As a boy, Stuart Thornton always knew when his dad Mike was on his way home from work.

The distinctive note of his Triumph Tiger Daytona’s exhaust would rumble through the Somerset villages, heralding his arrival long before he appeared on the driveway.

“The sound of the Triumph was part of my childhood, and part of the village really,” says Stuart, who coveted the Daytona from the 1980s onwards.

“He took me to prom, or what was then the school dance, on it, to everybody’s amusement, and it was something I really coveted and hoped that some day I would inherit.”

“Bittersweet” inheritance

Sadly, that day came sooner than expected when Mike died after a short illness at the age of 73 from mesothelioma, a legacy of working with asbestos as a young man.

That was in 2017 and, at the time, Stuart and his father were in the process of restoring the ‘67 Triumph that had been in the family since 1975.

“It’s bittersweet, because you know that if you’re going to inherit the bike, it’s because your dad’s gone,” he says. “And he went ahead of time, basically as a result of an industrial accident. It’s what I inherited from my dad – I didn’t ask for anything else. He was kind enough to entrust me with it.”

Mike, and Stuart’s mum, Enid, had moved back to their native Yorkshire, and father and son had stripped the Triumph down, resprayed the frame and sent the carbs away for refurbishment.

“We were doing little bits together, and he was enjoying it,” says Stuart. “It was all coming together, but then unfortunately he got too ill. He signed it over to me at the end of 2016, and I said I’d finish it for him – for us.”

Stuart completed the rebuild the following year, with the help of the Norfolk Motorcycle Museum in North Walsham, and now rides the Triumph around the country lanes of his adopted Norfolk home.

Having it up and running brought a bit of closure

“Having it up and running put a bit of closure on it,” he says. “Without getting too misty-eyed, I often have conversations with my dad as I’m riding it, just saying ‘here you go, it’s still going, it still does that pop’.”

Mike, originally a steam engineer who went on to work in the refrigeration industry, rode a succession of James motorbikes as a young man, but was without a bike by the mid ‘70s.

All that changed after a conversation about motorbikes in The Swan pub in Askern, South Yorkshire.

“He had gone down to the pub to play dominoes with a bunch of people and the conversation turned to motorbikes,” says Stuart. “This guy had said he knew where there was a Triumph Daytona, and dad was interested.

“I think back then buying the Daytona was a bit like buying the Ninja of the day. It was the sports version, the one to have.

Something Mike could work on

“I think it appealed to him because he was a bit older, he was mechanically minded, and it was something that he could work on, so by some mechanism he ended up bringing the motorbike home.

“It must have been ridden for a short period of time because my mother says she remembers being on the back of it, heavily pregnant with my older sister, Helen.

“Shortly after he got it, because the bike had some issues – it’s a Triumph, it would have leaked, it wouldn’t have run right, it’s got difficult-to-balance twin carbs – it was rather quickly taken to bits.”

When Mike bought the Triumph, it was painted all white – a non-standard colour for a Daytona, and Stuart has been unable to find out why.

“When it was new, it was either never painted in the right colours or there’s a rationale why it was white – and nobody really understands it,” he says. “I’ve spoken to the owners club and they’ve traced the numbers back. It appears in a sale from this place in Nottingham, and then it goes quiet until reappearing in a conversation in a pub in Askern in 1975.”

The Triumph stayed in boxes until a few years after the family had moved to Somerset in the early ‘80s.

“Nut and bolt restoration”

“One day, dad decided ‘right, I’m going to start putting it back together’,” says Stuart. “He did a nut and bolt restoration of it. In my mind it was still white at that point, but it could have been when it went red, which happens to be a Nissan colour.

“Dad couldn’t work out why he was attracted to that red until he’d finished it – it was quite funny because he wheeled it out onto the drive and put it in front of the company car he had at that time, which was exactly the same colour. He went ‘ah’.”

When rebuilding the bike – a 500cc sports model created to mark Buddy Elmore’s win at the 1966 Daytona 200 race – Mike was unable to find the correct exhaust.

“He couldn’t get 500 pipes, so he put on 650 pipes,” adds Stuart. “He was a bit embarrassed by the noise, but everyone else loved it so he kept them on. He was known throughout the villages for it.

“You could hear him coming from two villages away. You knew exactly where it was because you knew what hill it was coming down as it was popping away.”

The same pipes remain today, and the bike remains… loud.

Main mode of commuter transport

All through the rest of the ‘80s, right up until his final working years in the noughties, Mike used the Triumph as his main mode of commuter transport.

“He used to make the daily 30-mile trip from home out to Portbury, where he worked as chief engineer at Frigoscandia,” says Stuart, who rode scramblers off-road as a youngster, but didn’t take his bike test.

“I had a series of KTM enduro scramblers and did green lanes and stuff like that. I also had Honda C50s and 70s, a hotchpotch of bikes bought for nothing and run into the ground. I never rode them on the road and I didn’t get my licence until this bike stimulated it. When I had restored this bike was about the same time I finally got my licence.”

In 2001, Mike bought a BMW R1100RT – was it the end of the road for the Triumph?

“Every now and then he sort of announced ‘I think I’m going to sell the Triumph’ and I’d protest like crazy,” says Stuart. “‘No no no, what do you need to do to it, let’s work this out’, and I managed to convince him every time not to sell.

Daytona was nice and smelly and noisy

“The BMW became his more long distance bike, but he genuinely did like riding the Triumph to work because it was nostalgic and nice and smelly and noisy and stuff.”

Stuart still had plenty of work to do when he got the bike home to Norfolk in 2017, much of it still in boxes.

“I had to do a full hunt around the garage up in Yorkshire to make sure I’d got everything,” he says. “I got the stuff back here and did a full audit to see what was missing. There wasn’t too much, and just a couple of things I obviously had to replace.

“I used Oliver Barnes at Tri-Supply for parts. He’s a lovely guy – he will tell you exactly what you need every time, really supportive. My dad had bought bits with him as well, and I actually made a trip down to see him and bought him a bottle of whisky to say thanks for supporting my dad while he was alive.”

For nearly three months, Stuart painstakingly put the Triumph back together, using rattle cans to respray the bike in the same Nissan red his father loved.

“I did it sympathetically to my dad’s taste – to a purist it’s wrong, but it’s how my dad envisaged it,” he says. “It’s due another respray and a full work down, and I’m in half a mind to put it back to what it should have been, which is blue over white with black panels and black frame.”

Finally, Stuart got the old bike running, a feeling he describes as “quite amazing”.

Pottering around on the old bike

“I’ve been pottering around on it ever since,” he says. “There was a period when I used it to go to work, which was great fun – in the summertime that was, not really in the wet weather.

“Blatting from Norwich over to Lowestoft through the country lanes was a great way to start and finish the day.

“It’s a bike that you have to check when you get off it, because something’s probably fallen off, so you need to go back the same route the next day to see if you can find it.

“I think it’s found its spiritual home in a way in the back roads of Norfolk, because there are no demanding hills, nice little corners and the speeds are not too high. You can just potter about.”

So what’s the furthest Stuart has ventured? Has he taken the Triumph back to Yorkshire?

“That would be folly,” he smiles. “The furthest I’ve been is Hunstanton via the north Norfolk coast, a good long day’s trip – but it did seize on the way back. It was a very hot day, and it has a problem with one cylinder overheating. I just let it cool down and off I went again. It’s fairly robust – I’m pretty confident it didn’t damage anything.”

The Triumph may not have been to Yorkshire, but the Yorkshire branch of the family has come to the Triumph.

Taking his mum out on the Triumph Tiger Daytona

“Several years ago, my mum asked if she could come on the back of it for nostalgic reasons, so I said ‘yeah of course’, and we went on a little blip round the Norfolk lanes,” says Stuart. “My mum would have been in her 70s by then, but she was obviously adamant that she’s still 21. It was nice – she said it feels exactly the same as it did all those years ago.

“It’s a cliche, but it is a part of the family. When they come down they’ll have a poke about at it, and when I go back to Yorkshire they’ll say ‘how’s the Triumph’? as if it’s a forgotten relative they don’t see very often that lives at my house.”

Unlike people, motorcycles can be immortal, and Stuart is determined that his father’s Triumph will stay in the family for decades to come.

“It’s not leaving the family. My daughter’s inheriting it, whether she likes it or not – she’s five,” he smiles. “At the moment, every time I start it up she runs away. She’s sat on it when it’s not running, but as soon as it starts up with its noisy big throaty pipes, she thinks twice and goes ‘no, I want to get off now’.

“I’ve got some work to do with that, but we’ll get there. I’m quietly confident that she’ll get ‘the bug’ in the end…”