RealClassic DAVE WILLIAMS’ TRITON
Triton. For those who remember it first time around, the name flips the on-switch in the memory bank, and the mind images start rolling on your mental screen. Jailhouse Rock, Kid Creole, Bill Haley and the Big Bopper. Brylcreem on your hair, espresso coffee in the cup, white chin scarves and if you wore a helmet at all, it was a pudding basin. Mods and rockers, juke box jives, Bank Holiday punch-ups on Brighton beach, and anyone who rode a bike that wasn't British needed their head examined. Which you might very well oblige by undertaking with the aid of a bicycle chain and a set of knuckledusters - although Harleys were OK if you could afford one, but few could back then in grimy, impoverished, post-war Britain.
The Ace Cafe, the Busy Bee, the Chelsea Bridge Mob and cafe racing early-60s-style, involving death-defying (well, mostly) burnups along the North Circular Road looping around central London, up the Great North Road heading towards Bonnie Scotland, along the Watford By-Pass, or through the series of corners marked ‘Deceptive Bends’ on the Brighton Road near Dorking.
You had to queue to be one of the 40,000 fans lining the track at the Brands Hatch bike races, unemployment was nonexistent even if wages were pretty low, Mike Hailwood would win three separate hourlong Grand Prix races in a single day, and the pound in your pocket bought four gallons of top grade four-star petrol. Yeah, those were indeed the days, in the Triton years…
A 1960s hybrid generally created by marrying a twin-cylinderTriumph engine with the Featherbed frame off a Norton, the Triton was the archetype cafe racer of the period, arguably delivering all the more street cred via the fact that you couldn't buy one from a dealer. You either had to build your own, or get the likes of Dave Degens, proprietor of Dresda, to screw one together for you. Either way it would be one of a kind, since not even any two Dresdas were the same. Because there was no such thing as a catalogued Triton streetbike, that made each one built different from the
