The Story of an Extraordinary Revival

THE UNEXPECTED INVITATION ON TRIUMPH-HEADED NOTEPAPER had been intriguing, but I was not expecting much when I arrived at an anonymous building in an industrial estate outside Hinckley in the English Midlands in June 1990. After all, Triumph had finally gone bust seven years earlier; a final nail in the coffin of a once-proud British motorcycle industry that had struggled through the 1980s in terminal decline.

Strange as it now seems, back in those pre-internet days there had barely been a rumour that something was stirring at Triumph. We knew the failed firm had been bought from the liquidator by a builder. The site of its famous old factory at Meriden, 25 kilometres to the south-west, was a housing estate with roads called Bonneville Close and Daytona Drive.

I had no suspicion that anything exciting was going on at Hinckley, despite having spent many days at a proving ground just down the road, speed-testing the latest, mostly Japanese bikes. There I had occasionally glimpsed a prototype rotary-engined Norton, but no Triumphs. A Triumph dealer had been using new spare parts to assemble small numbers of 750-cc Bonnevilles, antiques compared to modern GPZs and GSX-Rs. But that had ceased. Triumph was dead.

Then, on that June morning in 1990, a man