Posts Tagged ‘Triumph’
Something for the Weekend
Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Triumph TR7
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Now, call us old fashioned, but could it be that the Triumph TR7 was the ugliest automotive creation of these islands? It’s not a particularly rare point of view – legend has it that when the Harris Mann penned design was first shown at the British leyland design meeting way back in the depths of three-day-week, recession wracked Britain of the early 1970s, it was thought to be a spoof. His other design had been, of course, The truly pug-ugly Austin Princess.
The potential for the car was great. Billed as ‘the shape of things to come’ at the time, the angular wedge was driven by a more or less the same two litre engine that appeared in the much loved Leyland stalwart the Dolomite Sprint. What’s more an iconic wedge-haired Joanna Lumley drove one in popular seventies action series The New Avengers (notice the synergy of ‘wedge’). Whatever you think of the design now, the TR7’s rakish modernism must have looked refreshing on the stolid streets of seventies Britain. It sold pretty well in the UK, and was a sales phenomenon in the US.
History, though, hasn’t been kind to its looks.
But in fact, we think you’ll agree that from the perspective of this angle achieved for an ad campaign, that the (Michelotti designed) convertible version actually looked kind of attractive from the raised three quarter.
Or could it be that the true genius of the campaign in question is the placement of the lingerie-clad lady on its wing?
Top Ten Cult Classics
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010BMW HP2 Megamoto
Why? One of the first signs that BMW had loosened its tie and started drinking in the morning. Powered by a highly tuned version of the fuel-injected, 1170cc, 8-valve Boxer engine, it is the most playful BMW ever built. Well, I say playful, playful like sporting a lamb chop waistcoat and having a game of ‘Hide and Seek’ with a grizzly bear.
+ It is a BMW the Batman would ride
– Short tank range. Loves expensive petrol
Suzuki GSX1100EFE
Why? It’s a dumb as a rock-chewing dog but it’s unlikely there’s been a sturdier motorcycle ever built. JCB could paint one yellow and use it in quarries. The engine is predecessor of the mighty GSX-R1100, but this bike has no fussy fairing to complicate or beautify. Cormac McCarthy’s Road will be patrolled by GSX1100s.
+ Simple, brutal and tougher than a herring gull
– Most have been turned into hideous drag bikes
Bimota SB2
Why? From the days when a tiny Italian firm, more used to making industrial heating and ventilation ducts, created the most advanced road bike the world had ever seen. Motive power is supplied by a tuned Suzuki GS750 motor. It’s also Massimo ‘916’ Tamburini’s first masterpiece.
+ The frame unbolts and splits in two for engine removal.
– Only 140 were ever built
Triumph Speed Triple T309
Why? The very first Hinckley Triumphs didn’t set the blood pumping. Reliable. Bulletproof. British. Yes, yes, yes, but a bit briar pipe for a 20-year-old. Until 1994’s Speed Triple T309. It’s a high watermark in motorcycle minimalism. Subsequent Speed Triples have all been technically better but didn’t capture the imagination in the same way.
+ Built to last. And British.
– It’s a pensioner magnet. ‘I used to ‘ave a Triumph…’
Penton 125 Six Day
Why? There’s something about these early-1970s dirt bikes that is just so right. The metal tank, yellow number boards, tiny drum brake and radial-fin heads. Of course, I could’ve chosen a Husqvarna 400, but this tiddler is close to perfect. These early bikes were produced by KTM for American company set up by enduro rider John Penton.
+ Weighs the same as loaf of bread, but climbs like an ibex
– A modern washing machine has more torque
Honda ST70 Dax
Why? Yes, its cousin, the C90, is the best-seller of all-time, but the Dax has fold-up bars so you can easily more store it on your yacht. What do you mean you haven’t got a yacht? You’ve got a Dax though, right?
+ Named Dax due to its similarity to the dachshund
– Doesn’t come with a free yacht.
Suzuki GSX-R1000 K5
Why? Every now and then the Japanese build a bike that so stunning lorry drivers stop owners and demand to lick their headlights. But, due to their relentless new product timescales the Japanese forced on the market, replace it in two years, and chuck away what made it so gorgeous. Yamaha did it with the R1 of ’02, and Suzuki did just the same in 2005.
+ The ultimate disposable Japanese hyperbike
- Blue and white can clash with your leathers
Scott TT Replica
Why? Between-the-wars, two-stroke racer for the road. The earlier Flying Squirrel is more famous, but the TT is the one I’d have. Long-stroke engine, fishtail exhausts and sturdy Scott front forks. And it’s liquid-cooled. The Japanese didn’t get to grips with that until the 1970s.
+ Pokey, even 70 years later
- Not named after a gliding rodent
Wood Yamaha YZ450
Why? A pure competition bike made in small numbers in Costa Mesa, California. This chro-mo framed beauty is built to compete in dirt track races on the short ovals of the Mid-West. It is as pared-down as an HB pencil. Everything fit perfectly, and has a purpose. It is the purest distilled essence of a racing motorcycle on the planet.
+ Absolute minimalism
- Not much good for touring the Alps
Indian Scout
Why? Like the majority of, but not all, the bikes in the list it was built to last. They left the factory a few years after The Great War and some, still 90% original, are still earning their keep on the various Walls of Death around the world. The other reason I love them is for their left-hand throttle, swapped to allow Patrolman to ride and shoot at the same time.
+ The tooled-up vigilante’s ideal ride.
- Unless the bad guys are in anything faster than an Austin 7
Steve McQueen: The Power of Style
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010The blogosphere is awash with paens to Steve McQueen as an icon of cool. Why is Steve McQueen such an important figurehead for (mostly) blokes who like cars and motorbikes. It can’t be just about how good he looked, can it?
His was a hard life. You’ve probably heard all about it before. The absent father. The Alcoholic mother. He suffered struggles in education and run-ins with violent street gangs. He spent his youth hanging out with a coterie of whores, oilmen, lumberjacks and circus performers before landing himself a gig in the Korean-war era US Marine Corps. In a prescient echo of his performance in The Great Escape, he spent time in the brig for going AWOL, before stepping up to the plate and embracing the life of a military man and eventually distinguishing himself.
The 20 year old McQueen was honourably discharged from the Marine Corps in 1950 and straight away began to study acting in New York. At the weekends he would race motorbikes – and according to various sources he was so successful that he was able to live off the prize money to fund his drama training.
It wasn’t until 1957, however, that landed his big break playing a tough, taciturn bounty hunter in a network series called Wanted: Dead or Alive. He went on to make his name for brilliantly studied performances – often playing marginal mavericks who managed to see to the heart of a situation – and, crucially – were able to act on that intuition to a certain blend of stylish triumph.
Throughout the sixties McQueen came to exemplify the complex and contradictory vision of manhood than many men share: one where the dark and the light co-exist and complement each other. An essence of the characters he played – from the steely PI in Bullitt to the American GT usurper in Le Mans and everything in between, shone through to his daily life.
“Racing is life. Everything else is just waiting…” When McQueen spoke those words in the trailer of Le Mans, you could tell the man really meant it, and similarly, when he was quoted by a journalist as saying “I live for myself, I don’t answer to anyone” there was a self-evident truth in the utterence.
From today’s perspective, such uncompromising candor coming from a major Hollywood star is hard to envisage.
Taking this reality to heart, it’s hardly surprising that the fashion industry has taken great note of the outfits he casually wore and have sold his image back to us time and again. Take a close look at these pics and ask yourself if you’ve never wanted to step into Steve McQueen’s shoes.
Anyone who has ever dreamt of the freedom glimpsed behind the wheel at speed can recognise the reality that lay beneath this apparently styled surface.
Images via Life Archive & Luther Blissett
The Cooling of the Classics
Friday, July 10th, 2009A TONGUE-TIP TASTE OF CLASSIC BIKING: SAN FRANCISCO STYLE
“The thing is with modern bikes, is they’ve got no soul.” Rob, proprietor of the Ace Café in San Francisco’s Mission district, presides over one of the hubs of neo classicism of San Francisco’s biker community. “There’s nothing like a bit of English Iron to get the adrenalin going…” he laughs.
Rob is a twenty five year émigré from Liverpool who cherishes his accent as much as he does his hard won beer and wine license from the city of San Francisco. As he tells me this, he puts another beer down on the bar as another pod of black leather and denim-clad young bucks with sculpted features and a Friday vibe stream into the Ace.
On the walls are a series of homages to classic bike scenarios, Manx vistas, racer portraits, retro oil ads and admonitions to the young and the reckless in the shape of back-to-back loops of On Any Sunday. “ Sure I’ve ridden Jap bikes, owned tons of them. But I keep going back to British machines, as well as the odd Italian. They’ve got something more to them than loads of revs and loads of technology.”
And Rob and the crew at the Ace are just part of a huge movement toward classic European bikes here in San Francisco. But the hipster capital of the world, ubiquitously wired, post ironic and self styled capital of the American left field, is at the vanguard of a global phenomenon that has as much to do with disillusionment as it has to do with a regeneration of fashion sensibility.
Tony is a salesmen at Munroe Motors, on Valencia Street in the Mission, just round the corner from the Ace. “It’s unbelievable how popular Ducatis and Triumphs are becoming these days, “ he tells me as the slanted Californian light glints beautifully off the acreage of European steel lined up deliciously in the Munroe shopfront. “I think that it’s because people realise now that bikes are not only brilliant value and are relatively environmentally friendly, that European they are more craft-oriented and mechanically accessible than super high-tech bikes from Japan.”
But underlying this trend toward getting back to mechanical integrity is an undercurrent of romance, an aesthetic rejection of all things electronic and over-designed. “As soon as I got on a Ducati I knew I’d never go back” Crash tells me. The worryingly monikered twenty eight year old graphic designer (who is also a bike riding instructor part time), and tells me of the beauty of his Ducati Classic Sport S (above).
In a sense the return to the classic in Biking in San Francisco is a nod to the general zeitgeist. While bikers will always be petrolheads at heart, jump on a classically proportioned machine with passionate design and minimalist electronics and you’ll evoke a simpler, less guilt ridden time when getting from A-to B was not only about having as much fun as possible, but was also about hand wrought, hard won expertise. In San Francisco biking parlance, Classic means European, and European means style. In San Francisco, the classics have been well and truly cooled. And what happens in USA happens soon amongst the Eurotrash. Watch this space. And fire up that Triumph.
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The Cult of the Café Racer
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
Ok, I know. A true café racer shouldn’t have anything as pretentious as a French accent anywhere near it. And alright, I know as well that at least the engine on a true ‘Caff’ racer should have been milled in the greasy environs of the West Midlands. But there was something about this image of a German man on his caffed up Honda CB500, liberated from a US-based enthusiasts’ site , that summed up what my idea of a customised street racer out of the classic mould should be.
The whole idea of a café racer, of course, comes from the fifties, when greasers lathered up into a frenzy by Gene Vincent records from a transport café’s jukebox, would race from roundabout to roundabout for kicks. The obvious need to stay clear of alcoholic beverages meaning that a nice cuppa char served in your average transport café by the side of a British A-road was much more conducive as a meeting point than a local hostelry.
The classic café racer was a bike that had been modded for quickness surf-footedness — fifties and sixties examples aped the homologated road racers of the time. Long, flat stripped or chrome fuel tanks and small, one man seat right at the back of the frame were the most visible leitmotifs, along with dropped, ‘clip-on’ handlebars. The definitive machine in the early years was a hybridised beauty that was the progeny of a Norton frame and Triumph engined machine called “The Triton” (Triumph and Norton, geddit?).
The café racer cult has since the days when they were simply stripped-down mods, become a scene in itself, and acolytes of the scene fetishise all that is utilitarian – even though it is often filtered through the lens of youth cult and the fashion business. Whatever the roots and the rhymes and the reasons, there’s something about the classic set up that brings us out in the need for English iron and unadulterated grease.
Stay tuned for a fleshed out feature on our favourite sort of motorbike.
