Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

How about building your own GP four-stroke engine, then - especially with your established connections with Hmor (who builds the Mclaren team's Mercedes F1 engines - AC) and your location in the heartland of the F1 car racing industry? Do you feel that getting involved in Grand Prix racing would be a strategy Triumph would benefit from? It's not something we're doing at the moment, but I wouldn't rule anything out. Any publicity is a benefit to the company. Something you're known to be working on at Triumph for launch later this year is a largeengined three-cylinder cruiser. Can you confirm that, and if so, it presumably must be aimed at the American market· in which case, is increasing market share there Triumph's main commercial objective in the immediate future? It's not strictly a cruiser· but it's quite a bit larger than the one we just launched (the Bonneville America - AC). All our markets are com· mercial objectives· it's just that there's a greater number of people in the USA, so more potential customers. We've enjoyed continuous growth there the past couple of years, above industry average but when you started out from a small basis, any improvement is noteworthy. One hundered percent of nothing is still nothing - but 100 percent of 10,000 is quite a large number, so we're making very good h.eadway - our sales in the USA are up 38 percent this year. How about Japan? You've made a couple of efforts to get established there, without much success. No - we made one effort, through a distributor, and now we've taken it on ourselves. No reflection on them - they were primarily distributing other products and didn't have the expertise in motorcycles, so we've formed a very small subsidiary and are doing it ourselves. Japan has a good potential for us, but it's like the USA - 100 percent of nothing is still nothing, so we need to build up from a low base. One of the Triumph family of models that seems to have received least attention lately is the Trophy range. Do you plan to revamp this in the near future? We constantly take a look at everything - but the touring market is high on our list of priorities so, yes, we are taking a close look at the Trophy. You can expect something quite soon. With shaft drive? I would say we'll be competitive in that field. Draw your own conclusions. You've agreed to supply the older-version three-cylinder Triumph engine to Italjet for use in their Grifon roadster. Any other commercial partnerships like that in the offing? Well, that seems to have fallen into abeyance for the time being, so I don't know where we stand with it - but it's true that Gilera came calling on us a couple of years ago, looking for supplies of the TT600 powertrain which we'd just launched. But we wouldn't be interested in making something available immediately which would need a degree of application engineering, and we didn't have the resources planned to deal with that. So we had to say no. But if you were approached again now, what would the answer be to someone looking for Triumph engines to power their own motorcycles? Well, there's been a few people starting to come to us now, and we've been fairly receptive. Nothing concrete yet, though. You bought Triumph 18 years ago as a famous British motorcycle brand with inbuilt value that had the potential to be relaunched - and you've done exactly that, pretty successfully. What about some of the other famous names from the history books, particularly Norton and BSA are you interested in acquiring them and giving them the Triumph treatment? No - all I can say is that it's one thing to buy something, but to make it work is something completely different. I've never discussed buying any other trademarks and don't plan to. You've had quite a bit of criticism lately for making bikes that are well-engineered but lack sex appeal from the styling standpoint - the TT600 being the most obvious example, or the new Daytona, where you had a product with quite a bit of personality, but then revamped it to look a lot like other bikes. How do you respond to that? Well, whatever the market tells us, we have to accept - that's my only comment. If you're telling me that's what the market's saying, well, I have to accept your word for it. What you're really saying is that we made the TT600 and Daytona look too Japanese, whereas what I would say to you is that the Japanese have anglicized their products so where does that leave us? Where do we go from there? If they come to European styling houses, or set up their own design operations here in Europe, as they have done, I respect them for doing so - and that's fine. But don't then criticize us for haVing bikes that look like theirs - it's not our doing. Anyway, there are certain constraints that are imposed on us and all the others, from outside, that we have to work within - things like the headlight width on the Daytona, which was one reason it's ended up looking the way it does. That ties our hands behind our backs somewhat, in terms of look. However, you've designed most of your bikes so far in-house, by which I mean via John Mockett and his design team, even if they work outside Triumph. Do you plan to look further afield in the future, especially as the range continues to grow? We're outside already now, both in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. You'll see the results during the coming year. But we respect what John Mockett's done for us, very much, and we've always had a good relationship with him. He contin- ues to work for us, and he's still an important part of what we do. John designed the Bonneville for you - but is it true that, originally, your intention was just to produce the base model and the America version for the transatlantic market, and leave it at that? No, our strategy from the beginning was always to produce more than one or two versions. There'll be quite a few more variations coming out over the next two or three years, like a cafe racer version, and a street scrambler version. We plan to enlarge the Bonneville family quite a lot over what it is at the moment. What are you most proud of achieving in your 18 years of Triumph ownership - what element do you regard as most successful in building the company? The good people we've pulled together to do it with. It's not difficult to find people qualified to come and work here, but it's hard to find people of the right caliber to come and do it, and that's a big difference. Everyone's psychometrically tested, so we try to make sure that people's skills are compatible with the areas we want to place them in, and our take-on out of the CVs and job applications we get presented to us is just on three percent. But the fact we have such a low staff turnover, around 2.5 percent, shows that we get this right. They're the key ingredient in achieving what we've done so far. Let's look at the other side of the coin - what are you least satisfied with in the past 18 years at Triumph? Any mistakes you regret making? Possibly we ought to have achieved more in the time we've been at it - but that's not a major criticism, just the nature of the business we're in. I've no real complaints about how things have gone. Okay - now for a look into the future. Where does Triumph go from here? Do you plan to take the company public, or keep it private - or would you sell it to someone else? Even if I knew, I wouldn't say - but the answer is I really don't know. But one thing it will never be is a public company - not while I'm involved. Finally, John, any message to your customers who might read this? Yes - that we'll continue to pursue continuous improvement, in all aspects of our business, as it affects them. They're what counts - we never forget that. I:N cue. e n e _ s:

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