Reckon the current retro classic boom is all a bit dull? Nothing but a load of Shoreditch beard-fiddlers, messing about with crappy old BMW Boxers and Honda twins from the 1970s? Well, we sort of hear you, a bit. But there’s plenty of cool stuff too. Like these two supercharged Triumph Thruxton Rs, unveiled at the weekend for a retro bike show and sprint race in Germany.
The Glemseck 101 is a bike festival near Stuttgart in southern Chermany, which has been running for the past decade. It’s actually based round the old Solitude racetrack, which keen BSN fans will have read all about a few months back. It’s grown into a big old gig, and incorporates a small 1/8 mile Sprint race within the event. The big manufacturers have got involved, with Yamaha’s Yard-Built setup and a heap of other interesting stuff turning up.
But this year, Triumph went all-in. The rules for the Sprint race said ‘1200cc twin’. Triumph told us, “We wondered about superchargers, so we checked if there were any other rules. They said no. So our German guys called up again to double check. Still no other rules. So we got on the phone and ordered two Rotrex superchargers.”
Of course, the advantage of having a motorcycle factory at your disposal is that you can pretty much get anything sorted, in a hurry. So the two bikes you see here were turned round quick-fast, with help from Richard Albans at TTS Performance in Towcester. The ‘White’ bike has got a modified 675 Daytona fairing bolted on there, together with a 675 seat unit. The chassis is mostly stock, with the Öhlins shocks and Showa BPF forks up front, plus tweaked Bembo monobloc calipers. Yum.
But it’s the blower which catches the eye most. It’s mounted on a bespoke bracket, which looks pretty ‘factory’, funnily enough… The install adds an extra 60bhp to the stock 100-odd, but there’s another few horses available in there too, should they be needed…
The ‘Black’ bike has similar spec, in a naked, more stock-looking form, but still pretty sweet.
Triumph wheeled out its new ‘ambassador’, none other than Mr Carl Fogarty, to ride the White bike at Glemseck. As you’d probably expect, he did pretty well – a full-factory blown bike, with a full-factory rider was a bit much for the Cherman VolBärtenkraftsgeschäftsführers… A win for Foggy, and the Triumph Blower Bikes!
Now, at this stage, we’d generally throw in some speculation about how this could be the start of a whole new range of supercharged Triumphs. Sadly, the good folks at Triumph have scotched this, by very headily suggesting that this is nothing more than a jape. The firm has no plans for supercharging all its bikes going forwards sadly, so if you want one of these blown Thruxtons, you’ll have to do it yourself! Our advice is to call TTS Performance, or Big CC Racing in Wokingham, and ask them to sort you out…
