2002 Triumph Speed Four

Under-rated and over-looked, Bertie Simmonds makes a case for remembering one of Triumph’s forgotten fours.

- Bertie Simmonds

This month’s Quick Spin, is a bit of a game of two halves and ironically for two reasons.Firstly, my most recent ride on the subject of our spin – Triumph’s Speed Four – was held in pretty dismal conditions, so I was lucky to have the original copyright free launch shots of me riding the thing from 15 years back, so you will see some sunny shots from way back when and some not so sunny. Secondly this ‘two halves’ concept neatly sums up Triumph’s approach to building 600cc middleweight machines and bikes in general.

You see, Triumph’s model range has always been a little schizophrenic. Sometimes they’ve produced unique machines which have been hard to pigeonhole alongside any Japanese, European or American equivalent, while other times they’ve taken the opposition a little more head-on and almost tried to beat them at their own game.

See overleaf for the low-down on the Speed Four’s older (and faired) sibling the TT600, but suffice to say it tried to take on the Japanese in the hard fought supersports class and lost, for a number of reasons. The TT was launched in 2000 and just two years later out came the Speed Four – essentially a naked version of the bike.