A new British bike firm has revealed a pair of Triumph-derived 750cc triples – the GP-Sport and GP-Street – promising handmade quality and massive performance.
Spirit Motorcycles is a joint venture between custom bike shop Spirit of the Seventies and top tuner Tony Scott’s T3 Racing. The former will built the bikes, including a handmade chassis. The latter provides the engines.
The engine is interesting. While its basis is clearly the smaller of Triumph’s triples, the 750cc capacity comes from a longer-stroke crankshaft, up from 49.6mm to 55mm. The engine cases themselves also appear different. In fact, they’re very similar to the ones that have been spied testing on Triumph’s next-generation Street Triple – a model that hasn’t been officially shown yet but will also have a capacity of around 750cc.
Given Scott’s close ties with the factory, is it possible that he’s obtained a supply of the new engines before they’re even officially revealed? Don’t rule it out.
However, he’s worked plenty more magic on the motor. A high compression head and all the other tricks T3 Racing have learnt from years of tuning Triumphs results in an amazing 180bhp on the top-of-the-range ‘R’, or 156bhp on the base model.
The engines are fitted to a tubular frame with K-Tech suspension, and either wrapped in carbon-fibre superbike-style bodywork to become the GP-Sport or left naked, with wide bars and a stacked headlight, to be the GP-Street. Even in base form, the GP-Sport and GP-Street weigh just 145kg.
While it all looks lovely, there is a hitch. The basic versions of either the faired or naked models will set you back a frightening £44,999. And if you want to add an ‘R’ to their name – along with the extra power and stuff like carbon fibre wheels to get the weight down to an astounding 140kg – that rises to £68,999.
The firm has plans to make just 50 of the GP-Sport R models and 50 GP-Street Rs. Numbers for the non-R versions aren’t limited.
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