Motorcycle Explorer Nov 2015 Issue 8 | Page 130

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.