s engineering. It’s science as art.

It’s what would happen if the team at NASA and the Museum of Modern Art got drunk and decided to “hell yeah, brother” things up a notch.

And Jamie? He’s the guy running the experiment. He’s part physicist, part artist, and completely obsessed with getting it right.

While we talked and walked, one thing became crystal clear to me: his vision for what Harley performance can be is so far ahead of the curve that it feels like you’re watching the next chapter of the industry being written in real time.

As if his brain wasn’t already moving fast enough, Jamie’s got the perfect partner in crime: Mike Van Orden, his Service and Operations Manager.

Mike’s an Arizona guy who moved out to Tennessee to work with Jamie after years running his own high-performance shop with his dad.

These days, he runs the dyno at Moonshine Harley-Davidson like an orchestra conductor. He tunes, tests, and signs off on everything. And if something’s not perfect, it doesn’t leave.

In fact, on the day I was there, the first time I saw him, he was deep in a tuning session in their soundproof dyno room.

Jamie took me back there as part of the shop tour, and the second I stepped through the doors, I heard the unmistakable shriek of a wide-open pull.

My favorite part is that Mike had no idea who I was. But at one point, he turned around, saw me peeking through the window, and shot me a huge smile and a wave.

A minute later, he came strolling out, hopped on another customer’s bike for a test ride, and disappeared.

Then he came back, ran another session, and cracked a joke like he hadn’t just been making horsepower on demand.

“We inspect our own work,” Mike tells me later. “It’s our name and reputation on the line, so we want it right.”

They don’t just chase big numbers for the sake of bragging rights. They chase precision. Even on their YouTube channel, you’ll find examples that prove it. Like their 1275 big bore Sportster build, for instance, that put down 96 horsepower and 82 foot-pounds of torque.

For that motor, those numbers are staggering. But that’s the kind of range the team at Moonshine Harley-Davidson plays in, from budget-friendly hop-ups to full-blown, street-legal space rockets.

“We want to be able to accomplish everything someone wants, performance-related,” Jamie says. “Everyday rider or monster build. Doesn’t matter. We’ll make it happen.”