Triumph Daytona 675
In 2005 John Westlake rode the pre-production 675 Daytona and marvelled at its performance, handling and looks. 15 years later he’s still deeply impressed, especially as you can now buy a decent used one for £3500.
In 28 years of testing motorcycles, the most exciting day was, without question, Wednesday July 13, 2005. At 11am four of us from Bike meet an unmarked white van in the carpark of a pub by the A5 near Hinckley and stand around nervously as a bloke in a Triumph Tshirt unstraps a yellow motorcycle in the back of the Transit. What he rolls out is, frankly, astonishing.
Until that moment, only a handful of Triumph staff had seen a finished Daytona 675 and the expectation was that the new bike would be a threecylinder version of the Daytona 600 – ie, sweethandling, competent, but still a step behind the brilliant Japanese supersport weapons. The 600cc arms race was at its peak in 2005 and noone believed Triumph could compete.
The first shock is purely visual. The bike we’re gawping at is a prototype development machine complete with scrapes and stone chips but it is still Keira Knightley on wheels. Ye gods the 675 is beautiful. The fairing clings to the engine like a wet Tshirt, emphasising how lithe and narrow it is, and it looks hunched forward, aggressive, like a race bike. Perhaps because it was styled by one of the development team rather than a design expert there’s nothing flashy about it, with no flourishes applied purely to keep on trend. It’s pure, functional, beauty – a three cylinder 916.
Such is Triumph’s confidence that not only can we ride the prototype, but they’ve said we can test it against its rivals too. This is unheard of, and has never happened since. Bike photographer Chippy Wood is an excitable man at the best of times, but he’s in danger of gibbering himself to an early grave. We can’t quite believe they’re letting us do this. Triumph’s Production Development Manager Ross Clifford starts the 675 and we listen to a menacing version of the Triumph triple burble as we get on a CBR600, ZX6R and Daytona 600, ready to follow him round an unocial Triumph test route, stopping to swap bikes along the way. The first problem is keeping up. As soon as Ross turns off the A5, he opens the taps on the 675 and it’s all we can do to keep him in sight. Beforehand he’d talked about 123bhp at the crank, a 14,000rpm redline and as much torque at 4000rpm as a CBR has at its 11,000rpm peak, and I’d registered it all as impressive. But when you see it in action… holy crap, the 675 is a missile.
The way it drives out of corners makes it a nightmare to keep up with for the other 600s. I ride harder than I’ve ridden for years and he still pulls away. I remember thinking that either Ross is a TT racer (he’s not), or that 675 is special. After several miles of Grade A silliness we stop and Ross waves me onto the 675. It feels slim and tall, pitching me forward over the bars, but with enough distance to the pegs to give my knees a decent bend. I launch the 675 and almost immediately know how Ross was so fast.
The way it tips daintily into corners reminds me of a VFR400, yet it smashes out of them like an RVF750. It feels so light, so easy and yet so involving too. A small part of my brain is overwhelmed by how good the bike is, but most of it is carried away by the sheer joy of riding. Corners flow into one another with a rise and fall of yowling triple, the tyres tracing a perfect arc from kerb to centreline and back again. What a bike.
I stop at a layby and sit there grinning, wallowing in the fact that I’m the first nontriumph employee on the planet to know what we’ve got on our hands here: a Britishmade, bonafide supersport great. No niggles, no doubts. Amazingly, a decade and a half later, little has changed in the supersport division. If you want a blisteringly fast middleweight sportsbike, a tidy Daytona 675 is still the weapon of choice. Sure, a newer R6 or CBR will pip it on track if you’re a decent club racer, but on the road? No chance. That midrange wins every time. And, best of all, you can now get a tidy example of British supersport genius in your garage for just £3500 – that’s almost as astonishing as what Triumph let us get up to with their prototype 15 years ago.
‘If you want a blisteringly fast middleweight sportsbike, a tidy Daytona 675 is still the weapon of choice’