I thought the Thunderbird was the business when I first saw the pictures. Had to have one - pant, pant. A six month old example at £6000 in the local dealers caught my eye. A low finance HP deal was part of the bargain and the steed only had 2300 miles on the clock. Well, it was the tail end of winter. Although the bike looks a bit like a sixties Triumph, there’s no mistaking the bulk and mass of the 485ib machine. Rather than being designed as a classic from the ground up, it’s really just a modified version of the three cylinder 900 Trident, but at that point I was completely under the influence of its looks.
Once under way, first impressions were good. The engine’s been detuned to a mere 70 horses, although it still uses the same twelve valve, three carb, DOHC head of the Trident - if you think about it, Triumph should dump all their models except for the 900, and produce variants on that with different top ends. In that context, the Thunderbird should have a simple, single carb, six valve, OHC top end. The 900 engine is widely accepted as the Triumph mill, so why they bother with the other stuff, which the Japanese do better, beats me.
Back to the Thunderbird and its low power but high tech engine. Grunt it has aplenty, not really needing more than three gears (another area where they could cut costs - wanna give me a job, Mr Bloor?) and slamming down the road against pretty much any conditions of hill or wind in just about any ratio you want to use. It's a very easy bike to leap on to and ride off into the distance.
The stock Trident was criticised for being top heavy, the Thunderbird benefiting from a cut down rear frame that makes you feel part of the machine. This in turn makes it less top heavy. In an almost traditional manner, it feels well planted on the road and is nicely precise but it doesn’t have the ease of bend swinging as, say, a late Bonnie (OK, early Bonnies were a bit of a deathtrap through the bends but they did eventually sort it out), due entirely to it carrying an extra 100lbs of mass.
This excessive weight is well hidden for most of the time between 25 and 85mph, but town work's a bit of a struggle. As is flat out riding - meaning about the ton in real life, though 110mph may be possible - as the suspension goes a bit wobbly and the bars work against rider comfort. However, unlike most customs it’s not impossible to ride fast, not dangerous as such, just a lot of damn hard work. At more moderate velocities it’s very laid back, excellent in comfort and as safe as any big multi when the going gets awkward (or wet).
It's easy enough to find areas in the Triumph’s chassis dynamics which could be slagged off, but as the bike is aimed at taking riders away from Harleys and, perhaps, the odd Jap custom, it’s much fairer to give the Triumph full marks for general performance, including the more than adequate disc brakes.
I say this as someone who's had the misfortune to own two Harleys. A 1200 Sportster and 1340 Electra Glide. Both were full of character and brutish torque (not to mention vibration) but were terribly out of place on UK roads. Maybe I’m just a wimp, maybe I didn’t have the guts or sheer low cunning to subdue these beasts into submission, but I rarely ventured above 60mph on either, and often ended up with bits breaking off or minor engine faults grinding us to a halt. I felt greatly cheated and disillusioned by these two experiences, though to be fair both bikes were quite old and high mileage. The new ones might be better, but I doubt it!
The Triumph has all of the style and history of the Harley, but is a far easier and better bike to ride on the road. As far as engine and chassis dynamics go, it also kills dead the Jap customs (I’ve owned an XV1100 and VS800), as well as having much more street credibility. So I was a happy boy, all agog in Triumph land? Well, not quite. I parked the Thunderbird up alongside a '69 650 Bonnie, and to be absolutely honest about it, the Thunderbird looked rather contrived, looked more like a Jap custom than a thoroughbred English classic! That Bonnie just looked so neat and compact and complete, as if time itself had evolved, wrought, its final shape.
This was three months and 3000 miles down the line. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the roar of the Thunderbird’s silencers, the whine of its engine, the excessive torque and way it felt planted firmly on the road - but there was something out of kilter, missing, which suggested that the sum of its parts were never going to greatly exceed the finality of its experience.
I don't know. I really don't. Despite all its obvious goodness, its vast superiority to the majority of customs, deep down the way its engineers had wrought its performance in spite rather than because of its engineering excesses began to annoy me. The only area in which such engineering duplicity turned up was the appalling fuel economy. 30 to 40mpg was an insult of large proportion for a lowly tuned, mildly ridden classic in 1996 - I was expecting around 60mpg, which even then would only be on a par with a sixties Triumph that exhibited similar performance and had to suffer the further indignity of fuel frothing in the carb from its excessive primary (twin cylinder) vibration.
It is true, if the glossies are to be believed (and | don’t suppose they should...), that Triumph did try to fit a single carb and that the strange firing pulses of the three cylinder engine made smooth carburation difficult to achieve. As mentioned, a simpler head designed from the ground up, rather than retrospectively bodged on (I use that word freely in light of the fuel economy, so there!), might have provided the solution; let’s just hope that Triumph are going to be a bit more sensible with their new generation of 900 triple by offering both low and high tech models. As someone who's nearer fifty than forty, the Thunderbird’s performance was, despite these misgivings, more than adequate for my needs. I enjoyed revelling in the thumping torque at sane speeds rather than playing silly buggers in warp drive on a race replica, which as well as doing in my licence would’ve broken my back.
Around 5000 miles into my venture with the Triumph, I'd grown a bit more fond of the machine. It had taken me through atrocious, vile, conditions down in Spain (weird weather, wrecked roads and crazed cagers) without the slightest of worries. I’d also managed a 70mph swerve to avoid some nutter on the M4 who'd decided to snake back and forth across three lanes. I was also convinced that the engine was completely bullet-proof and would, if necessary, come to life first press of the button when submerged beneath a few feet of snow.
On such thoughts and actions do motorcycles gather a place in one’s heart. It definitely could've been so much better (400lbs, 70mpg, etc.) but, to be fair, it has to be the best classic/custom on offer.
HJ