Yohoho and a twistgrip of fun…
THE BRIGHT SILVER BIKE YOU’RE CURRENTLY looking at is almost certainly the second-best Bonneville I’ve ridden in a very long riding life, much of it spent riding Triumph Bonnevilles. The very best? I’ll get to that in a moment. That last statement stopped me in my tracks. I performed a little burst of mental arithmetic and understood that it’s well over a half-century since I somehow passed my riding test. A scary thought. I’ll not mention it again.
Except to say that in those far-too-many years I have indeed ridden lots and lots of Triumph twins, most of them Bonnevilles, even though I’ve never really been much of a Bonnie fan. I was recently invited to take out one of the late Meriden T140s, one with disc brakes at each end and an electric starter in the middle, and although I was unable to actually make the date, it set me thinking, wondering which was the stand-out bike in a very long line of Triumph twins. Not just Bonnevilles. My first thought was a TSS, the eight-valve flyer which can be both brilliant and bloomin’ dreadful. I’ve ridden more of the latter than the former, sadly, but a couple of them were genuinely
