Nearly four years now. Four years that my Ducati 999 has been at the erstwhile witchdoctor’s to cure a running fault that makes it stall and impossible to restart when hot. It’s bound to be some crappy little sensor relay or something, but so far, the fault has remained elusive. Of course, four years is a ridiculous amount of time to wait to have a bike fixed, moreover a bike that was actually running and which you could use. But there you go; the witchdoctor is a friend and he is now retired from his Ducati dealership and he doesn’t want to do the job (evidently) and I don’t, or didn’t, have the money to pay him for all his time, so I’ve let him do it as and when it’s suited him. Apparently, this isn’t often. Will I get it back this season? It was looking that way, and he said I would, but then he contrived to get rear-ended on a racetrack and put a 12-stitch gash in his leg. He couldn’t walk. So, I stopped holding my breath and went in search of a new bike.
The Ducati is a 2006 model that I have had from new. It’s not unreasonable to get a new bike after 13 years. The 999, when it is working, is a fine motorcycle which is why I have had it for so long. I’m perfectly happy with it and as I have probably already written, I can’t see really what benefit I would derive from a faster, better-handling, more modern Ducati on the road. But it has a drawback which it shares with its superbike Ducati brethren: it is unsuitable in the current Swiss regulatory environment. If you read my post on Via Sicura, the traffic laws we now have, you will understand this. In a nutshell, the Ducati starts to make sense at about 120 kph on the open road. Sadly, this is a speed that will ensure you lose your licence and that will land you with a multi-thousand franc fine. The 140 kph that the Ducati will amble along at cheerfully, and which makes perfect sense when you are riding it, will land you in jail and probably result in the Ducati being confiscated. I have ridden for over 30 years at these speeds with no ill effect for me or anyone else. This might seem irresponsible to the casual reader, but if you’ve actually ridden a modern superbike, you will see how normal it is.
Anyway, if I am to continue to enjoy motorcycling without living in fear of what may lurk in my letterbox, I reckoned I needed a new bike that would provide fun and amusement at speeds closer to the legal limit. Hence, I found myself test-riding and subsequently buying this 2019 Triumph Speed Twin.
Triumphs are known as Trumpets, or at least the old ones were, so I have dubbed my bike the Donald Trumpet. It’s a strange choice of nickname as I can’t stand the guy, but there you are. It amuses me.
The Trumpet is a 1200cc parallel twin and it looks very retro. It was designed for people like me, people who can remember riding motorcycles that looked like the sorts of things that rockers took to south-coast beaches in the UK for a weekend of argy-bargy in the 60s. A big comfortable seat, a simple elegant motor, flat bars and no fairing. But in the 2010s, we want reliability, superb handling, oodles of stomp and brakes that work. None of these things were on offer back in the day, but now they most definitely are. The Speed Twin kicks out about 100 bhp which would have been huge in the 70s and early 80s, but is nothing to shout about these days. Its great strength, however, is the monster torque that is delivered by the engine. 1200cc is no small motor and you can expect it to produce the goods when you twist the throttle. For comparison, the bikes it is modelled on would have been about 650 or 750cc and would probably have made half the power.
As I pointed out, however, it isn’t really about going fast all the time. That is no longer the aim. The goal is to bumble along peacefully, but to know that you could wind the thing on should you so desire. It is the lack of fairing that makes it all so reasonable. On the Ducati, the fairing and the clip-ons that have you doing constant press-ups conspire to make you think that you are ambling along when you are really doing 140 kph. On the Speed Twin, it feels quite fast already at 100 kph, and you find that on motorways you are quite happy doing barely 120 kph, the legal limit, while all sorts of other vehicles whizz past you. This would be suboptimal for a long, Europe-crossing, continental trip but for going to work in a radar-littered country, it makes a lot of sense. I don’t know what the top speed of the thing is – probably about 200 kph, I would imagine – but it’s irrelevant as there would be so much wind-blast at this speed that even if the bike could do it, you couldn’t, for very long.
The Speed Twin is an undeniably handsome bike and you feel oh-so-cool riding it. Check out all those little details and just the sheer emptiness of it – you can see right through the motor. But you get proper 4-pot Brembo brakes on big rotors for stopping – probably not too dissimilar to what are on the 999. These aren’t cutting edge brakes these days but they are plenty powerful enough for the road and I have never had any complaints about the Ducati’s braking. The Speed Twin, or at least mine, will not be going round any racetracks. You now get ABS in any case, of course, which is new to me. The rear tyre is an unfashionably small 160 section, but it comes as a Pirelli Rosso Corsa III, so it is super sticky. Put it this way, if they thought you needed more tyre, I’m sure they would have put it on and in any case, you’ve got traction control now so if the thing starts slipping, you shouldn’t end up in a hedge. The suspension is non-adjustable, but if seems fine as it is. It’s not as if I am consumed by a desire to fiddle with it, so the fact that I can’t is no hardship.
The dash looks old-school, deliberately, but it provides a lot of info. You’ve got an electronic display as well as the analogue clocks and that includes two trips, gear indicator, fuel gauge, amount of kms you can ride before you run out of fuel, fuel consumption, both instantaneous and average, and a clock. Strangely, what it doesn’t seem to have is a motor temperature indicator, nor an outside air thermometer, both of which the 999 has. I quite like knowing the ambient temperature and it can be good to know your motor’s temperature, even if ignorance of this fact gives you something less to worry about. I’m always worrying that the 999 is running too hot (which it probably is). There is a button which allows you to scroll through all this info on the go and it is easy to reach and simple to understand. You also get three riding modes, Wet, Road and Sport. I’ve only tried Road so far, as I’m running the bike in, so there is no point in trying Sport. And I have yet to try out the bike in the rain. I shall be avoiding rain as far as is possible, as I loathe washing bikes, although I hate having them dirty. This means that any kms done in the wet always results in long cleaning chores. Anyway, it seems fine to me in Road.
The riding position suits me down to the ground. The pegs are reasonably high and rear-set and apparently will not touch down in corners. I hate it when stuff grounds in bends. Ducatis don’t have hero blobs on the pegs as you won’t be getting them down, and nor does the Speed Twin. The bars are flat and quite wide. They are even wider with the bar-end mirrors that look cool and work really well. Nonetheless, they do make the bike quite wide which is not so good for filtering in traffic jams. You are leaning slightly forward to get to the bars – just enough that you aren’t bolt upright into the breeze, but you still have a great view of the road ahead. The seat is pretty comfy, but it’s not an armchair. In fact, after sitting on it for a couple of hours on my way back from picking it up from the dealer’s, my bum began to protest a bit. This never happens on the 999, which seems to have a piece of plank for a seat, but I think that is because I am constantly shuffling around on it to hang off in the bends; not something you are going to be doing much of on the Speed Twin. So, you tend to just sit in one position and this can be a little bum-numbing after a while. Early days. I may well get used to it.
My friend Manu came by on Sunday on his Triumph Thunderbird and we went for a ride, being careful to dodge the showers that were all around. Manu has had many Ducatis and Triumphs in his life, along with a lot of other things – old MVs, Nortons, Harleys and a Bimota. But his ride of choice for the last decade or so has been this Thunderbird with the stacked pipes. It’s a 900cc Hinkley triple and it makes a raucous sound when you open the taps. So, one more cylinder than the Speed Twin, only ¾ of the engine displacement and rather fewer horsepower, if quite enough. Naturally, as biking friends are wont to do around here, we swapped bikes after a while as I knew that Manu was dying to try out the Donald Trumpet. After about a minute on the Thunderbird, I had found a name for it: The Spluttering Sofa. And I had also found out a lot more about the Speed Twin.
The Sofa’s saddle was immediately hilarious. You can see from the photo that it is much more substantial that the Speed Twin’s perch and it is very comfortable. The bars are higher and narrower than the Speed Twin’s and you feel that you are sitting in the bike rather than on it. The centre of gravity also seems higher, so it’s all a bit disconcerting. Your legs are tucked up under you in a far more forward and a lot less-roomy position that on the Speed Twin. I know that the Sofa handles, because Manu hustles it about at a great rate, but I certainly didn’t feel inclined to. It doesn’t inspire the same level of confidence as the Donald Trumpet. You feel as if you are sitting in a sofa and being rushed around. An odd experience, but not an unpleasant one. Then there is the exhaust note. The Speed Twin pops nicely on the over-run and makes a really good muted impression of a classic Britiron exhaust note. Must be the engine configuration, but I also suspect that Hinkley did their homework here. Some modern Ducatis, despite being 1200cc V-Twins, make a noise like a fart. I am thinking of the Multistradas. In order to comply with Euro 4, it seems, Ducati have just engineered any exhaust noise out of them. Disappointing. The Speed Twin, though, is civilised but still very much a motorbike and its exhaust is in keeping with the rest of it. A nod to the past whilst not pissing off the inhabitants of every village you pass through.
This is not so of the Sofa. If the Speed Twin pops on the over-run, the Sofa splutters, very noisily, like an apoplectic septuagenarian. Crack open the throttle and it roars in a rather gurgling fashion as if it smokes about 60 a day. This is not a bike to pass unnoticed on. The pipes are from Triumph’s own catalogue but are of course illegal in Switzerland and are now impossible to find. So, they aren’t the standard items. You can buy other zorsts for the Speed Twin too, but I don’t think that any of the others look as good as the stock items and my desire for owning a loud motorbike sort of ebbed away when I came to live in this village 15 years ago. Naturally, you don’t want a farting bike, but the Speed Twin has the right soundtrack.
It’s when you look at the Spluttering Sofa that you realise how non-retro the Speed Twin really is. Look at the back mudguard – massive on the Sofa, minimalist on the Donald. Check out the indicators: huge bullets on the Sofa, tiny little dainty items on the Speed Twin that look as if they were sourced from an aftermarket parts catalogue. The pegs on the Thunderbird are the much more period-correct, massive rubber-covered things. On the Twin, they are turned aluminium items that wouldn’t look out of place on the latest Ducati superbike. It’s as if Triumph have already café-racered your Speed Twin, knowing exactly what you’d have wanted to change on it. The result is that there is nothing to change on it at all. Suits me. I no longer really feel the need to customise everything.
I have now done my first 450 kms on the Donald Trumpet and I have liked all of them. It gives you a feel-good factor which is different from that provided by the 999. The Ducati is really all about experiencing the road as a racetrack, the fun you get from picking a line, or hitting an apex and nailing it out of the corner. I love it. It’s how I’ve experienced biking for 30 years. The Triumph is more about taking in the atmosphere and scenery whilst being wafted about on a magic carpet. There are other magic carpet bikes available but you suspect that with them, if you do feel like upping the ante, they will quickly fray around the edges. The Speed Twin, on the contrary, feels small, capable and fast but in a relaxed manner. It is just what I was looking for. And if the Ducati ever makes its way back to my garage, like a lost cat, then I’ll have all bases covered. It’s not as if I have cured, or even attempted to cure, my sportsbike addiction. In the meantime, I am perfectly happy spending my summer with the Triumph Speed Twin – an awesome example of a motorcycle.