Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127840
From most angles the' Speed Quattro looks like your average Speed Triple. Well, every angle except from behind, the view you'll most likely get should you Issue a speed challenge. By Alan Cathcart Photos by Kel Edge Sk any kid with a Lego collection, and you'll get the same 11 answer: Transplants are tops. After the junior aerospace engineers of the next millennium have made the kit just once the way it was designed in Denmark to be done, the best part of fiddling with bits of slotted plastic is apparently to mix 'n' match parts of various kits with each other, to create your own idea of how they could have been made, but weren't. Same thing with motorcycles: bigger toys for bigger boys. John Bloor might not agree that his range of Triumph motorcycles is a twowheeled form of Legoland, but the modular design basis on which his engineers have developed the. range of models that have given rebirth to Britain's most historic motorcycle marque, does invite the mix 'n' match approach. At the point that all Triumph models share a com- & ! mon backbone frame into which either of the company's engines can be slotted, you're practically invited to start swapping parts about from one model to the other, as Triumph itself is the first to have recognized, and done. Triumph's Italian importer Carlo Talamo came a close second, with his four-cylinder Megasprint consisting of a Daytona 1200 motor slotted into the half-faired running gear from a Trident Sprint triple, but Talamo's more into one-off show bikes th~ customizing Triumphs in this way for public consumption. Still, his next project, the Speed Four, presented a powerful reminder to the parent factory tha t it had all the ingredients at hand to make the ultimate Streetfighter, a four-cylinder 1200 Daytona-powered aked roadster with 147 bhp at the crankshaft and 130 rear-wheel horsepower that would street-sweep punier rivals like the Suzuki 1200 Bandit and Yamaha XJR1200, and even pose serious competition to Yamaha's V-Max for musclebike mastery. Amazingly, Talamo's Italian-brewed Triumph Speed Four dead-heated on its debut with the appearance of an iden tical bike concocted from the same brew of Triumph parts by Triumph's second-biggest dealer in Britain (and thus in the world), Daytona Motorcycles in West London. Only theirs is called a Triumph Speed Quattro; ho, ho - get it, Carlo?! But apart from the name, the difference between the two is that Daytona will sell you the result, or else transform your fully-faired four-eylinder into a muscular megabike that takes no . prisoners in the Naughty Nudie stakes. The fact that Triumph have declined to follow the Anglo-Italian lead and extend their lineup of four-eylinder models with a factory-built clone of the Speed 4 makes it all the more worth considering, especially if you have a Daytona-12 with fullfrontal accident damage but a healthy chassis and motor. Depends which way you want to go about it, that is: you could of course concoct a Speed Quattro by transplanting a four-cylinder Daytona motor (or the softer-tune Trophy version, if you wanted less poke) into a Speed Triple chassis, but that would leave you with a fivespeed Daytona 900, unless you used one of the new six-speed '96-model naked triples for the swap job. Better to go the Daytona Motorcycles route and strip out the bodywork, lights, instruments and fork assembly from a Daytona-12, then replace them with the front end off a Speed Triple. This has several potential benefits. One, it's easier to sell the leftover Daytona parts individually - that is, if you don't decide to keep them and give yourself the bonus of having two bikes in one: an unfaired cafe racer for the summer months, a full-fairing streamliner for the winter. Takes a day's work at most to swap from one to the other, says Daytona Motorcycles boss Geoff Carter. Two, because the two models share the same chassis, rear suspension, gas tank, seat, wheels and brakes, yOll don't have to source any other parts. Three - and most important of all - though all Triumphs have the same rangy 27-degree head angle, the Speed Triple is the only bike in the company's catalogue with a 40mm offset to the fork yokes, 5mm more than the rest of the range including the Daytona, which in turn delivers reduced trail leading to sharper steering and sportier handling. If you ever wondered why Triumph opted for the unfaired bike for their worldwide onemake race series, perhaps this is a clue. Never having been a big fan of the Daytona-12's handling - stable and solid under touring conditions, but too heavy with the' four-cylinder motor to have any serious sporting pretensions; buy a Trophy instead - the day I spent with the Daytona Speed Quattro was an eyeopener: Why doesn't the factory make this simple change in steering geometry _ themselves? You couldn't ever expect that a bike with a 1490mm wheelbase would be nimble, and the Quattro isn't exactly, either. But it does steer considerably more sharply and easily than the Daytona-12 it once was, delivering a relative degree of agility that is quite beyond expectations for such a heavy bike scaling 501.6 pounds dry. Of course, there isn't the weight of the fairing and a second headlamp over the front wheel, and there may well be something of an optical illusion in play that makes a'naked bike always seem lighter and less bulky to change direction on than a fully faired one. But there's no doubt tha t even with the heavy four-eylinder motor with its twin balance shafts and extra pot on the side, the Quattro was relatively easy to switch from side to side through the winding Hertfordshire lanes north of Daytona's Ruislip base. Flick, no; You never forget this is one heavy old motorcycle, even without the fairing, so you have to work at it. But without sacrificing the trademark stability of the Hinckley-built bikes, the Quattro definitely represents a step up the sportbike ladder in terms of steering. I'd say it's an even better-handling bike on smooth roads than the Speed Triple, because the weight of the heavier engine settles the quicker-steering front end better, while