In the autumn of 1968, the Triumph Trident reached American showrooms wearing a fuel tank that looked like a bread box and exhaust silencers the press compared to ray guns. A car company had styled it. Roughly four weeks later, Honda pulled the covers off the CB750 in Tokyo. It was cleaner, cheaper, had an electric starter, a disc brake, and was beautiful in a way the Triumph simply was not.
The engineering was never the problem. In 1965, three years before the Honda appeared, a 740cc three-cylinder engine was running in a test frame in the Triumph experimental shop. It would outrun every twin in the world. By any honest reckoning it was the first superbike, and it was ready years before Japan had anything to answer it.
The story begins in late 1963. Bert Hopwood ran Triumph’s design office. Doug Hele was a development engineer who could take a good design and find the last few horsepower hiding inside it. For years Hele had been urging Hopwood to think about a three-cylinder engine, not the twins Triumph was famous for, not the fours the Italians favored, but three.
Hopwood kept not doing it. Then one evening after the office emptied out, the two men sat down and sketched out the basic shape of the engine that would become the 750 triple. It started as a doodle, a way to pass an hour. They were the right two men.
Hopwood had worked under the legendary Edward Turner and understood both engines and the business that built them. Hele could turn a clever idea into a machine that would start on a cold morning and run all day. Between them they took the existing Triumph twin and reasoned their way to a third cylinder. The numbers tell how clever it was.
A 67mm bore and 70mm stroke gave 740cc with a 120-degree crankshaft. The three pistons rose and fell in a sequence that cancelled out the shakes a twin could never escape. It produced 58 brake horsepower. It was smooth where the twins buzzed, and it was fast at the moment fast was becoming the only thing that mattered in the American market Triumph depended on.
They knew what was coming. Turner himself had been to Japan in 1960 and returned shaken. He described the Japanese factories as a dynamic experience and a somewhat frightening spectacle. The threat was not a secret.
The answer to it was running in a test frame by 1965. The trouble was upstairs. Edward Turner, brilliant, autocratic, and skeptical of the triple, retired in the early sixties, locked in a decades-long rivalry with Hopwood. His successor, Harry Sturgeon, was a driving force who might have pushed the triple hard.
Sturgeon died of a brain tumor. Lionel Jofeh, a man from outside the motorcycle world, came in. Above him at the BSA group sat Eric Turner, no relation to Edward, a chairman more comfortable with balance sheets than with motorcycles. Hopwood watched his design get passed from hand to hand, studied and second-guessed.
In his memoir, written years later in bitterness and sorrow, he claimed the first triple was so good it could have gone into production in 1965, straight in, a stop-gap to hold the big bike market until something better came along. Instead, in his phrase, it was quietly pushed into a corner. When it finally emerged, he wrote, the design had been minced about, designed by a committee. Two words that carry the whole tragedy inside them.
When the triple finally reached the American testers, they could barely believe their instruments. Cycle World strapped their equipment to a Trident in 1968 and recorded 117 mph flat out and nought to sixty in five and a half seconds. For 1968 on a roadgoing motorcycle, those were the best numbers anyone had ever seen. Cycle Guide put it more plainly.
The Triumph Trident is the fastest street machine we have tested, bar none. The machine was brilliant, the reviews ecstatic, and the men who built it were at the top of their powers. In Birmingham at Small Heath on Armory Road, home of BSA, the largest motorcycle manufacturer the world had ever known was still turning out machines by the tens of thousands. In the early 1950s, BSA, Birmingham Small Arms, a company that started making rifles and bicycles before it ever touched a motorcycle, was the largest motorcycle manufacturer on the planet.
Its slogan claimed one in four motorcycles in Britain wore the badge. At its height the group built some 75,000 machines a year. The Small Heath works alone employed more than 12,000 people. You could walk the length of the shops and cover the better part of two miles without leaving the building.
Four-story blocks of brick and glass and iron, alive with the noise of presses stamping, lathes turning, and brazing torches flaring blue-white as men joined frame tubes by hand. Triumph’s export trade to the United States was the engine of the whole enterprise. In 1967, at the peak, the company shipped nearly 25,000 machines across the Atlantic, and the Americans paid 7. 5 million pounds for them.
Steve McQueen rode them. The Bonneville was the coolest motorcycle in the world. The strategy behind the triple was built on that American appetite. The 650 twins were reaching their limit.
The market wanted something bigger, faster, more. A three-cylinder 750 would leapfrog straight over the twins and land ahead of whatever the Japanese were cooking up. Back in 1966, a sales report had landed on the desks at BSA that spelled it out in black and white. It dropped the bombshell that Honda was working on a 750.
Not a rumor, not a guess, but a specific dated warning that the biggest of the Japanese firms was building the exact kind of machine that would challenge the triple head on. They had the warning. They had the bike. And still they contrived to be slow.
Two years passed between that report and the triple reaching a showroom. The company chose to build two motorcycles out of the one engine. The Triumph Trident and the BSA Rocket 3, and not merely with different badges and paint, which would have been sensible, but with entirely different frames. The Triumph got an upright engine in a single down-tube frame.
The BSA got its engine tilted forward in a heavier duplex cradle, some forty pounds heavier all told. The American dealer networks were separate and proud, and each wanted its own distinct machine to sell. It was badge engineering taken to a self-defeating extreme. Two production lines, two sets of tooling, two lots of development.
It added weight, added cost, and added delay. If the boardroom couldn’t decide what the triple should be, the racetrack had no such doubts. In March 1971, the triples went to Daytona and took the whole podium. Dick Mann won on a BSA Rocket 3.
Gene Romero came second on a Triumph Trident. Don Emde took third on another Rocket 3. First, second, and third, all powered by the engine two men had doodled after hours in a Coventry office. BSA and Triumph had thrown a budget running to $2 million across those seasons.
At Mallory Park that same year, John Cooper on a British triple beat the greatest road racer alive, Giacomo Agostini on his MV Agusta, by three-fifths of a second. The machine that mattered most never had a proper name. It was a works Trident that had sprayed oil over its rider for hour after hour at the Bol d’Or endurance race, until somebody christened it Slippery Sam. The name stuck, and Slippery Sam won the Isle of Man production TT five years running, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975.
Five consecutive victories on the most dangerous racing circuit on earth. The same fundamental machine year after year, beating everything the world could send against it. But the war was being lost somewhere the triple couldn’t reach it. The finest motorcycle in the world was not selling.
Honda’s CB750 broke cover at the Tokyo show in October 1968. It had a 736cc four-cylinder engine mounted across the frame, smooth as silk. A five-speed gearbox. Around sixty-eight horsepower.
An electric starter. Press a button and it fired. A hydraulic disc brake on the front wheel, when the Triumph still relied on drums. An engine that didn’t leak oil on the garage floor, when every British bike leaked as a matter of national character.
Then Honda’s American man, Kihachiro Kawashima, stood up in front of the dealers and told them the price. The number landed at around $1,300. One account of that moment records the reaction in a single line. All 2,000 dealers burst into thunderous applause.
For more money than the Honda, the American buyer got a bike he had to kick into life, that stopped on drums, that leaked, and that wore the tank a car firm had bolted on. Honda sold close to 40,000 CB750s in its first year. The triple, Trident and Rocket 3 together, sold 27,480 and 5,897 over its entire seven-year life. Honda outsold the triple’s entire production run in its first year alone.
To understand why the triple was late, you have to go out into the Warwickshire countryside, to a grand old manor house called Umberslade Hall. In 1967, BSA opened it as a central engineering center with around 300 staff, costing something like a million pounds a year to run. It was Lionel Jofeh’s creation, and it sat apart from the grease and noise of production. The design office had been physically lifted away from the people who knew how to make things.
The drawings came down from the hall to the works, and something was always lost in the journey. Umberslade produced a double overhead cam 350 twin, the Bandit, the Fury, a bike that looked good on paper and never properly reached production at all. All the while, the triple, the one bike that could have held the line, waited. In 1975, the Boston Consulting Group delivered a report to the British government, Strategy Alternatives for the British Motorcycle Industry.
The consultants found a company culture fixated on short-term profit that had made the fundamental mistake of surrendering the small motorcycle market to Japan without a fight. They laid bare the productivity gap. A worker at Honda produced in a year more than 100 motorcycles. A worker in the British industry produced around 10.
In money, it was around $36,000 of value created per man at Honda against roughly $2,400 in Britain. And then came the decision that would become the most famous of them all. BSA’s management wanted the triple to look modern and splashy in America. Rather than trust the men who had been styling Triumphs for decades, they hired Ogle Design, Britain’s hottest design consultancy.
They were brilliant, fashionable, and they had never, not once, designed a motorcycle. One of the Ogle stylists, Jim English, later described the brief exactly as they had understood it. BSA wanted a very flashy American look, like a Cadillac car. What came back was the shoe box: a five-gallon fuel tank with hard slab sides and squared off corners.
A bread box, a brick. The exhausts were finished with strange sculpted tips the press seized on instantly. They called them ray guns, Flash Gordon pipes. When Cycle World tested the bike in October 1968, they wrote that the muffler outlets would look more at home peeking out from beneath the skirts of a motor scooter.
Some American dealers, faced with a crate containing a brilliant motorcycle wearing a hideous tank, simply reached in and bolted a Bonneville tank straight on before it ever reached the showroom floor. By February 1970, the factory was shipping what it euphemistically called a beauty kit. By 1971, there was a full restyle. Classic Bike Guide put the cost in the plainest possible terms.
The Ogle restyle, they wrote, took roughly 18 months to complete, and it meant the bikes that should have shaken the world in 1965 were fatally late. The honest truth is harder and sadder. Ogle didn’t get to design a motorcycle. They got handed one that was already largely fixed, told they could shape the tank, the side panels, and the silencers, and little else.
The delay had many fathers, and the styling firm was only the most visible of them. And then, as if the company were determined to prove it could still make things worse, came 1971 and the oil-in-frame disaster. Someone decided the triples and twins should carry their engine oil inside the frame tubes. It was a clever idea, badly executed.
The new frame made the seat sit so high that shorter riders could barely get a foot to the ground. Production of each type of triple engine is said to have fallen to around 50 units a month. In 1971, the BSA group lost 8. 5 million pounds.
By late 1972, the group owed more than 20 million. In March 1973, its shares collapsed. The largest motorcycle manufacturer the world had ever known was insolvent in all but name. Edward Heath’s government set a condition for any rescue.
BSA and Triumph would have to merge with Norton Villiers, under the Manganese Bronze umbrella, run by a financier named Dennis Poore. The new company was called Norton Villiers Triumph, NVT, with a government grant of just under 5 million pounds. Poore’s logic was the cold logic of the balance sheet, and by the balance sheet’s own lights it was not wrong. The industry could not sustain the works it had.
At Small Heath, the great works on Armory Road began to wind down. In February 1976, the cathedral of British motorcycling, the works that had employed 12,000 people, closed its doors. But it was another factory, smaller and about to become far more famous, where the workers decided they would not go quietly. On the 14th of September 1973, Dennis Poore came to Meriden for the first time.
He had never visited the factory before. He arrived to tell the workforce that it would close, that all 1,700 jobs would go. He delivered the news and left without taking questions, saying he had a meeting in London. The women of Meriden held a mock funeral at the gates for the Triumph name, coffin and all.
Then the workers occupied the factory. They blockaded it. Meriden made parts the other plants needed, so by holding the gates, the workers were choking Small Heath and the rest of the operation too. The blockade held for months, then years.
In February 1974, the government changed, and into the office of industry secretary came Tony Benn. His own civil servants advised him plainly that a workers’ cooperative running the factory would not be commercially viable. Benn overrode them. He called it a social experiment in industrial organization.
In March 1975, after 18 months of blockade, the Meriden Motorcycle Cooperative was born, funded by a grant of £750,000 and a loan of around 4. 2 million pounds. And then the cooperative did the thing nobody outside those gates believed it could. It built motorcycles, good ones.
It kept the Bonneville, the T140, the last of the great Triumph twins, alive and rolling out the door. It outlasted Small Heath. The cooperative lasted the best part of a decade. But the pound grew strong, making every bike they exported dearer abroad.
The Japanese kept coming. The money ran down. In October 1983, the Meriden cooperative went into liquidation. They knocked Meriden down in 1984.
Where 2,000 people had built 1,500 motorcycles a week, where the women had held their funeral at the gates, where the blockade had held for 18 months, they built a housing estate. Whoever named the streets knew exactly what had been lost there. You can walk that estate today and find the signs at the corners. Bonneville Close.
Daytona Drive. The only monument the factory ever got, spelled out on street signs above the parked cars. But the name did not die. In 1983, a builder named John Bloor bought the rights to the Triumph name.
In 1990 and 1991, Triumph re-emerged from a modern factory at Hinckley in Leicestershire with a fresh range of machines built around a modular family of engines, a common design shared across three-cylinder and four-cylinder bikes. Three cylinders. A modular range. Bert Hopwood, who had drawn the triple after hours in 1963, who had watched it get minced about by committee, who had argued for years for exactly this kind of shared modular engineering and been ignored, had championed the idea and been overruled.
The vision the old company could not bring itself to back became the foundation of the new one. Today Triumph is the largest British-owned motorcycle manufacturer in the world. It still builds three-cylinder engines with that unmistakable howl. And one of them wears the name Trident.
Slippery Sam, the bike that won the Isle of Man five years running, ended up in the National Motorcycle Museum, was destroyed in the fire that swept the museum in 2003, and then, because some things are too precious to let go, was painstakingly rebuilt. The companies died. Small Heath and Meriden are a memory and a housing estate. The men who built the triple did not live to see their engineering vindicated on the scale it deserved.
The tank and the ray guns were a real mistake, and so were the ten deeper mistakes beneath it. Together they cost Britain the crown it had held in its hands in 1965 and could not hold on to. But the brand outlived the blunder. Hopwood’s shelved idea, the modular triple, dismissed by a company that couldn’t see past its own committees, turned out to be right all along.
The engineers were never the problem. They were only ever the answer, arriving, as they so often did, a little too early for the men who might have listened, and a little too late to save the world they built.