The Pink Triumph | www.odgie.com

One time about 20 years ago me mate Ted comes up to me in the pub, and says he’s thinking of drag racing his Triumph, and would I like to ride it? There was this new streetbike drag series run by Superbike magazine, with a class for Four-Stroke Twins, and the idea was cos he was a hefty weightlifter chap, an I was a skinny dude with drag racin experience, I’d make it go quicker, and he’d concentrate on doing the tuning. It sounded like a Good Idea, so we did it.

Of course, nothing’s quite that simple… The bike was his road bike, a T140 with an 8-valve top end in a little rigid frame, but as soon as I saw it I said it ain’t gonna work cos it’s too short, so before even our first meeting I’d built a new frame and we’d done all sorts of shit to it. Oh yes, an painted it pink… Anyways, it went quite well, and we won a few meetings and stuff. And of course, anyone who’s ever done drag racing will know that very slippery slope…

img_1144135315_15109_1148588976_mod_342_195 — The new frame ready for first build-up. I got Stu Garland lay tiger stripes over the pink for us, in an echo of the old leopardskin Norton paintwork.

img_1144135315_15085_1148028389_mod_274_187 — Update of first incarnation, still with 8-valve Unit T140 motor. And very much pinker…

So by the end of two or three short years, me and Ted were both skint and in debt, and it was no longer Ted’s road bike, but had grown a full race pre-unit motor with one-off ex John Clift Puma crankcases, a two-speed semi-automatic Bewley gearbox, slider clutch, 3” wide primary belt drive, and nitrous oxide injection… So that would be somewhere around 150bhp then…

It was still on road tyres and ran in the street legal class, and we won the Championship and set the quickest ever time for a Triumph Twin Streetbike at 9.73 seconds – it would actually have been faster, but the cylinder head melted at ¾ track. I felt it go down, but knew it was a good run so hung onto it through the lights… You could see daylight between the exhaust valves when we got back to the pits…

12166206_978596922182536_1234160647_n — A sad photo, Ted sat on the back of the van, Maz Harris in the centre of the photo, both sadly no longer with us. RIP guys.

Eventually we broke the crank in half, and although we got a new crank machined out of solid billet, we got sidetracked into other stuff over the winter layoff, an it never went back together. That was about 15 years ago, and people still ask ‘Whatever happened to the Pink Triumph?’ so I guess it made its mark. It’s still in various bits in the recesses of mine and Ted’s sheds, though I doubt it’ll ever see the light of day again. Anyway, at least now you know…

img_1144135315_15088_1148029112 — A good run at the Ramsey Sprint, Isle of Man TT week.

2015 Update: last year some cool guys from the NCC resurrected the remnants, and after an incrediable amount of work, effort and money, took it to Bonneville to race on the salt flats. Look it all up on Facebook, but here’s a photo – still recognisable as the same bike after all those years and incarnations…