Category: News Items

Looking back at 2023 we’ve seen lots of new faces at both our ride-outs and club nights. Its been a busy year for the Branch. We’ve met every Thursday with turnouts of 20 plus in the winter months, around 40 on dry summer nights and more than 50 turned out to hear Norman Hyde speak in March. We’ve had 44 rides organised this year. We’ve also had two lunchtime bike meets, our own Old Motorcycle Gathering and we’ve taken our Branch stand to several other shows including the Swallowfield Show and Dr B’s. We joined in the annual Toy Run and Easter Egg runs, went to Sammy Miller’s Triumph day and Bulldog Triumphs Launch day. We had a quiz night, a BBQ and a bring and buy sale. Altogether, we’ve had around 100 events for Branch members to meet together. See below for some photos of the year.

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We’re planning another year full of activities in 2024, so we can all look forward to having more fun on our Triumph’s next year.

Triumph has announced they will discontinue the Thruxton and is producing an exclusive limited Thruxton Final Edition to mark the final production run of a British legend in exquisite style. For information follow this link .

The first Thruxton was produced by Triumph in 1965. This was a production racer and only 52 were made with nearly all of them bought for racing. The Thruxton pictured is the very first of those 52 and is currently owned by Berkshire Branch member Richard and was restored by his brother Greg. See here for more information about this special bike.

The Thruxton name was not used again by Triumph until 2003, when the Hinckley based company launched one based on the new Bonneville which had come out two years earlier. It had an 865cc engine, as compared 790cc for the standard Bonneville, swept back exhausts, rear set foot rests and low clip-on bars. As with the standard Bonneville, this bike was air cooled and had twin carburettors. In 2008 it was upgraded to electronic fuel injection along with the rest of the Bonneville range.

In 2016, Triumph completely redeveloped their Modern Classic range with new water cooled models and as part of that they launched the Thruxton 1200 along with a variant with higher specification suspension called the Thruxton R. Since then Triumph have produced a number of updates including an even higher specification model, the Thruxton RS, the Thruxton Factory Custom and a Chrome Edition with an all chrome tank.

The modern Thruxton’s have frequently been used as a starting point for building custom cafe racers. Numerous custom examples can been seen at bike shows.

So is this really the end of the Thruxton? Well, its been discontinued before and then come back, so maybe it will make a reappearance in the Triumph line up in the future.

Triumph Motorcycle sales, revenues and profits surged ahead in 2022. The company has just published it’s accounts for the year ending June 2022 showing that it’s world-wide sales of motorcycles had increased by over 25% to 89,143, up from 70,838 the year before. Revenues showed an even bigger increase of over 41% to £711 million, up from £502 million in the year ending June 2021, while profits increased to nearly £50m (£49,964K) for the year.

The percentage of the company’s motorcycles sold overseas has increased to 89%, up from 86% the year before, showing Triumph is firmly established in world markets.

The company says it remains dedicated to the continuous improvement of its products and committed to meeting it’s customers needs and desires.

Amen to that.

This year was our first full year of activities after two years disrupted by the pandemic. We made good use of it with around 100 activities/events organised which were opportunities for Branch members to meet up during the year. We had about 40 ride-outs, held our Old Motorcycle Gathering show, held two other bike meets, had our Branch stand at half a dozen other events, met every single Thursday evening and hosted the National AGM. Here are some photos of the year.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

I hope you enjoyed the year. I am looking forward to having more fun with you all on our Triumph Motorcycles in 2023.

Keep on rolling!

Ton-Up Ted