TERRIBLE T WINS
Right then, modernists! So you’re really impressed with your modern Triumph twin, packed from stem to stern with classic iconography and subtle references to tasty Triumph twins of the past, and you find yourself wondering whether the Real Thing might be as much fun. Or maybe even more fun! What to do about this?
The modern Triumph company’s range of ‘classic’ twins has been with us for quite a while now, since 2001 in fact, so look out next year for a whole host of somehow special machines with some dubious ‘Twenty Glorious / Golden / Classic Years’ slogan stitched in Union Flag lettering in all the traditional places. Twenty years – two entire decades – which means that the glorious modernised interpretation of the extremely long-lived Meriden masterstroke has enjoyed a rather longer run than most models of the machine it was supposedly based on. Or which it was intended to remind us of, or even perform like, or something.
It’s not entirely certain why the freshly-minted Hinckley concern took so long to produce some sort of memento mori to the radiant past, where the sun never set, so forth. Especially given that the Trident reincarnation was right up there in the first of the new range’s brochures, along with other nostalgic names from the only slightly leaky past, such as Trophy and indeed Tiger, we all expected that a twin called Bonneville would bounce into the revived limelight pretty quickly. But not so.
Because I am that ancient mangler, I was around for the eventual trumpet fanfare launch of the new range of twins. I rode several examples, genuinely
