Celebrating 20 Years Of Triumph: An Exclusive Interview With Product Manager Simon Warburton

Monday, September 20th, 2010

As part of Triumph Live at Mallory Park, Stay On The Black took the opportunity to sit down with Triumph Product Manager Simon Warburton and ask him about designing motorcycles, the UK bike market, rivals, electric bikes & MotoGP.

SOTB: Hi Simon, nice to meet you. We understand you’ve been at Triumph for quite some time originally as a Design Engineer?

SW: Yes it was engineering design not styling. I started on the chassis, doing ergonomics, lights and other bits and bobs before moving onto the engine. So my first job was the engine design on the 955 ST – that was doing the cooling system, the exhaust system and the fuel injection calibration.

Then I moved onto the Daytona 955 update in 2001; designing rods, pistons, stuff like that for the engine. I then moved onto the Daytona 675 and designed the gearbox, the clutch, the starter mechanism and the gear selector mechanism and then moved onto the chassis and did the ergonomics, the bodywork, lights and then moved into my current position of Product Manager.

SOTB: So how many designers does it take to design a bike?

SW: It depends on the project. If you’re doing a whole new bike, you’ve got anywhere between seven and ten doing the engine and seven and ten doing the chassis. Obviously if you’ve got a fully faired sports bike then you’ve got quite a lot more bits on the chassis then there are on a basic classic bike.

So you’re looking at anywhere between 14 to 20 for a complete bike over a period of anywhere between a year for a small update but if it’s a complete bike it’s 3 to 4 years.

SOTB: And how long into that before a prototype is out?

SW: So when people see the first prototype bike riding around and say “oh it’s going to be out in two months”, no, it’s going to be out in a year and a half because it’s about a year and a half into the project when you can get the first prototype bike up and running. And then there are various stages of more and more refinement and more and more problems to overcome to get to production.

SOTB: With such a long development time there must be ‘mind-changing’ moments?

SW: On the Thunderbird project, we had a slight ‘change of tac’ in the middle of the project, the one that came out last year. We made a late change to the specification which put about another year and a half on the project and that project was over five years.

The styles are changing and the specifications that you have to reach are also changing and the world moves on and you have to polish up your crystal ball and figure out where to go. You have to be prepared to change your mind in the middle.

We try and set the standard very high in all areas and we obviously try and predict what sort of bike we will need in four years time. You use your general experience and look closely at what’s been happening over the years, charting progress and then try and set the standards so high in terms of power and performance for a sport bike so that in five years time you’ll be on the money. You also have to keep your eye on what’s going on and recognise that “hang on a minute”, the worlds changed a bit and what is now the right thing to do isn’t what we thought the right thing to do was and that’s when something will take a bit longer.

SOTB: So you’d never ‘can’ a project?

SW: We normally wouldn’t. I mean normally you’d hope that you hadn’t got it that wrong but that’s possible. We have canned a project once. We did a big 1300cc sports tourer that we famously canned in the early years of this decade. We got quite far down the line and just realised that this isn’t the bike for us.

SOTB: How do you think you keep up with the likes of Honda and Suzuki Etc?

SW: Just by trying very hard, learning from our mistakes. We’ve got some very good engineers and we just work hard. There’s no magic to it. You’ve just got to set the right target and it helps that John Bloor (Triumph CEO and rescuer) believes in investing in the future. He won’t back away from spending a lot of money if it’s the right thing to do and he doesn’t have this short term view that a lot of people have, especially investors in companies who say things like “I need to return this in three years time” and he’s very much “no, no, five, ten, fifteen years that’s fine”. It’s the right thing to do now so we’ll do it. So that helps a lot.

SOTB: Triumph is really the UK bike market at the moment, do you think there’ll be other manufacturers?

SW: The UK is one of the biggest markets we’re in. UK, US and France are all of a similar size for us then you’ve got Italy, Germany big markets Spain, Japan, Australia, South Africa, and Argentina.

I don’t know, I think there’s too much ‘short-termism’ in Britain I think for people to really invest in a manufacturing industry. Manufacturing doesn’t do particularly well in the UK because there aren’t people believing in it, investing in it. It’s kind of disappointing. It would be good for the bike world in general and for motorcyclists if there were more [manufacturers] but I can’t see it. Nobody has stepped up and come anywhere near yet.

SOTB: Are there any plans to do further partnerships and specials, such as the one you did with Paul Smith?

SW: Not as a policy or a strategy, I think it’s very clear that we do need to get the word out. What becomes apparent, whoever you ask, whoever you talk to, is that the thing that’s holding us back is awareness. There’s no question about it. The bikes we do are very competitive and yet other people sell more of them and its awareness and perhaps dealer network also. But the limiting factor is not the bikes. I think you’ll still find people in the UK who don’t know we make bikes or think we just make Bonneville’s. Bonneville’s, well the whole classic range together, is 25% of our business and a lot of people think it’s 50% - 75% of our business and we just do a few sports bikes and it’s not that way at all. But what we don’t do is spend a lot of money on marketing. The whole global marketing team is six guys and they’ve got enough man-power resource to put the brochures out and get the website updated and this [Triumph Live] has been done in some spare time but we don’t spend enough on marketing from our point of view.

It’s not a strategic thing to do those tie-ins but they’ll come up when the opportunity arises and you may see some more of those.

SOTB: Who approaches who?

SW: Sometimes it works both ways, sometimes we get approached. We actually get a lot of approaches for that sort of thing that we don’t take up I’m pretty confident of.

SOTB: It was a marriage of two icon British designs in Triumph and Paul Smith

SW: That’s right but it doesn’t often work just right. We had an approach from a Formula 1 team a couple of years ago to do a co-operative, a bike basically. When we actually sat down and looked at it, it wasn’t going to work. But it was somebody in the Formula 1 marketing department thought it would be a great idea but when we looked at it, it didn’t work. So, some of them are good things to do, some of them are not.

SOTB: Can you ever see a time when Triumph will have an electric motorcycle?

SW: Well ‘ever’ is a very long time obviously. I think what is very clear at the moment, the current level of technology, particularly of batteries, is just not there to support the kind of bikes we do. If we made scooters, absolutely yes, for something that’s got a low level of performance and low range requirements then the technology is just about there. Just about.

So what we are doing is maintaining a ‘watching brief’ and when it looks like we think that in three or four years time we might be at the level where we could do a bike that would do what our bikes need to do, then, yeah ok, we will. We’re not saying “no we’ll never do an electric bike” but right now, there’s a lot of kerfuffle about electric bikes, but the reality is not there. They’re very expensive, they’re very low performance or they’re very low range.

SOTB: Can you see Triumph maybe building a scooter?

SW: No, it’s just not us, again, never say never but we’ve got plans telling us what we’re doing for the next seven to eight years and there are no scooters in there.

SOTB: Who does Triumph see as their main rivals in the motorcycle world?

SW: Well interesting because the Japanese are sort of withdrawing from Europe and the US, they’re not really putting much effort into the bikes, they’re not developing them. I think you’re going to see medium term decline in the Japanese manufacturers in Europe. I think you’re going to see the Europeans coming to the fore, as you’re already seeing with BMW. I think BMW are one of our natural competitors, we don’t overlap the range in a lot of ways but their coming into sports bikes were going into adventure bikes so that will become more and more the case.

Ducati are obviously pushing hard at the moment, and we’ll see how long they maintain that, but to a large extent it’s us, Ducati and BMW. We don’t have much overlap with Ducati either in terms of price band. They’re premium bikes; we’ll push a little bit up that way in the future, and they’ve got the monsters that compete with us.

SOTB: They’ve got the cruiser coming out soon as well.

SW: Sort of cruiser yeah, it’s more like a Rocket then anything. But I think that all manufactures around the world are spreading out away from little niches and that’s what we’ve been doing right from the start as a survival plan.

I think strategically we’ve got the best chance of surviving and prospering if you’ve got a broad spread of products and you can see KTM have tried to do that, and they’ve had some problems. BMW have been doing that for the last couple of years. Ducati are doing that as far as they can, the classics thing hasn’t worked out for them, but they’re still trying to spread out a bit so you will see manufacturers coming into contact more and more.

I guess we still take the Japanese very seriously but I think you’re going to see an ascendancy of Europeans in the next few years.

A lot of the Japanese have really scaled down their development work, they’re focusing more on what, to be fair, is the majority of the world motorcycle market, these little 150cc bikes. If you go to like Vietnam or Indonesia they’re selling more bikes there than all Europe and US put together. They’re all small but for the Japanese that is there business.

SOTB: We we’re looking for the next BMW S1000RR bike from the big Japanese guns.

SW: I think BMW have come in at exactly the right time because, luckily for them – they wouldn’t have known when they started the project, the Japanese have just stopped competing. They’ll still push in some areas but in general you’ll see Japanese development dropping right off.

SOTB: And finally, any plans to enter MotoGP when it goes to 1,000CC in 2012?

SW: MotoGP is just not us at all, we built the Daytona 675 and we’re competing in World Supersport and various Supersport championships around the world and at some point it will be right for us to build a Superbike, at some point. Not right now. And when we do that we’ll go to a suitable level of competition but we’ve always been a bit more realistic and I think that MotoGP is hideously expensive, it’s not on the horizon