STREET TRIPLE 765RS
You've really got to doff your cap to Triumph. Not only did it conceive the Street Triple 675 in the first place back in 2007, in the process setting the gold standard for performance, desirability, build quality and price in the middleweight naked class, it's continued to set the standard ever since. That's 16 years with a target on your back, roughly 5800 days when designers at all your competitors have gone to work each day to come up with something better… and, being blunt, have not managed it.
Don't get me wrong, the sector is loaded with bikes that are all brilliant and worthy of your hard-earned cash, but I'll bet you a year's subscription to Fast Bikes magazine that you can't find a middleweight naked test in ANY of the UK motorcycle media during the past decade and a half that the Street Triple hasn't won. So, what do you do when your bike is top dog in class, with no sign of any challenge coming from your competitors?
It turns out that if you're Triumph, you don't play it safe, save your energy, maintain the status quo and keep adding to the 130,000 units already sold. You don't even give it a quick once-over with an extra couple of bhp and trim a kilo of weight from it. No, if you're Triumph, what you do is start with a phone call to the people who have been designing and building your Moto2 engines for the past four years…
If you're taking all the trouble of going racing by becoming the engine supplier for the Moto2 world championship, you might as well get some benefit from it. So, when the man from Triumph says that the engine in the 2023 Street Triple R and RS is the exact same as the one in the Moto2 bike, minus posh clutch, Marelli ECUcopy of that engine, complete with concessions to the road and Euro5 emissions, making 128bhp. I have no problem with Triumph's claim that the Street Triple's engine has a direct link to the Moto2 race engine being genuine and not some sort of marketing guff. If the target for the latest Street Triple was 130bhp, why wouldn't you just copy the race bike engine when you know it makes the target power you're looking for? It just makes sense.
