One feature I really liked about the 2001 Triumph Sprint RS was the smoothly damped Sagem fuel injection system so I was intrigued when the maker decided it needed fixing. I was looking forward to getting my hands on one...
Well, now I have, and that's not all that Triumph has improved on its top all-rounder. Marginal revisions of the front suspension have yielded impressive improvements to stability and road-holding.
But first the motor: the latest edition of the 955cc triple gets a closed-loop fuel-injection system with a lambda sensor on the collector that reads the level of unburnt gases in the exhaust stream and adjusts the fuel input accordingly, dozens of times a second.
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Together with a digital rev-counter (a simple sub-routine of the ignition processor) and a throttle position sensor, the system not only adjusts itself to meter the optimum mix of air and atomised fuel but "learns" from the rider in the sense that it measures the rate of change of these parameters.
Its response to big throttle inputs is as instantaneous as on any racing system. Drift through the Friday afternoon traffic on the RS and the system will damp out the on-off jerking of the tiny throttle movements almost as well as the earlier model and still way better than any other spritzer set-up I've tried.
Then get it out on your favourite twisties and crack it open hard and the steering gets very light indeed as the bike leaps forward on a huge thrust of mid-range torque right now; its response to big throttle inputs is as instantaneous as any of the pure racing systems.
The motor has been re-tuned to take advantage of this versatility. The Sprint topped out at a slightly disappointing 228km/h, slower than I would have expected given that Hinckley claims 88kW for this version on the T-series motor.
Its mid-range, however, is hugely muscular, peaking out on 100Nm of solid grunt at 5100 revs thats 1100rpm less than the previous model.
I was always conscious of having to pay attention to get good shifts.
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