Triumph 1998: Get Sporty!
TRIUMPH 1998: GET SPORTY!
A SPORTING VERSION OF the best-selling Thun derbird 900 headlines Triumph's catalog for 1998, a year that company officials hope will see increasing sales in the American market.
The born-again British marque has received a lukewarm re ception since it began exporting motorcycles to the colonies in 1995, but with the recent success of the Thunderbird and the new for-'97 T595 Daytona, that trend appears to be turning around.
"It's been a phenomenal year," says Triumph America CEO Ross Clifford. "We've sold more bikes in the first six months than we did the entire last year."
Poised to boost U.S. sales even further is the new Thun derbird Sport, which as the name implies adds a dollop of high performance to the retro standard recipe.
"When the Thunderbird first came out, people were asking for more sporty components," says Clifford. "We'd already begun work on the Adventurer cruiser though, so the Sport re ally couldn't have been built any sooner."
The Thunderbird Sport differs from the base model both me chanically and visual iy. Principal changes to the 8 85cc inlineTriple include 36mm Keihin carburetors, a 3-into-2 exhaust sys tem and a close-ratio six-speed transmission. Cam timing also was revised to re tain the T-bird's low-end power, yet gain more on top. Claimed output is 82 horsepower at 8500 rpm and 56 foot-pounds of torque at 6500 rpm, compared to the standard Thunderbird's 69 bhp and 53 foot-pounds.
Chassis-wise, the Sport gets fully adjustable Showa suspen sion, plus a .4-inch-longer alu minum swingarm that quickens steering, improves cornering clearance and yields .8-inch more rear suspension travel. Tires are gummy 17-inch Avons, while brakes are Nissins, with a pair of twin-piston calipers grasping 12.2-inch rotors in front.
As for the Sport's sporty styling, Triumph's designers looked no farther than the com pany's own history books; the upswept mufflers, for instance, have a certain X-75 Hurricane feel, while the tank badges come from the old TI4OD.
How much will the Thunder bird Sport cost? No one is saying yet. But considering that the tooling for the first-generation Triumphs is now paid for, expect prices to remain at current levels. And expect more of this sort of makeover in the future.
"It's difficult for a new compa ny to have diverse models' ex plains Clifford. "When we started, we couldn't have done these pipes, for example, because we couldn't share them with other models. Now, we're taking the compromise out of the machines."
Brian Catterson
