Triumph’s first-ever factory involvement in grand prix racing could hardly have gone better. The new 765-powered Moto2 race was a thriller, with Lorenzo Baldassarri beating Tom Luthi by three-hundredths of a second, the top five covered by 2.3sec and with no engine problems.
The extra power and torque of the 765cc triple also bettered the race record by 18sec.
“The first thing I noticed with the 765 engine is that you’ve got so much more power off the bottom, so you’ve a much wider working range. You can stop-start the bike – go in slow mid-corner, stand the bike up and get out. Or you can run corner speed and use a different gear, so the engine will make the racing more fun for the riders and it makes the battling closer and better, because different riders can work in different ways.
“With the 600 everyone had to use the same lines and the same gears.”
Triumph never entered a GP team even at the height of its powers in the 1950s and 1960s, because company bosses said racing was a waste of money. The brand’s best GP result was second place to Giacomo Agostini’s MV Agusta triple in the 1969 500cc at Spa-Francorchamps. The rider was factory road tester Percy Tait and the bike was a T100 twin street bike, developed by Tait and legendary engineer Doug Hele.
Tait, Hele and a few others worked on the project in their spare time, keeping the whole thing hidden from management. “It was all done in secret in a half-disused machine shed behind the Experimental shop,” said Tait.
“There was never an official policy to go grand prix racing,” said engineer Norman Hyde, who worked with Hele and Tait. “But Doug had come from Norton where he had worked under Joe Craig, so he was always mega-keen on racing.
“He would do racing work when he wasn’t supposed to, so he tended to be like Nelson putting a telescope to his blind eye: I see no racing bikes.”
In 1969 Tait contested several GPs, turning up at events in Triumph Experimental Department’s tatty Ford Transit, then racing home on Sunday nights to be back at work on Monday mornings.
https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/news/motogp/motogp-mutterings-2019-qatar-grand-prix-part-3
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