BLOWN AWAY
Arguably the most beautiful motorcycle ever built, it’s no surprise there’s a Hurricane in the Smithsonian Institute. While the history of how the Ogle-designed BSA Rocket 3 ugly duckling morphed into the Triumph X-75 Hurricane surely doesn’t need re-telling, you might wonder what is it about this bike which made it such an obscure object of desire. And what’s it actually like to ride?
Like many RCers, I was once svelte, impecunious, and propelled around the mean streets of my adolescence on a variety of the Birmingham Small Arms company’s products, mainly slowly and usually incontinently. The bikes, not me. From the lofty heights of a C15, the Triumph Hurricane was as attainable as Susan George. The triples’ rarity meant I only ever read about them, never seeing one in the flesh… but the yearning was there, fuelled by articles in the press. As a young rider I be moaned the fact that all the nice bikes were affordable only to people older, fatter and balder than me. So when time played its trick of fast-forwarding, I finally found myself
