Bonneville: a date with destiny
There’s a certain irony that, without the Germans, the quintessentially British Triumph Bonneville might never have existed at all.
Back in 1953, the biggest effort on the motorcycle land speed record was not by the Americans or even Brits, but by the German NSU team. That year, their 500cc streamliner, raised the official FIM motorcycle speed record to 180mph.
But down the road at Pete Dallio’s Triumph shop in Dallas, a bunch of pals were unimpressed. Dallio, mechanic Jack Wilson and Stormy Mangham, decided to build their own machine to reclaim the record and a series of events, culminating with the Triumph Bonneville, got underway.
Their bike, The Devil’s Arrow, had a frame by Mangham, Thunderbird engine tuned by Wilson and, with local flat-tracker Johnny Allen riding posted 191mph one-way in August 1955. But they lacked the money to continue until US Triumph importer Bill Johnson came on board. Three weeks later they did a two-way average of 192.3mph; a record, before a technicality ruled it out.
They returned in 1956 with an updated bike now in white livery... as did NSU. On August 4 NSU logged 211.40mph, before heading home to the Cologne Show. Triumph arrived on September 4 and posted an average of 214.40mph on the 6th. The rest, as they say, is history. In truth, the FIM never officially ratified the record but it didn’t really matter. Johnson, Triumph et al fanned a publicity storm, the bike was shipped to Britain for the Earl’s Court Show and when, two years later, Triumph’s new fastest-ever roadster was unveiled, only one name was ever going to be used. Less well known is that in 1959, soon after the Bonnie was launched, Allen returned to the Salt Flats once more, this time crashing at 220mph. He never attempted it again, ran a Triumph/Suzuki dealer in Fort Worth until 1974 and died in 1995.