BACKROADS • MAY 2022
O N T H E M AR K MARK BYERS
RIDING A UNICORN… Dangerous Dan called the other day. Regular readers will know that DD is a superb rider and the moniker only refers to his hazard to my bank account, because he’s always finding super motorcycles on which I end up spending money. This call was no different: after the normal pleasantries and back-and-forth about riding next weekend, the call turned to cool bikes. Dan had been talking to a locally-famous collector who keeps a small stable of awesome street machines in the recreation room of his house and said collector made a passing mention of selling his mint-condition 2006 Triumph Daytona. The alarm klaxons sounded “Battle Stations!” in the few remaining restraint neurons of my feeble brain. This is the same collector who pulled a sheet from atop a 2000 BMW M-series Roadster to reveal what became my wife’s birthday present. His taste in motorcycles is equally superb and eclectic, from BMWs to Ducatis to Triumphs. In this case, he mentioned he’d possibly like to part with a red 2006 Triumph Daytona 675. When DD said that, my skull nearly exploded from the noise of the klaxons sounding and my inner voice screaming “DIVE! DIVE! DIVE! Rig for financial depth charges! Make ready for rationalization! Rig for silly running!” For those of you who don’t know, in 2006 the Triumph Daytona 675 burst on the motorcycle world like a vacuum bomb of middleweight su-
Page 5 persport excellence from the Hinckley factory. Journalists ran out of thesaurus entries for “superb” in their madness for what at the time was named “Bike of the Year.” To this day, they speak of the inaugural entry into Triumph’s middleweight triple-cylinder sportbike foray with a reverence reserved for classic iron. Triumph’s product-development boss Ross Clifford said of the bike at the time, “…the Daytona 675 is the epitome of everything Triumph stands for; when we do something, we’re going to do it in a distinctly Triumph way.” The 2006 Daytona 675 was a game-changer. So today, finding an inside-the-home-kept, barely-ridden, red Daytona 675 is like finding a unicorn. I am gleefully familiar with the 675 genre, as I have a later model Street Triple 675R - essentially a naked Daytona 675 - and it has a more snappy power delivery than the 1050 Speed Triple. When I rode the naked 675 on the track at VIR, I was always conscious of not snapping the throttle open so as not to make my best impression of Marc Marquez doing a stratospheric Flying Wallenda highside. Adding a full fairing and sportier riding position to the equation only makes the saliva gush from my mouth with more Pavlovian anticipation. Here’s the problem: I believe in riding motorcycles, not ensconcing them in basement aquariums. And when you ride a motorcycle, especially on the track in the way that such a machine was meant to be ridden, you run a risk: the risk that you’ll make a mistake, lowside into a turn, or take flight in an aforementioned highside, turning the bike into just another parting-out exercise on Ebay. To do that with something as beautiful as a red, firstyear Daytona 675 is the equivalent of killing a unicorn. To quote a Harry Potter tome: ““…it is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn,” said Firenze. ”Only one who has nothing to lose, and everything to Continued on Page 6
