Triumph’s Moto2 for the road

It’s not much more than a bitsa-special at the moment, but don’t let that fool you

Here’s a series of spy photos of Triumph’s new Daytona 765 in action during a private test. This is the motorcycle that the British firm is likely to add to its range next year.

The move to bring back a racey middleweight is spawned from the Moto2 project. Triumph is supplying the engine (a 765cc triple) to every team in the competitive MotoGPfeeder class for the next three years. The eventual motorcycle that we will see on the roads is an off-shoot of that project.

To that end, the motorcycle that our expert spy snapper has caught is a Daytona 675 with the 765 engine that’s currently in the firm’s Street Triple fitted to it – so a pretty typical Triumph parts-swapping exercise (albeit with uprated cam profiles, valve train, pistons, etc).

Let’s assume that when the bike goes on sale next year (and it will, let’s not pussyfoot around about this. Triumph is sinking a vast amount of money into providing the engines for Moto2 – the 765cc engines into Moto2 – so do you REALLY think they’re doing that for their health, or do you reckon they want to make a shed load of cash from selling road-going Moto2 lookalikes with 765cc motors in them? Yeah, us too) a large part of the bodywork is going to change. The lights will shrink, the angles will be more pointy and Triumph will do what Triumph always does with it’s race-bike-on-the-road plans, it’ll make the thing more angry looking.

What our spy snapper has caught on film is in full-on RR mode with the single seat unit, the Street Triple’s 765 instruments and a lovely megaphone-style exhaust, which apes the Moto2 prototype that Triumph showed last year.

Tech-wise, the bike in the video has NIX30 Ohlins forks with Stylema radial calipers and a TTX rear shock (there’s nothing new here, it’s pretty much the rolling spec on the Daytona 675 R).