The Love Affair – Man & Machine

For easy, reliable horsepower nothing beats a Triumph Daytona 675, says T3 Racing’s Tony Scott

ack in 2005 we’d run a trackday series with Niall Mackenzie and Pierfrancesco Chili, when Triumph came to us and said they had the Daytona 675 coming out and did we want to run races on it? We looked around, saw what had been done before – like the R6 Cup – took what we liked, dropped what we didn’t and out of that came the Triumph Triple Challenge.

We ran it for four years at club level with a few guest appearances at BSB, then the following four years at BSB where the Triple Challenge had its own grid and was considered a support class.

It was a single-make series, small performance mods gave it a race feel but it was heavily policed with all stock engines and parts. We took the winner from each year and pulled them into our own team under our banner as T3 Racing, then gave them a shot at the Supersport Cup, later called Supersport Evo. For us that was very successful: we won the Supersport Cup twice, and Evo in its first year in 2014.

Riding the Daytona 675 is like riding an upmarket 250, and that slim build seems to make an immense difference to the bike’s corner speed. It was such a sweet handling bike, and so light, that it made a great transition for riders who were taking a step up. They gelled with the bike quite quickly.

The great benefit for them came against inline fours because you’ve got to rev those hard, almost like a two-stroke, to get them up into the sweet spot… but the Triple is much more forgiving. It produces more torque at lower revs than an R6 (stock 2006 Daytonas made 47.49ftlb at 9900rpm, an R6 hit 43.8ftlb at 11,500rpm), so if you made a mistake with your gears you could still have drive out of the corner.

That created a bit of yo-yo effect on the track. We’d leave the rest of the pack out of the corners every time, then they’d rake us in on the straights because the triple couldn’t match the Japanese fours for top speed – for example the R6 had 5mph on us.

Then in 2013 Triumph brought out a new 675R, which addressed the high-end revs to a much greater degree. But it sacrificed the midrange. We spent over a year working out how to get that midrange back, and we got it back before even the official factory-backed team thanks to a short exhaust system. We proved the point because we won our championship four rounds before the end and always had the fastest speed-trap times.

The bike was such a leap forward from the previous models. From those you could get 132bhp, maybe 135bhp. Now it’s closer to 145bhp and still with that punch out of the corner. You’ve only got to look at the BSB results from last year: five of the top seven in the Supersport championship were on Triumphs.

And they tune up incredibly inexpensively too. It’s an engine that responds to compression really well, and that’s a cheap modification to do – you can make a very a competitive club-level bike quite inexpensively. A superstock-spec one will give you a 135bhp at the back wheel, and that’s just a head skim and a layer out of the gasket. We’ve been doing it for 30 years and have tuned everything you can think of, but in my view the 675 is the easiest and cheapest bike we’ve come across to make good reliable bhp.

Tony is the director of T3 Racing and Promoter of the Triumph Triple
Challenge. Visit www.t3-racing.co.uk for details.

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The Machine

Triumph Daytona 675
Year introduced 2006
Power 123-126bhp
Weight 185kg
Price new £9599

OIL LEVELS
“The oil level is fairly critical for the 675 engine. They don’t respond well to low levels, and that’s one of the two main causes of failure that I’ve seen from them.” Checking is done by a dipstick, and you should be especially vigilant on track.

EARLY MODELS TUNE UP BETTER
“The 2006 675 is a good tuneable engine from a racing point of view. Later generations are less so. On the earlier ones (claimed 123bhp as stock) you can make some improvements fairly cheaply, mostly through upping the compression.”

CHECK THE RECALLS
Triumph operates a very clear system for checking recall histories. Just go to www.triumphmotorcycles.com/safety-recall-search and type in the VIN number of the model you’re looking to buy. 

REGULATOR-RECTIFIER  
“The very early models had regulator-rectifier issues. It’s something to keep an eye on. An easy way of telling if it’s starting to go is when you’re revving the bike, if the lights get brighter as you rev and dimmer as it ticks over.” 

INLET CLEARANCE SETTING
“When you’re setting up the cam timing you have to be a little more liberal on the inlet clearance. It’s to do with the size and the way the piston moves at high RPM as opposed to a Japanese engine, and that’s a peculiarity to the 675cc engine.”

SLIPPER CLUTCH
“On the pre-2013 models fit a slipper clutch. With the amount of engine braking it’s relatively easy to over-rev on a down change, and you can knock out a valve doing that. A slipper clutch safeguards against that happening.”

Words: Dan Aspel