Banana Republic

As a head-scratching bike from the time, the years have been kind to Triumph’s thought-provoking Daytona 1200.

- BERTIE SIMMONDS, ANDY BOLAS

The great thing about being part of a magazine like CMM is that you’ve got all the experiences of bikes from ‘back in the day’ backed up with hindsight and history.

Then you saddle up a bike you did way back when and all these amazing ingredients serve up a balanced view of the bike that, with the benefits of 20-20 vintage vision, means you can properly sum up a bike in a way that you probably couldn’t back then.

Now, I’d best set my stall out and say how much I’m a big fan of early Hinckley Triumphs. I guess it’s because my first foray into motorcycle journalism came at a time when they were only a few years out of the starting gate and as I was way down the pecking order for bikes at the weekly paper where I worked, I often got the ‘off-cuts’. At first these were unloved bikes, the keys of which would lay dusty in the office key cupboard. My early rides were the likes of an MZ250 and a Suzuki DR350, both not the best tools for 310mile round trips for a weekend visit home. Other keys lurked in that cupboard and many had the name TRIUMPH on them. It seemed that for some elite journos of the time the modular Triumphs weren’t ‘all that’, as some scribes said to me back then Triumphs were almost ‘Kawasaki copies that are using old technology almost a decade old’.