STREETS AHEAD TRIUMPH STREET TRIPLE 765RS

Never one to rest on its laurels, Triumph has once again put in the graft to keep the Street Triple at the top.

- BIG MAC

You’ve really got to doff your cap to Triumph. Not only did it conceive the Street Triple 675 in the first place back in 2007, in the process setting the gold standard for performance, desirability, build quality and price in the middleweight naked class, it’s continued to set the standard ever since. That’s 16 years with a target on your back, roughly 5800 days when designers at all your competitors have gone to work each day to come up with something better… and, being blunt, have not managed it.

Don’t get me wrong, the sector is loaded with bikes that are all brilliant and worthy of your hard-earned cash, but I’ll bet you a year’s subscription to Fast Bikes magazine that you can’t find a middleweight naked test in ANY of the UK motorcycle media during the past decade and a half that the Street Triple hasn’t won. So, what do you do when your bike is top dog in class, with no sign of any challenge coming from your competitors?

It turns out that if you’re Triumph, you don’t play it safe, save your energy, maintain the status quo and keep adding to the 130,000 units already sold. You don’t even give it a quick once-over with an extra couple of bhp and trim a kilo of weight from it. No, if you’re Triumph, what you do is start with a phone call to the people who have been designing and building your Moto2 engines for the past four years...