The Concept
The Hinckley crew have come up with a winning
formula as they have clued into what riders are
looking for. They are looking for options and while
finding a bike that is all things to all riders is about as
possible as finding the Holy Grail; Triumph have come
up with a rather good plan to please as many as
possible.
First of all you have to know why the rider wants the
bike and then have the design built to that
specification. Ask one hundred riders what exactly an
adventure bike is and you will get one hundred
variations on the same theme.
It has to go off road! Yeah we hear this all the time
and we have shown that just about any bike can go ‘off
road’. If you really want an off road bike then you want
a rally bike, just see the Dakar spec and you have an
off road bike sorted. It’s a compromise of performance
based on your own ability when looking at what bike
to get for... we’ll call it dual sport because you also
want something that will tour for miles upon miles in
comfort... and that’s not a rally bike.
With this in mind I took the Tiger on just about every
surface that I felt it was aimed at. I hit the M6,
perhaps the most boring road in the UK with the
exception of maybe the M25. I took her down dual
carriageway and into town traffic. We pushed out to
the countryside for single-track tarmac with 30%
gradients both up and down before hitting some
simple Byways for gravel, splash and ruts. I had the
stock tyres on rather than TKC80/70 for anything of a
more serious dirt nature. I wasn’t about to go level 5
on Bridgestone Battle Wings, that’s for damn sure.
No one can argue that an 800cc Triumph is going to be
as nimble flashing down a Byway as a Suzuki DRZ400
ridden by the same rider. What I mean by ability is that
if you had the same Byway, rutted and a bit snarly in
places and put me on a DRZ400 and Marc Coma on the
Triumph Tiger 800 then I know who is going to be the
waiting at the end of the lane. No one is going to
argue that heading over the auto bahn for 600 miles is
going to be a barrel of laughs sat on that same DRZ! I
know who’s going to be ready for another full day
come Berlin. Horses for courses.
So the puzzle that Triumph has tackled is – make us an
off roading tourer. Something that I can ride all day on
the tarmac and can then handle some gnarly dirt down
in South America. Here is the answer that Triumph
came up with... and it’s a good one.