“Doug Hele had been nagging at me for years to give consideration to a three-cylinder engine design for larger capacity units. One evening late in 1963, after everyone had gone home, we sat in his office and, to amuse ourselves, we laid out the basic outline of what later became the 750cc three-cylinder Trident. This drawing was filed away as a memento.”
Bert Hopwood, in Whatever happened to the British Motorcycle Industry
FOR ANYONE WITH HISTORICAL INTEREST IN THE collapse of the British motorcycle industry, Bert Hopwood’s book is essential reading, if occasionally light on accurate dates. It seems the engine was originally designed on paper in early 1963. The TR3OC has produced an example of a prototype triple, one of a few P1 models built in the Triumph Experimental shop in 1964, which is now on display at the Triumph Visitor Experience at Hinckley.
This had a three-cylinder engine bolted into a modified 650 Bonneville Frame, with Bonneville running gear. Hopwood says that this first triple could have gone into production in 1965, as a stopgap model to capture the big bike market while the designers got on with building something more modern, but the project was quietly pushed into a corner as it upset corporate politics.
Hopwood then refers to an undated meeting in 1966, in which the bombshell that Honda was working on a 750 four was dropped by a sales executive, and the triple concept was swiftly pulled out of the shadows. Suddenly, the triple was back on the table.
Things looked promising until the managers at BSA decided they wanted a triple to sell too, which had to be the same, but different. The BSA version needed to have an engine that sloped forwards and
