SUPER BIKE PIONEER

SUPER BIKE PIONEER

1969 Triumph Trident 750 Triple

LINDSAY BROOKE

Smoother than a parallel twin; narrower, and theoretically less costly, than an inline-four. These were the design attributes of a 750cc three-cylinder motorcycle engine envisioned in 1962 by Doug Hele, Triumph’s new development chief, and Bert Hopwood, his boss. As two of the British motorcycle industry’s most experienced engineers, Hele and Hopwood recognized that the optimal route to higher performance was not through further enlargement of Edward Turner’s original prewar 500cc Speed Twin. Vibration caused by the inherent imbalance of two pistons rising and falling together while bring alternately had become a serious limitation in Triumph’s latest 650cc models. The higher the rpm, the worse the vibrations became. Hand-numbing roughness at sustained speeds, particularly on the sporting twin-carburetor Bonneville, was taking its toll on reliability and rider comfort.

The solution, Hele and Hopwood knew, was more cylinders. However, neither liked the idea of a wide transversely mounted four, the antithesis of Triumph’s slender and handy twins. They concluded a 750cc inline-triple with undersquare bore and stroke dimensions would be hardly any wider than a parallel twin of the same displacement. And a stout one-piece 120-degree forged crankshaft supported by four main bearings would make for smooth running. In a series of informal evening meetings, the two engineers made sketches and calculations for what eventually became the T150 Trident.

Launched in the US in fall 1968, the Trident and its close cousin the BSA Rocket 3 were arguably the first modern superbikes. And they could have been on sale two years earlier; the still-secret triple project was not made a priority until 1 964, when the rumor of a 750cc Honda, number of cylinders yet unknown, set off a shock wave within the hidebound upper management at BSA Group, which owned Triumph.

The Japanese threat injected urgency into the 750-3 project, invigorating Hele. “We had our first prototype engine on the factory brake [dynamometer] in January 1 965,” he said in 1994. “It made a whisker under 60 horsepower.” That’s nearly 14 hp more than a stock 650cc Bonneville. Promising stuff, although much more development was ahead. Hot running on the prototypes, for example, was eventually cured by the addition of a Mini Cooper automotive oil cooler for production.

Conceptually, the original Trident was a 500cc Triumph overhead valve twin with an extra 67mm cylinder and a four-speed gearbox. Early PI and P2 prototype machines, essentially the 750cc triple engine stuffed into a slightly modified 650-twin chassis, wore the shapely gas tank,

side panels, and mufflers that Triumph customers loved. And they were fast. Test riders clocked more than 120 mph on the P2 in 1966, when a carefully set up stock Bonnie might shake its way to 112. Residents of the British Midlands who often saw factory test rider Percy Tait on his daily 300-mile routes sometimes mistook the prototype triples for twins until Tait grabbed a handful of throttle. The big three’s raspy off-beat exhaust note was a prelude to the unmistakable howl that delighted race fans in the early 1970s, when factory Tridents and Rocket 3s in Rob North chassis won every AMA and international roadrace worth winning.

At birth, however, the 1969 Trident’s styling, specs, and cost made it an underdog. The bike’s appearance was best described as polarizing. The lithe and organic “Triumph look” of the prototypes was gone. BSA Group wanted its new multicylinder flagships to be mold-breakers, so it farmed out styling responsibilities to Ogle Design, one of Britain’s hottest industrial design houses. Ogle responded with breadbox 5-gallon fuel tanks and slabby side panels that made the triples appear heavy rather than sporting. “As we understood that job, BSA wanted a very flashy ‘American’ look, like a Cadillac car,” former Ogle stylist Jim English later recalled.

The triples’ large, garish mufflers, also styled by Ogle, resembled ray guns from a 1930s Flash Gordon sci-fi comic. Each muffler had a trio of little outlet tips that “would look more at home peeking from beneath the skirts of a motor scooter,” Cycle World said in its worldfirst October 1968 Trident road test. When it hit US showrooms, many Triumph dealers couldn’t sell the T150 because of its funny clothes. Some of them swapped out the oddball Ogle sheet metal with Bonneville and Tiger tanks and mufflers, right out of the crate. By February 1970, Triumph was shipping dealers a “beauty kit” for retrofitting new triples. The kit included a 3.5-gallon teardrop TR6 gas tank, rounded side covers, and traditional Burgess silencers, and transformed the Trident into an attractive machine...resembling the 1966 prototypes.

Despite this impromptu face-lift, which was adopted for production from mid-1970 to 1974, and its undeniable performance as the first Triumph capable of sub13-second quarter-mile times, the quick, comfortable Trident still came up short. Its $1,795 price made it the most expensive motorcycle offered by a mainstream manufacturer in 1969. Its drum brakes, carried over from the 390-pound twins, were “not up to the task of halting this 500-pound projectile in view of the speeds it can achieve,” CW said. The anemic binders, four-speed transmission, and perhaps most importantly, the lack of an electric starter effectively obsoleted the Trident when Honda’s CB750 arrived five months after the debut of the British threes.

The ground-breaking four was lavishly equipped with a front disc, five-speed ’box, and button starting, whereas the Trident wouldn’t get a front disc and five speeds until 1973—and electric starting wouldn’t happen until 1975. The Honda’s handsome styling was influenced by seven years’ experience building Grand Prix-winning four-cylinder racebikes. And the CB750’s $1,495 retail price “just knocked the pins out from under us,” former BSA Inc. sales boss Don Brown said.

“I loved the Trident. We sold about 25 a year,” said John Healy, the former owner of Triumph of Wellesley, Massachusetts, and a longtime guru of the Triumph International Owners Club (TIOC). His shop converted many early Tridents to the Bonnie style while rectifying various build-quality faults, including oil leaks, crankcases full of casting sand, seized pistons, and gearbox mainshafts that chewed themselves up due to inaccurate machining. These issues led to more than 100 engineering changes in the T150’s first year of production.

By 1971, Cycle’s editors had praised the updated Three as “bulletproof.” But by then, superbike leadership was established. In 1969, Triumph and BSA combined sold fewer than 7,000 Tridents and Rocket 3s in the US. Honda, meanwhile, sold more than 30,000 CB750s.