ARE YOU experienced?
The most famous exhibit at Triumph’s new Factory Visitor Experience is arguably an ordinary looking Sixties twin whose story curiously echoes that of the firm itself. It’s a TR6 Trophy, located near the ground floor exit. The dark green 650cc parallel twin has issues around whether it’s British or German, and was ignored as being almost worthless for years – yet it’s now one of the world’s most iconic and valuable motorcycles.
That TR6 is the bike on which Steve McQueen – or in reality his stunt-double pal and off-road ace Bud Ekins – jumped the barbed-wire fence in The Great Escape. It’s a 1962-model Triumph parallel twin that, to make the movie accurate, should really have been a German army BMW R75 boxer from 20 years earlier. After filming finished, the TR6 was sold to a farmer who used it to herd cows – before, decades later, nostalgia for McQueen turned the bike into a two-wheeled icon which, now restored, would fetch a fortune at auction.
Triumph’s story follows a similar path. Britain’s foremost motorcycle firm was founded in Coventry in 1902 by Siegfried Bettmann, who had emigrated from Germany a decade earlier. Triumph grew to be arguably the world’s leading
