Bob on for record
When you’re at a pandemic -induced loose end what else are you going to do but build a 200bhp Triumph Bobber and become a record maker, a record breaker…?
At the start of the first lockdown Jody Millhouse was looking for a project. Tidy up the shed? Dig a fishpond? Not exactly. ‘I thought, why not try and build the fastest Triumph Bobber in the world?’ Excellent. Though it has yet to be proved officially, Jody has almost certainly succeeded in his mission. The record stands at 147mph, which was achieved over two miles on the Bonneville salt flats. Jody recently hit 130mph in 10.5 seconds in a quarter of a mile at Santa Pod. ‘I was only in fourth gear so I’m confident it’s going to destroy that record,’ he tells Bike.
There are two fundamental reasons for this outlandish performance: a Rotrex C15 supercharger and a bottle of nitrous oxide. Without nitrous, the bike makes 165bhp at the rear wheel. With it, power goes up to 200bhp.
‘Fitting the supercharger and the nitrous was the easy part,’ says Jody, who owns the Thornton Hundred custom shop near Milton Keynes. ‘The physical machining, mounting of components and running a few lines here and there wasn’t difficult. What we struggled with was the electronics.’ Like most modern bikes Triumphs use a Canbus wiring system, which allows lots of electronic components to talk to each other using the same wire. It makes for a light loom, but is a nightmare to change anything if you’re customising the bike. ‘We binned the Triumph stuff because we couldn’t get it to work and designed and built it all up from scratch so it would do what we wanted. It now runs a standalone ECU and dash.’ Remarkably, lots of Triumph’s mechanical stuff remains, despite the modifications almost tripling the standard bike’s 77bhp. ‘I didn’t want to take it too far away from the standard Bobber so we run standard engine cases, heads, valves, springs, con-rods, gearbox and frame. The only things we had to change were the clutch, which is a custom made one with titanium pressure plates and extra strong springs, and we fitted forged pistons and high lift cams. The supercharger is the smallest one Rotrex do – if we went bigger we’d have to chop out the front of the frame and I didn’t want to do that.’
Unsurprisingly, riding the Bobber is entertaining. ‘Because it’s supercharged there’s no lag, so as soon as you crack the throttle it takes off. It’s got 170 lb.ft of torque (double that of a GSX-R1000), so you’ve got to hold on tight.
‘We’ve got a supercharged Speed Triple RS here that’s making 230bhp at the rear wheel, but the Bobber is more fun because it’s not designed to go fast. Even though ours has got full Öhlins and has been properly set up, it still requires a bit of a wrestle to go round corners. The noise is incredible.’
Jody’s next job is replacing the nitrous oxide injection. ‘Getting hold of nitrous is a nightmare so we’re looking at water-meth injection [where a water-methanol mix is injected to cool the inlet gases which in turn makes the charge denser, creating more power]. The advantage of this is we get more power all the time, not just when you inject nitrous.’
The bike’s first big public appearance was at the recent Goodwood Festival of Speed. ‘I had loads of interest from people saying “build me one”, but we never build the same thing twice. And to build exactly the same bike would probably be around £100,000.’
‘Why not try and build the fastest Bobber in the world?’