The first time...
‘...I rode a Triumph Daytona 675’
‘The 675 didn’t change much from that first ride until the launch in 2006’
R
iding the Daytona 675 for the first time is one of the clearest memories I have from the bike’s five-year development. It would have been the middle of 2004 – the first time we’d put a proper prototype together. Before that point, we’d been working with a four cylinder donor engine in a lashed-up chassis. That bike was used to work out centre of gravity, wheelbase, and steering geometry. We’d based it on a TT600 but with the chassis chopped up beyond recognition. I can’t even remember whether the donor engine was ours, or a Japanese one we had lying around. We couldn’t wait to try the triple engine in the new narrow chassis. We’d come to the conclusion around the millennium that triples were working better for Triumph than our other engines. We checked the FIM regulations and thought we’d need to be between the 750 twins and the 600 fours, so developing a 675cc triple engine made sense. We were just about to bring the inlinefour TT600 into production at that stage, so it was too late to change that model. Or indeed the Daytona 600 and 650 inline-fours that followed. We didn’t deliberately increase the capacity of the inline-four engine to ease the market into the idea of a 675. The 2005 Daytona 650 had increased capacity just to make the Daytona 600 into a better bike. We ended up with an engine that was still slightly oversquare but after we’d stroked it out a bit it worked very
Who is Simon Warburton?
If PB gave out knighthoods, Mr Warburton would be first to get his knee down. Since joining Triumph in 1997, he has worked his magic on the motorcycle range. He contributed to the chassis and engine design of the 675 and became product manager in 2006.
LEFT Clay mock up is remarkably similar to the production model, even down to that distinctive swingarm far right An early prototype in action during testing at Cartagena, two years before the 675 went on sale
Performancebikes.co.uk | June 2013
well. But we always knew it’d be a short-term solution, and that the answer lay in our new 675cc triple. I’d been involved with the 675 for three years by 2004. Even though I was one of the first in the project, there were a good many people who had worked for a good long while on it, and we all wanted a turn on the bike. We were confident that we had a good recipe. We calculated that with a triple engine we could make a supersports bike that was light, compact and narrow. We should be able to get good torque and about as much power as a 600 four. But what’s important is how the bike feels to ride. You can get all the numbers right, but you can never work out with pencil and paper the emotional impression the bike will make. It was getting dark and half a dozen of us were at the back of the workshop. The engine had been through its first round of tests and was in its new narrow chassis. And we were going to ride it for the first time. This wasn’t a proper test or anything. All the lads involved in the project just couldn’t wait to get their leg over the thing. It was literally a quick ride along an access road behind and we weren’t even allowed to take the engine past 4000rpm. The experience of getting on and riding it is as clear as a bell now. It felt strong, light, taut and together. Small, but with loads of power. The engine was pulling really strongly and revving freely from nothing, all the way to our 4000rpm redline. It felt absolutely brilliant, much better than we could have hoped for. I was lucky enough to have worked on the 675 for about five years. I spent time on the engine and chassis and I’m very proud of my contribution to it, but it was the result of a great team effort. And we’d set ourselves high targets. We wanted the bike to be pretty much the best at everything. We targeted the lowest weight and best performance. It had to look the best too. At that early stage there were still lots of tweaks we needed to do, but nobody had a particularly critical head on them that night in 2004. We were all blown away. It’s always the moment of truth. Everything before then’s a bit of a lash-up. But that first ride shows you in an instant what you’ve really achieved. Sometimes you will come across a problem in development and you have to make a significant change to a bike. That didn’t happen with the Daytona. We had challenging targets and had to work hard to achieve them, but the bike didn’t change much from that first ride until the launch at the 2005 NEC show. So that first bike we took turns to ride as the sun came down was essentially the same bike that went into production in 2006. It was a special moment. We were grinning like idiots all night long.
Interview Benjamin Lindley Photography Bauer Archive, Triumph
When the world was busy thrashing Japanese 600s, Simon Warburton and the 675 design team were about to get their leg over Triumph’s first supersport triple
June 2013 | Performancebikes.co.uk