SIMPLY THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS

These days, most bikes are good and some are great, but virtually none are perfect for all occasions.

Until now, that is. For the Triumph Street Triple RS is about as close as you can get to a bike which is all things to all men, women and callow youths: perfect for everything from commuting, to a weekend blast with your mates, to a flat-out track day.

The previous version was a superb bike anyway, evidenced by the fact that Triumph’s sold a whopping 90,000 of them, but when the design team at Hinckley sat down to improve on it, four little words were etched into their noggins like acid on steel: light, fast, agile and stylish.

The results are obvious even walking up to it, with a more aggressive look which, from the front, makes it look like an angry wasp, and exquisite attention to detail such as the hand-painted red pinstripe around the wheel. Start up and the new more free-flowing exhaust fills the air with a delicious growl. Ride off and it’s immediately obvious that it’s the lightest bike in its class, at a piffling 179kg fully fuelled.

Scalpel-like handling is a Triumph trademark, and it reaches its pinnacle here, with the bike so light and perfectly balanced that it only takes the merest shifting of weight and the lightest of touches on the wide bars to send you carving effortlessly through bends and powering down the next straight.

And with power and torque up 9% in the mid range, progress is hilariously swift.

The Brembo brakes, with two huge front discs, are as brutal and linear as the acceleration, although the rear needs a firm push for trailing into downhill corners.

After a morning on the road it was time to switch to the sinuous Cartagena track for the afternoon, to unleash the full potential of an engine which was originally designed for the Moto2 racing series.

Of the five riding modes – rain, road, sport, track and rider programmable – I’d been in road and, brilliant though that had been, switching into sport then track was like unleashing the hounds of Hades.

It is, in short, the best naked sports bike in the world, and there’s only one thing I could find wrong with it – it didn’t cure my tennis elbow.

The engineers at Triumph have promised to look into the latter for the next version, hopefully before Wimbledon. Triumph Street Triple RS

Price: £10,300

Engine: 765cc inline triple

Power: 121bhp @ 11,750rpm

Torque: 58 lb ft @ 9,350rpm

Colours: black, silver