Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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Matt Capri's 100055 is a zestful. mDdern-day retrD-revival By AlAN CATHCART PHOTOS ay Ku EDGE ixty-year -old Matt Capri is a serious speed hound, the owner of Southern CalifornianTriumph dealer South Bay Moto, whose Pacific Coast Highway premises just north of Lo ng Beach have since 1995 been a mecca for imaginatively eng ineered and outrageously fast performance updates of production Triumph streetbikes. Bikes like the fully street-legal turbocharged Daytona 1200 four, which Capri set Bonneville records with (salt, not model!) seven years ago at well over 200 mph , or the 400 -horsepower turbo Daytona T595 tr iple, which ran 157 mph in the stand ing quarter again with him aboard. A native New Yorker, Cap ri transplanted himself to California 30 years ago to become BMW's western sales ma nager. Later - in 1980 - he became a founder of BMW tuning house Luftrneister, wh ich set several speed records with Capri -concocted turbocharged and normally aspirated four-cylinder K-models during the next decade and a half. Founding South Bay Triumph in 1995 saw him switch his allegiance to the Triumph at the outset of its John Bloor-era ride down the comeback trail in the USA - though he already had extensive history with Triumph going back to his college days. "I built a TT specia l in the engineering labs at school, based on the Tiger 100," Capri recalls, "but being still a student and a wrestler on an ath letes' program , I didn't have time to hit the dirt track circuits with it, so I co ncentrated on t he illegal street d rags, where you cou ld earn some rea l money. There were lots of uncompleted freeways around New York back then where you could race pretty safely, and there'd be some fairly big bets going down, which helped me take home my fair share of bucks. You cou ld say Triumph helped pay my way through college. Eventually, I was sponsored by the local Triumph dealer, who sold lots of bikes because we did so good in the drags, so because of that we went legit and started going to the legal tra cks and chasing records with bikes I'd learned to t une myse lf. Me and my buddy Jack Wilson [prop rietor of Big D Triumph in Dallas, Texas, and cre ator of th e Triumph stream liner, w hich Johnny Allen took to the Wo rld Land Speed Reco rd at Bonneville at 214.5 mph in 1956, after which the Bonneville street models wer e/are named] traded rec ords back and forth for many years, only unlike Jack I did the riding as well as the tun ing - I liked the challenge of com bining the two." S www.cycienEWs.com Ca pri's Bonnie pumps out 84 ho rsepowe r and 66 ft.·lbs. of torque , almost 40 percent more than stock, and it gets better fue l mileage to boot. But from 1995 on, after a IS-year interruption w hile he focused o n BMWs, Capri retu rned to his first love of Triumphs, tuning and racing them w ith some success , as the official plaque prou dly mounted on the South Bay Moto dealership wall proclaims: '~ugust 1998 - World 's 1000cc Production Motorcycle Speed Record at 173.735 mph on Triumph Daytona T595 Bonneville, Utah , U.S.A." "Y amaha on ly beat that record last year with an RI," says Capri proudly. "It was the first absolute speed record tha t Triumph ever held with a stock motorcycle, which we prepared and raced out of this <, shop. " With such a proven track record for pe rfor mance tun ing, along with his success ful pers onal history with twin-cylinder Triumphs, it was inevitable that Cap ri would tum his attention to Triumph's new -ge neratio n Bon neville model as soon as it showed up in September, 2000. But what started out as a light makeover vvith CYCLE N EWS • FEBRUARY II , 2004 37