FOLKLORE:TRIUMPH’S2003TTWIN
The unlikely story of Bruce Anstey’s Junior TT victory.
It’s June 4, 2003 and deep in Triumph’s Hinckley HQ, Product Manager Ross Clifford is sitting at his desk watching a live stream of the Junior TT on his laptop. No other Triumph staff are watching – they’re too busy, and everyone knows the Daytona 600 stands no chance. But Ross is hooked, and can barely believe his eyes. The bike he and his comrades launched just a month ago is leading and has just smashed the lap record by six seconds with an average speed of 121.78mph. Behind it, 57 Japanese motorcycles are failing to catch up.
Ross watches with increasing astonishment as Bruce Anstey extends his lead and crosses the finish line a full 11 seconds ahead of Ian Lougher on the factory Honda CBR600. Triumph have won their first international race for 28 years on a brand new bike with just over three months of race development done by a pair of wizards in a Rochdale shed. Back in Hinckley, a shell-shocked Ross stands up and announces to his bemused colleagues: ‘Errrrr, I think we’ve just won the TT.’
The adventure began ten months before when famed engine tuner Jack Valentine heard that Triumph were not only building a 600, but were contemplating racing it. He went to Hinckley and presented his idea of starting a race team based around the new bike. ‘They were interested so I put some budgets together and met Mr Bloor [John, Triumph’s owner],’ says Jack, who remembers little of the meeting except that JB said he sounded like Fred Dibnah (which he does).
While contracts were being drawn up at the end of 2002, Triumph gave Jack and his Valmoto tuning partner Steve
Mellor a cylinder head and some other engine parts to examine. ‘Looking at the motor we knew we could make decent power although it was quite dated in some respects
– it was a heavy lump. But it had a very good cylinder head with really big valves, so we knew we could make power. But the gearbox was crap, with a low first gear and nothing nicely machined. It was like an old CBR600 ’box. The chassis also looked good, but we knew it was going to be a big task.’ With contracts agreed, Triumph gave Jack and Steve six bikes and left them to it. The plan was to enter one of the most cut-throat national championships on the planet – British Supersport – in just four months time. ‘Jack and Steve did an amazing job,’ says Ross. ‘Steve was a genius at tuning engines. We’d done a lot of development work at the factory and got it to around 100bhp before emissions knocked that down a bit, and in eight weeks they’d got it making 125bhp. That doesn’t sound much now but in 2003 it was a lot.’ Jack and Steve had a background in drag racing (Jack was a three time European champion), and they poured all that knowledge into the Daytona motor. ‘We tried many, many cylinder head designs,’ says Jack, ‘and there was only one that worked, and that needed a hell of a lot of epoxy filler in the ports because they were so big. There was enough air flow through those ports to run a blinkin’ drag racer. We raised the compression, but couldn’t touch the crank because that had to stay standard [due to race rules].’
While the engine tuning progressed Jack was also searching for riders, eventually persuading former British Supersport champion Jim Moodie and rising star Craig Jones to join the team. Jim was renowned for his development ability and was sent to Bruntingthorpe airfield, Leicestershire to start turning a road bike into a racer. He didn’t take long to recognise the scale of the challenge. ‘It was a good bike,’ says Jim, ‘but in those days supersport development progressed dramatically every year – not like these days. That meant a 2002 bike was uncompetitive in 2003, and the Daytona 600 felt to me like a 1999 CBR600.’
Still, Jim, Jack and Steve worked tirelessly through the early months of 2003 trying to get the Daytona up to race speed, but there were aspects they couldn’t fix because of regulations. The offset, for example. This is the distance from a line between the fork tubes to the steering stem, and affects the steering geometry. ‘The offset was too big,’ recalls Jim. ‘On short circuits on a normal bike, when you lose the front you put a bit of throttle on to transfer weight to the back and help the front grip again. You can save front end crashes like that. Because the Daytona was so long and had so much offset more throttle just drove the front further into the ground. I had some massive front end crashes.’ Then there was the engine braking. ‘When you shut the throttle it was almost like stamping on the back brake,’ says Jim. ‘It backed into corners terribly.’ Combined with the offset issue, this meant the Daytona struggled on the short circuits, with Jim and Craig rarely getting into the top ten in the first half of the season. But Jim – an 8-time TT winner – knew where it might work: the Isle of Man.
‘He said it would be superb on the roads,’ says Jack, ‘because you wouldn’t get the backing in, and the offset made it very stable. I was a bit worried because I thought it would back in somewhere at the TT, but Jim was sure it wouldn’t because of the higher gearing. So I asked Triumph if they fancied doing the TT.’
Ross seemed keen, so Jack went off to see if he could find some riders. ‘He said we could get Bruce Anstey and John Mcguinness, plus of course Jim, who had won the 600 Junior the year before,’ says Ross. ‘It was like a dream team. It was high risk, because we weren’t winning on the short circuits, but even so it felt like a no-brainer.
‘I went to chat to John [Bloor] about it. I was enthusiastic because it was our first season of racing and I thought we could get better. Also, because the road bike launch was a bit late [May rather than March], it linked with that. John said “ok, do it,” and I can remember thinking “f*cking hell,
I wasn’t expecting that.”’