Matt Capri AND HIS TRIUMPH STREET DRAGSTER RACING HIS WAY THROUGH COLLEGE

Full inside story of the illegal Street Drags on uncompleted Interstate freeways in 1960s America, countenanced by the police as safer than doing it on active highways!

- Alan Cathcart

American Triumph tuner Matt Capri, now 80 years young and finally retired from the drag strip and Salt Flats, has been a serious speed-hound all his life. For two decades from 1995 to 2015, his South Bay Triumph dealership on the Pacific Coast Highway just north of Long Beach was a mecca for imaginatively engineered go-faster updates of various Triumph models, in between being Triumph USA’s Dealer of the Year in 2005. These bikes included the street-legal turbocharged Daytona 1200 four on which Matt Capri personally set Bonneville records at over 200 mph or the stock then-new Triumph Daytona T595 triple that set a 1000cc AMA Production record at 173.735 mph in 1998, again with him aboard.’ “It took Yamaha three years to beat that speed with an R1,” says Matt proudly. “It was the first absolute speed record Triumph ever held with a stock motorcycle, and we prepared and raced it out of our shop.” South Bay Triumph Bonneville motorcycles also presently hold four FIM World Land Speed Records in the 1000cc twin-cylinder categories.

A native New Yorker born and raised in Long Island, Matt Capri transplanted himself to California in 1973 to become BMW’s Western Sales Manager, wrenched the R90S Superbike that Steve McLaughlin won the first-ever Daytona Superbike race on in 1976, beating their favoured Udo Geitl/Reg Pridmore teammates, and then in 1980 was a co-founder of Luftmeister, the BMW tuning house which over the next 15 years set so many speed records with Capri-concocted Boxers and four-cylinder Flying Brick K-models, both normally-aspirated and turbocharged. Establishing South Bay Triumph in 1995 saw Capri switch his allegiance to the British brand at the outset of its Bloor-era ride down the comeback trail in the USA - though he already had history with Triumph, and BSA, too, in his college days back in the 1960s.