Brand-new and 50 years old all at once, the Fender/Sucker Punch Sally's Thruxton currently
The road to Coolsville is a bitch to find. It's not on any road map; in fact, if you need directions you'll never find the place. Likewise, the overly keen are thwarted. Try too hard, look too desperate, and you won't get within 10 zip codes.
Having the right ride for the journey helps. Something like the custom Triumph Thruxton café-racer shown here.
Triumphs of old were always cool. Marlon Brando channeled his inner badass beatnik in 1953's The Wild One aboard a Triumph. James Dean, a brain-freeze in blue jeans, rode a Triumph in real life. Ditto King o' Kool Steve McQueen, who no doubt owned more Triumph T-shirts than tailored suits. Evel Knievel, pre-Elvis outfits and pinky rings, jumped a Triumph. In a brilliant bit of type-casting, Warren Beatty's character in Shampoo bedded half the housewives in Beverly Hills, making his horny rounds on a Triumph. On the racetrack, Triumph had swarthy Gene Romero with his lock-up-yer-daughter good looks, while BSA had Dick Mann, who looked like the dad doing the locking up.
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Café-riffer: Matching Esquire Telecaster was crafted by Fender master guitar-builder Paul
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Sara Ray wasn't the only artist enlisted. SoCal's Duane Ballard is one of the best leather
Not that the coolosity gene made the jump to the new factory in Hinckley when reborn Triumphs started rolling again in 1991 after an eight-year hiatus. With the exception of the rorty Speed Triple, most of the new Triumphs-and especially the lame-o early cruisers-couldn't find Coolsville if you mounted a Garmin and plugged in the GPS coordinates.
Then came the Bonneville II in 2001. Not as lithe or well-proportioned as the original Bonnie, and shame about those pipes, but there was just enough of the original DNA present that the revival worked. Serious swagger arrived three years later with the Thruxton variant, named after a British racetrack, styled after the homebrewed café-racers that London's Rockers and Ton-Up Boys used to terrorize traffic in the '60s. Suddenly the Bonneville was cool once more.
Turn it up to 11: What, you expected a rocker-style bike to wear anything resembling a muf
The jazzed-up Thruxton seen here bumps that coolness quotient considerably. Actually, it had to, given the client that commissioned it: Fender Guitars' Custom Shop, the same outfit that crafts bespoke Strats and Telecasters for the likes of Clapton, Beck, Burton, Cray, Gilmour and Townshend. They needed a traffic-stopper for their booth at the big National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Show. Ordinary wasn't an option.
"I'm a Triumph guy, I didn't want yet-another Harley chopper," says Mike Eldred, the Custom Shop's director of sales/marketing. "I wanted a '50s-style Triumph."
Curious, then, that Eldred turned to Sucker Punch Sally's to build the bike, never mind that both outfits are HQed in Scottsdale, Arizona. Formed in '02 at the height of the neo-chopper craze by partners Donny Loos and Jeff Cochran, Sucker Punch struck a blow for rationality by offering minimalist custom Harleys for about $16,000 and partially assembled do-it-yourself rollers for under $10K. Current SPS owner Christian Clayton, 39, started out as a customer and friend before buying the company in '06. While expanding the business, he's kept the entry-level pricing, albeit adjusted for inflation. Now the base Traditional Bobber costs $19,995, while the unpainted Working Man's Kit goes for $10,800. It's not coincidental that in the same week Jesse James shuttered his West Coast Choppers operation, Sucker Punch had 19 bikes being built on the shop floor.
Not your usual chop-shop then, driven home by the following on the company's website: "We are bike builders, hot-rodders, greasers, mechanics, electricians, welders, fabricators, skaters, snowboarders, BMX riders, motocross racers, chopper heads, filmmakers, designers, artists, musicians, chefs, authors, dreamers, makers, movers and shakers." Adds Clayton, "We're just a bunch of like-minded guys who love taking any piece of metal to the next level."