Motorcycle-Search News

August 31, 2006
By Dave Abrahams
Article: Motoring.co.za

It’s relatively easy to build a hot sportbike – put a high-revving, medium sized, multicylinder engine in a small, light chassis, tuck in the rider and the thing will go like a scalded cat. It won’t be much fun anywhere but on a race track, though.

To build a radical sportbike that does everything right and can still be ridden on the street without hurting itself or its rider is much, much more difficult. Getting the power is the easy part; engine development, thanks to Japan Inc, is now more a science rather than a black art.

Throw enough money at the brakes and suspension and you’ll get all the performance you can handle; world-class components are available off the shelf – at a price

But it’s the indefinables such as balance, handling and steering precision that make a sportbike work; an almost mystical mix of perfect geometry, carefully engineered frame flex in one plane but not in another, centralised masses and above all, low mass.

On the rare occasions when it all comes together the result is an instant classic. Massimo Tamburini got it right on the Ducati 916 in 1994; the 748, two years later, was even better.

To this day the latter is the standard by which sportbikes are measured – or it was. That position has now been taken by the Triumph 675 Daytona.

I’ve just lived with the Daytona on the road for a week and my respect for Hinckley’s hot middleweight has grown immensely.

When I rode it around Kyalami at the Amid Expo in May, 2006 I was impressed by its stability at high speed, its superbly accurate steering and the engine’s willingness to rev its nuts off

Let’s start with the engine: By using a three-cylinder layout Triumph design boss Ross Clifford was able to make the 675 engine 110mm narrower than the 650 four it replaced.

Three-cylinder engines are famous for torque; Clifford kept the stroke of this one short (52.3mm), enabling it to rev to a howling 14 000 and produce a claimed 92kW at 12 500rpm and a muscular 72Nm at 11 750.

Ultra-peaky, I hear you say, insanely narrow working range. Forget it; this thing kicks out more than 60Nm – about the same as Yamaha’s mad-dog 16 000rpm R6 at full chat - all the way from four to 14 000rpm.

You can pop out between two cars, crack it open at 60km/h in fourth (about 4500rpm) and accelerate hard through a gap in the traffic without getting anywhere near the power band – or even changing gear.

The bike’s everyday working range is 4000-8000rpm, which will take you up to a thoroughly naughty 165km/h in top. The engine hums musically to itself as only a three-cylinder can, with a deep, throaty note, and vibrates not a bit.

Extra urge

There’s no big step in the power delivery above eight thou but the extra urge is immediately discernable; high-frequency vibration begins to buzz through the footpegs and grips and the musical intake roar becomes a flat, rather angry, snarl.

The bike seems to bunch its chassis under your bum before throwing itself at the horizon, accelerating more like a 750 than a middleweight. Before you’re ready for it the five shift lights come on in sequence and it’s time to hook the next cog.

Once you get used to the immediacy and strength of the engine’s response you realise that the power delivery is actually surprisingly linear; the pinpoint throttle response makes it easy to dial in just as much power as you need to load the suspension and rocket the bike out of a corner, perfectly balanced.

Just when you think it’s all over, there’s a last frenetic kick from the engine somewhere around 10 500rpm; you won’t feel it in the first three gears because the mapping is slightly different in each gear to adjust the torque curve for more bottom end in low gears and more top-end in the higher ratios.

Hold it in fifth until the shift lights come on, hook top and the Daytona will top out surprisingly quickly at 254km/h with 13 700rpm on the clock and three of the five shift lights lit – which shows Triumph got the gearing spot on.

Worth learning

The clutch is typically Triumph in that it takes up a long way from the handlebar grip – I suspect Clifford has very long fingers – but light in action with a very firm take-up, firm enough that I stalled the bike a few times before I got used to it.

However, it stood up well to half a dozen full-tilt launches in high-speed testing, so it’s worth learning.

Triumph has taken a leaf out of Yamaha’s book by using a vertically stacked gearbox with the shift mechanism at the top (clearly visible in gallery picture No.10) to keep the engine short but, unlike the typically notchy R-series shift action, that of the Daytona is light, positive and crisp in either direction, with or without the clutch.

The seating position is compact without being cramped, well forward and high at 825mm, throwing a lot of your weight on to your wrists. The seat also slopes a little too steeply forwards, so you inevitably wind up hard against the tank when riding around town.

The frame’s two main spars curve over rather than around the dinky little cylinder head so the mid-section of the bike is astonishingly narrow, especially the rear of the fuel tank where your legs slot into sculpted cut-outs, seemingly only a hand’s width apart.

You are the bike

It has the effect of making the chassis feel even slimmer than it is; before you know it you’re part of the bike, picking up every nuance of the road through the (very) firm seat and guiding it with tiny shifts of body position and gentle movement of the bars.

The steering isn’t quite as intuitive as that of the Ducati 748, making the bike a little steadier going into corners, but the front end feels solidly planted no matter how hard you load the front suspension, allowing you to go as deep as you like on the brakes before turning in.

And when you do, the 675’s ground clearance is practically unlimited; whoever had the media bike before me scrubbed the tyres to the edges of the treads without touching down the “hero blobs” under the footpegs.

Then you turn it on, as hard as you dare; the bike’s torquey power delivery maximises rear tyre grip like a twin rather than spinning it up like a four.

You hit eight grand and the top-end rush shoots you out of the turn, more like a multi than a twin, demonstrating how a three-cylinder bike can combine the best attributes of a twin and a four.

Rock steady

Despite the 675’s ultra-tight 1392mm wheelbase it’s rock steady in long corners thanks to the steering damper hidden inside the fairing and the long swing-arm, the raison d’etre of the vertically transmission. The only time it shook its head was occasionally on a full-throttle upshift – not unusual on short-coupled sportbikes.

The bike’s handling and road-holding are superbly predictable on all but the worst surface; it knocked hell out of my kidneys on our bumpy test route without ever losing its composure.

I took it over the “ride and handling” section of our test circuit at least 10km/h faster than ever before, which is as much a tribute to the confidence the bike inspired in me as to its road-holding.

Precision braking

The brakes are just as good; a radial master cylinder and Nissin radial-mount callipers provide a level of bite that would be lethal if it weren’t delivered with the sort of precision and feedback usually only available to Grand Prix riders.

If you want to find how the world’s fastest riders go into corners so hard and get away with it, ride this bike.

The 675 isn’t perfect: the screen is too low, buffeting my head at 200km/h even with my helmet’s chin piece touching the tank; the digital speedo in the lower quadrant of the rev counter is partly masked by the cables, making it difficult to read, while the clock on the infoscreen to the left remains perfectly legible at any speed.

It becomes uncomfortable after 40 minutes in really heavy traffic and as your wrists take strain the steering becomes a little nervous (rider input, I think) while the “plastic plank” seat doesn’t help.

Setting the benchmark

But it is definitively the finest–handling middleweight sportbike I’ve ridden on track or street, a perfect balance of power and response, steadiness and agility, precision steering and firm but supple suspension.

It is the standard by which future sportbikes will be measured. As I said after those first four laps of Kyalami – it’s that good.

Article courtesy of: www.motoring.co.za

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