CW TBT 2006: Triumph 900 Scrambler – ROAD TEST The Ghost of Steve McQueen. - Cycleworld
You see these great fire roads that seem to go on forever, twisting and climbing across the rugged green terrain, and they look like a dual-sport version of Paradise. The answer, of course, is easy: You missed it because, most of the time, you were riding on a large, fast road bike with dropped bars, and the dusty turnoffs into those jeep trails looked about as inviting as a diesel spill on an exit ramp. I’m flying into California to spend a week on the new 900 Scrambler, a bike that presumes to evoke Triumph ’s great Trophys of the 1950s and ’60s, those stylish, all-purpose bikes that could tour, take you to the corner store or run across the... Street scramblers were a big thing in the Sixties, and Triumphs were the absolute kings of the class. They essentially invented the category with the TR5 Trophy in 1949, and then went on to dominate desert racing and enduro events for the next two decades. Steve McQueen famously raced a 650 “desert sled,” then joined the Triumph-sponsored 1964 American ISDT team, along with the Ekins brothers, Dave and Bud, and Cliff Coleman and John Steen. McQueen even rode a Triumph, thinly disguised as a German army bike, in his attempted Great Escape –with Bud Ekins standing in for the famous fence jump. Lee Marvin and Keenan Wynn raced Trophys in the desert. Source: www.cycleworld.com
