sobering with 6 deaths in a single race a year ago:
You have been misled, "the TT" is motorcycle racing, not Death Race 2000 ...
"The TT" is a
series of races for different types and classes of motorcycle, first race is usually during the afternoon of the first Saturday in June, races for different types and classes are scheduled morning and afternoon of the following Monday, Wednesday and Friday - I say "scheduled" because fog and/or bad weather often causes races to be postponed to the following day. Two of the 2023 deaths were a father-and-son sidecar crew, sidecars do
not race with solos ...
The previous week is "practice week", different types and classes practice separately either early morning or late evening (while there is still light).
So, sad though they were, the six 2023 deaths occurred in different races and practice sessions over two weeks, not "in a single race" ...
One lap of the TT course is nearly 38 miles long, all two-lane public roads closed for racing or practice; there is at least one 30 mph hairpin and other stretches where the fastest bikes (and/or the riders with the biggest
cojones) reach (exceed?) 200 mph ... There are almost no run-off areas, otoh lots of stone walls and earth banks. So, regrettably, when things go wrong, they go very wrong very quickly.
Slippery Sam
a Trident built for the 1970 race
While what became the original
Slippery Sam (in the UK's National Motorcycle Museum for several decades) was built originally for the 1970 UK racing season, the bike in the linked video is a "replica" (and not a particularly good one) likely based on a T150 road bike. Production racing regs and scrutineers were quite lax in 1970 compared even to less than a decade later; however, even 1970 regs and scrutineers would have struggled with a rear brake not fitted to any production Triumph until 1971 and the front disc brake not fitted to any production Triumph until 1973 ...
Before the 1970 UK racing season, Triumph had been production racing with Bonnevilles. 1969 sales of Triumph and BSA triples had been poor all over the world; for 1970, Daytona was to allow 750 OHV engines for the 200, it was decided the Meriden Experimental Department would build a number (12?) of Rob North-framed Trident and Rocket 3 racers for Daytona (6 each of Trident and Rocket 3, three each for British riders, the other three for US riders?), three more Tridents were to be built alongside the Daytona bikes for production racing in the UK and Europe. What primarily cemented particularly
Slippery Sam's legendary status was the bike won particularly the Production TT every year from 1971 to 1975, that last year a ten lap race with two riders on each bike;
Sam won many other titles and individual races but it was the string of TT wins particularly.
1970 front brake on both Daytona and production racing triples was the magnesium 10" version of the Fontana 4 l.s.; aiui, the rear wheel/brake on the production racing Tridents was the q.d. one listed for the 1970 UK & General Export TR6.
Sam continued to race with the front Fontana through 1973, was not fitted with front discs (right caliper and slider reversed as Triumph fitted only one to production bikes) until 1974.
IIrc, the "Slippery Sam" title was originally conferred
on Meriden test rider Percy Tait. He had previously been "Sam The Transport Man"; in 1970, Doug Hele decided the production racing Tridents should contest the 1970 Bol d'Or 24 hour race (the last year it was for 'production' bikes). For some reason, it was decided late on to change the engine from castor to mineral oil; the engine was not cleaned properly internally, the mix of castor and mineral oils caused a sludge in the engine that caused it to eject oil from the breather, that spread over bike and rider (amazing the bike was not simply black flagged
). Qute how the
Slippery Sam title moved from Percy to the bike is lost in the mists.
Gotta love those twin, three-pipe outlet cans
"Rayguns" are basically what was standard initially on all first year Tridents and Rocket 3; when Meriden produced first a "beauty kit" to make unsold Tridents in the US look more like twins, and then made a "US" version of the T150 in 1970, the "rayguns" were replaced by mufflers that looked more like those fitted to the twins (still not the same though ...
).
However, the "rayguns" on production racing Tridents were specially built by Les Williams, originally one of the fitters in the Meriden Experimental Department, later the original
Sam's guardian and eventual owner. Les donated the bike to the NMM; when fire destroyed the NMM racing bikes hall in 2003, Les was one of the specialists allowed to go through the rubble to collect as much as possible to restore as many bikes as possible; he rescued
Sam's rayguns, painstakingly beat them straight again and soldered the special internals back together. Nevertheless, Arthur Jakeman (one of Les's colleagues in the Meriden Experimental Department and later one of Les's partners in L.P. Williams) joked the special 'rayguns' were the reason production racing Tridents 'only' produced 77 bhp when the same internal components in Daytona triple enginess produced 80 bhp with the 3 into 1 exhaust system ... :laugh:
So the factory mechanics had to rebuild TM bikes engines as well as the racers ...
