Triumph Street Triple

Born of thoroughbred stock, the new Street Triple offers the heart of the thrilling Daytona 675 and the soul of the lawless Speed Triple

Some motorcycles need long, flowery introductions to ease into an amusing, anecdote filled report on its ability. The new Triumph Street Triple is no such machine, for to waste words on setting dramatic scenes or carefully constructed stories would be doing the most exciting bike of 2007 a huge injustice. I’m sorry to ruin the end of this tale, but after one of the best day’s riding I’ll ever have I can’t keep you in suspense as to the Street Triple’s talents until my fi nal paragraph. Too often we talk about naked middleweight machines as being dumbed down and stripped bare. The recipe is simple enough, but the execution of it is hard to master. Some bikes end up being too revvy and unsuitable for their new application, while other bikes finish up as dreary, soulless shadows of their former selves. But once in a generation a bike comes along and blows every preconceived notion about the class into smithereens.

And that bike is the Street Triple. With the heritage of the Speed Triple as one
parent and the dynamism of the Daytona 675 as the other, the Street Triple always had the potential to be a wild child. It’s like having a rockstar dad and a swimsuit model mother. And so it came to pass...Launched on the shores of Lake Garda, and using roads that the renowned Trento-Bondone hill climb route scorches up, the test for this naked machine couldn’t have been sterner. Any corner cutting, so obvious in this class, would be cruelly exposed through a route whose corners ranged in speed for 20mph to 120mph. Its unadjustable suspension would feel mushy and imprecise, its cheap two-piston sliding brake clippers would fade and capitulate and its revised engine would wheeze meekly at altitudes that reached 1,700 metres
surely? On other machines maybe, but not the Street Triple. The day started
brilliantly with Lake Garda disappearing in the rear-view mirrors. The lake wasn’t replaced by more stunning scenery, but rather with Tarmac as the fi rst of what felt
like a hundred wheelies was executed out of the swish Italian resort. My wheelies are normally unspectacular in both height and length, but the bike loaned me talent for the rest of the day. But stunts would have to wait as almost immediately into the
120km ride the route took us up a blissful ribbon of road into the stunning Dolomites scenery. The surface was unusually good for an Italian road, but the challenge was anything but easy – and this is where the Street Triple’s Daytona 675 DNA comes into its own. The 675 is an amazingly lithe and exact bike, classleading
in fact, and given that the Street Triple shares almost everything of the 675’s chassis it comes as no surprise that the Triple made light work of this harsh terrain. I had coffee and croissants for breakfast. The Street Triple had this tortuous strada. Even if Triumph had lavished the Triple with the same adjustable
suspension as the 675, I wouldn’t have touched a thing on this bike. And the unadjustable suspension (except for preload on the rear) seemed to offer easy compliance to a wide range of shapes and sizes with the rear Dunlop Qualifi er tyre being the first to buckle. Sublime stoppers Quick to turn, especially with the wider bars, the Triple offers amazing feedback and precision through a huge range of
corners. Feeling solid and stable in quick turns, but responsive and easysteering
through slower ones, the Street Triple breeds confi dence like a contagious infection – and within a few corners you’ll be the next victim of this horrendously fun disease. But those cheap, nasty brakes were nagging away at me. But what better
way to test them than to charge up to a dozen hairpin bends at anything up to 100mph and then shed 80mph in as shorter time as you dare. That’ll show Triumph up to be
the corner cutters that they are, surely? Well, no actually. The brakes are amazing. Yes, the two piston Nissin sliding calipers work as well in this context as the 675’s
do on the race track. Friendly, but ultimately forceful, they suit the bike to a tee.
OK, so Triumph has got the chassis and suspension spot-on, they’ve sorted the brakes
too. Surely they’ve messed up the engine, detuning the soul from the Daytona 675? Not
a bit of it. The engine has been worked on, but nothing like to the extent it would take to mess with the 675’s amazing triple confi guration delivery. Revisions, small that they are, come in the form of a revised camshaft that reduces cam lift slightly
and new pistons that are better suited to the slightly lower revving engine. In fact, the motor is actually stronger to 9,000rpm than the 675 – just where you want a naked bike to excel – and it’s hardly shy above this, pumping out a (claimed) hugely satisfying 107bhp at nearly 12,000rpm and offering crisp, clean delivery on
every throttle opening. What this translates to on the road is a fl exible motor that offers response in almost every gear in almost every situation – whether it be pulling in third out of a hairpin bend and still keeping in touch with other hell-bent riders or riding the bike on the redline. Cost effective So far the linage of the Daytona 675 is clear. Borrowing the frame and the engine, this is bound to be the case, but the legacy of the Speed Triple, beyond that of its looks, is never far away. And that legacy is a very naughty one indeed. Yes, as well as doing a great impression of a utilitarian machine for the masses, suitable for novices and experts
alike, the Street Triple can turn a green stunter into an expert in the space of a
day. As Triumph’s product manager, Simon Warburton puts it, “We anticipate it getting abuse.” The Street Triple makes its Speed Triple brother feel like a lardy old bus as it wheelies with ease from the fi rst two gears, before turning you into a stoppie-meister in the space of a few passes. But even this isn’t the best thing about the Street Triple. No, the fact that it is 10 800 $ (£5,350) is the best thing about it. I can’t see how Triumph has done it for the money – and even Triumph’s bean counters are wondering how they let this one through the books. Margins on the Street Triple are low for everyone – the factory, importers and dealers – so Triumph are hoping that volume will make fi ll the potential black hole where profit once was. And if there’s any justice in the world the Street Triple will sell by the thousands because I can see no better way to commute, scratch or stunt than this.