TRIUMPH Bonneville

In the world of motorcycling, it is rare, if not unique, for a manufacturer to have two bites of the cake - both with a cherry on top - with two iterations of one particular model, especially when separated by a couple of decades.

- Harry Fisher

But that is exactly what has happened for Triumph with the Bonneville, first from 1959 to the end of the 1980s (if we include the 750cc models, which, even by the mid-1970s, despite being a logical progression of the model, were shown to be positively antiquated by the new breed of large-capacity Japanese motorcycles that were sweeping all before them) and more recently from 2001 to the present day.

Pedants among you will no doubt argue that the original T120 Bonneville and the current range of Bonnevilles are completely different entities but I would argue that they are the same bike. Look at it this way: if the original Triumph company had continued as it was and was still manufacturing the Bonneville, who is to say that it wouldn’t have reached the same level of development as that which we have today, always assuming that the money was available for such development?

As for claims that the two companies - Triumph Engineering Co. Ltd. up to 1983 and Triumph Motorcycles Ltd (under new owner John Bloor) from that point on - are not the same, well, that has to be dismissed out of hand. If we are to claim that a company ceases to be the same company upon sale to another entity, then Triumph ceased to be Triumph both in 1936, when it was sold to Jack Sangster of Ariel, and again in 1951, when Sangster sold Triumph to the BSA Group. Unlike the current incarnations of Norton, BSA, and Brough Superior, to name but three, Triumph never ceased to be an entity, whereas the three mentioned were resurrected, many years after they had gone out of business and stopped producing motorcycles when the rights to the names were purchased.