Boris Murray's Triumph Dragster
Boris Murray's Triumph Dragster
A two-hearted beast born during Top Fuel's golden age
COOK NEILSON
OH BOY, HAVE I EVER SEEN SOME cool bikes in my time: Kenny’s Yamaha TZ750 Miler in 1975, and again last summer. Charlie Vincent’s Triumph 650 scrambler and Don Gore’s BSA of similar specification, beating the crap out of each other at the Grafton Scrambles back in the Sixties. Bob Leppan’s Triumph Detroit streamliner. The Britten. The V8 Moto Guzzi. Gary Nixon and Cliff Guild’s Triumph 500 roadracer. The booming, clattery old Harley flathead Cal Rayborn rode to win Daytona in 1968 and 1969, and the one Mark Brelsford used to break Kel Carruthers’ heart at Laconia in 1970. Any Honda CBX. Every round-case bevel-drive Ducati V-Twin.
Cool. All really cool.
And not one of them remotely as cool as the coolest motorcycle of all time. Which would be the double-engined, nitro-buming, national-record-holding, high-gear-only Triumph built and raced by Boris Murray. Boris and his beast. Let me tell you how cool they were.
Boris made a living for at least two years touring around the country, match-racing and making exhibition
runs. Boris had a dog who observed the pit scene from the back of the pickup, wearing sunglasses and earmuffs as a matter of course. Even Boris, a man of uncommon modesty, is forced to admit that from 1965 until about 1974, his bike was “pretty hard to beat.” It ran 8.74 at 175 mph in Bowling Green,
Kentucky, 39 years ago-on a 4-inchwide M&H rear slick. For almost the entirety of its racing career, it held both ends of the national record for Top Fuel, and it held those records in all three sanctioning bodies: NHRA, AMDRA and IHRA.
Murray’s Triumph double was so cool that for many of us who raced against it all those years ago, we’d almost rather get beat by Boris than win against anybody else. We were racing on some nameless, dusty, dreary, sun-blasted, smoking-hot inland Florida dragstrip in the middle of the summer back around 1970.1 got lucky enough to go against Boris in the final. As I remember, it was pretty even for about the first 800 feet, then the mighty Triumph dug a little deeper and that was that. As we slowed, I remember thinking, “That was the coolest thing I ever saw.”
All forms of motorsport have their Golden Ages. For motorcycle Top Fuel drag racing, our Golden Age would have to have been the Sixties. The famous guys only needed the one name. Joe. Dave. Sonny. Danny. Leo. Clem.
T.C. (Smith, Campos, Routt, Johnson, Payne, Johnson, Christensen). What made it so good, I think, was that the bold, imaginative, resourceful people built genuinely exotic stuff (doubleengined British Twins, largely, and the occasional large-displacement Vincent), while Leo Payne taught the rest of us how to build competitive big-inch Sportsters. It did seem, for a brief period, that we Sportster people would all travel around in a big, noisy heap, end up somewhere like Niagara or Houma or Ateo or Maple Grove, take turns getting whipped by the Triumph double, then all go to dinner with Boris and find out where we’d have to be, in a week or a month, to get thumped again.
The Top Fuel landscape changed a bit
later in the Seventies, when guys started adapting automotive slipper-clutch technology and nice, fat, wrinkly rear tires, and exploring serious fuel injection and supercharging on big-inch Japanese Multis. The performance numbers inevitably got better; the size of the Top Fuel fields just as inevitably began to shrink. In the late Sixties, you could go to a big meet in, say, Alton, Illinois, and run against 20 or 30 other Top Fuelers; nowadays, I doubt if more than a handful even exist, much less compete.
So that was our Golden Age. And Boris Murray’s Triumph double was its glittering, fuming, barking, wheelstanding, tire-smoking centerpiece. The Coolest Motorcycle Ever.
Go ahead. Look at the pictures.
And tell me you have a better idea.
