Triumph Street Triple 765 RS Review: The Middleweight Benchmark

Ask a paddock full of journalists to name the finest middleweight naked and the same answer surfaces again and again: the Street Triple 765 RS. Triumph’s flagship roadster has become the yardstick, the bike everything else is politely compared to and quietly beaten by. It is fast without being frightening, sophisticated without being cold, and it does the whole job with a mechanical charm that borders on addictive.

Part of that magic is the badge’s Moto2 connection — Triumph supplies the engines for the world championship’s middleweight class, and the road-going triple wears that heritage lightly but unmistakably. This is a naked bike engineered by people who race, and every control speaks of that obsession with feel.

The 765 triple: the perfect middle way

The 765 cc inline-triple is the star turn, and it is arguably the sweetest engine configuration ever fitted to a road bike. Making 128 hp at 12,000 rpm, it hands you the low-down flexibility of a twin, the top-end urgency of a four, and a sound all its own — a hard, metallic wail that builds to a howl as the tacho sweeps round. There is simply no bad place in the rev range.

It pulls cleanly from 3,000 rpm, gathers pace with an eager, elastic surge through the midrange, and then charges to a redline that begs to be chased. The up-and-down quickshifter is beautifully judged, and the fuelling is spot on — the RS never feels highly strung, yet it will happily post a 3.3-second sprint to 100 km/h and a genuine 250 km/h if you let it stretch its legs.