Triumph Rocket III is a beast with three cylinder

By Susan Carpenter

Sept. 16, 2014 2:58 AM PT

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 2, 2007 —

The Rocket III Classic Tourer is Triumph’s latest entry into the cruiser market, and one thing’s for sure: It’s no hog. But at 751 pounds dry and nearly 2,300 cc, it is quite the heifer.

Power. Girth. Flash. Triumph’s biggest and baddest is a real beefcake of a bike that panders to cruisers’ basest instincts. It just does it in an unconventional way.

New for 2007, the touring version of Triumph’s year-old Rocket III Classic is a triple novelty. The long and low profile, the floorboards and rock ‘n’ roll shift are pure cruiser, but the bike is English, not American or Japanese. Its power isn’t cranked from a big, air-cooled V-twin but a gargantuan, liquid-cooled in-line triple. Busting the bucket at a whopping 2,294 cc, it’s also the largest-displacement mass-produced motorcycle with a motorcycle engine on the market.

On paper, that adds up to a bike so macho you almost need a mustache to throw a leg over.

Or so it seems. Flipping the switch, it’s a different story. Firing up the bike, I was struck by the timidity of its exhaust note. It was Arnold Schwarzenegger talking with Maria Shriver’s voice.

If you’re a Harley fan, that isn’t a good thing. But Triumph’s elephantine tourer is more of the anti-Harley. It’s for aging Steve McQueen types who caught the biker bug tearing around on ‘60s Triumphs but whose bones can no longer take the abuse -- guys who prize the nostalgia of this 105-year-old motorcycle marque as well as the performance and novelty of its famed triple cylinder.

The advantage of a triple over a twin? There’s just as much bottom-end torque (147 pound-feet at 2,500 rpm) but less vibration and higher revs, for an even broader power band. Then there are aesthetics. On the Rocket III Classic Tourer, the motor’s mounted lengthwise rather than crosswise in a nod to another well-loved though long-defunct English motorcycle manufacturer -- BSA.

What’s modern about the ’07 tourer: the motor is counterbalanced, to make the ride even smoother. In addition to being liquid cooled, it’s also shaft driven and fuel-injected.

Despite these modern amenities, I admit I was prejudiced against this bike before making it mine for a couple weeks. I didn’t care that the bike pulls a whopping 140 horses at 6,000 rpm. In these days of escalating fuel prices, the bike’s heft seemed out of sync with the times. I figured the bike would consume as reasonably as a frat boy at an open bar.

At first, that suspicion was confirmed. The fuel light came on exactly 100 miles after I’d filled up. On a 6.3-gallon tank, the math worked out to a

worse-than-your-average-passenger-car 20 mpg, but that was inaccurate. When I filled up at 107 miles, only 3.5 gallons fit

in the tank. That means the

bike actually gets a respectable 30.5 mpg. It turns out there’s a problem with the calibration

on the fuel sensor on some of these bikes, Triumph admits, but not so many that it’s issuing a recall.

Once my fuel concerns were erased, it was a lot easier for me to enjoy the bike’s meat-and-potatoes power and tornado-proof stability. Even carving canyons, this 98.4-inch behemoth was a lot easier to throw around than I expected because the front end isn’t raked for raising cain, just kicked out a moderate 32 degrees.

Overall, this bike defied my expectations, though I do have one request: I would have liked a reverse gear because I was sweating after three-point turns in my driveway.

susan.carpenter@latimes.com