Cycle News

TRIUMPH MOTO2 PROTOT YPE FIRST TEST P84 glorious, haunting howl from the Arrow pipe that's devoid of any silencing. I'm fortunate to have ridden several classic MV triples, as well as the Chaz Davies Su- persport 675 which was quite stirring to ride in terms of the engine note, mainly because of the intake roar you got even with an airbox fitted, but that wore a silencer to meet WSBK noise limits. Whereas like the MV Agustas, the Moto2 Triumph's exhaust is free to air and all the better for it. When the lights go out for Moto2's first race of the Triumph era, the sound of 30- plus open-piped triples surging down to the first turn will be worth the ticket price alone! But there are no prizes for sounding great, so where the 765 motor really delivers is the strong hit and broad spread of midrange torque, coupled with the smooth pull out of second-gear turns, of which there are several on the Stowe circuit. It's more of a souped-up street bike you could go to the shops on very quickly than a gnarly, peaky GP racer. Throttle pickup on the ride-by- wire system is ideally controlled, with no jerkiness to get the rear Dunlop Moto2 control slick spinning in the absence of trac- tion control, just a smooth but relentless drive out of the bend as you ride what feels like a substantially fatter torque curve, and flat-shift wide open down to the next turn. To begin with I had to remind myself to use all the revs that As company owner John Bloor told me in a personal interview some years ago, he supports racing when it can be beneficial to Triumph's street bikes. "We're interested in racing—we don't rule anything out that might be a benefit to improving the product," Bloor said. "I go to Doning- ton Park every year, I've been to Assen to watch, I've been to Day- tona—it's totally incorrect for people to say I hate racing, because it's quite the opposite. It's just that in the early days when we were building things up, I didn't want to dilute the effort—try to do every- thing, and you'll make a good job of nothing. "Our main objective as a company is to get the street product right, and if racing can help that, we'll do it." The emphasis placed by Dorna on reliability above all else for Triumph's Moto2 engines when stressed out in the white heat of competition will surely benefit 765 streetbike customers—let alone lead to the surely inevitable development in due course of a race replica sportbike incorporating the performance enhancements to the RS version of the engine, which would be an exciting middle- weight rival to, say, the Suzuki GSX-R750. Despite this, Sargent insists there are no plans yet to produce such a bike. "We keep being asked if we're going to do a Daytona 765 street version using the same engine tune," he says, "but fundamentally we've always said that, if there's enough demand for one, then we'll consider doing it!" After axing the Daytona 675 for 2017 when the 765cc engine made its debut, Triumph may already be preparing the ground for the (re-)introduction of such a bike "by popular demand." The Triumph brand has recent history in world racing, having sucessfully competed with Chaz Davies in WorldSSP.

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