NEW AND RIDDEN: TRIUMPHTIGER900

Completely new, but oddly familiar.

Good to know, for old engine luddites like me, that even in the digital age of riding modes, and electronic engine management, making a significant change to a motorcycle sometimes involves reshaping big, heavy bits of steel.

But it’s typical too, that despite all of the engineering brilliance that’s gone into the new Triumph Tiger 900 Rally Pro – the huge pile of swarf, the work of extreme heat, force and giant milling machines operating with microscopic accuracy – the thing you notice first is the white paint on the tubular trellis frame. It looks fantastic.

The Triumph Tiger 900 is all-new, from the front to the back wheel rim, and from the screen (in any of its five, easy

to adjust positions) downward. The old 800 was a great bike, but the development team started with a blank computer screen and some big ideas about how to do this.

The new Tiger is stuffed with clever electronics and nifty rider focused features, but the single biggest change to the bike is the crankshaft – on a motorcycle you don’t get much more fundamental than that. So for the first time we’ve got a Triumph triple that doesn’t feature a 120° crank layout and the evenly spaced firing intervals that go with it.

Triumph refer to the new crank as a ‘T’, so the pins are arranged at 180°-90°-90° intervals. This allows the firing order to be managed so that two cylinders (one and three) fire close together, then there’s a bigger gap to the third