Written by Andrew Jones
For all their marketing bucks, there’s one thing the motorcycle manufacturers? money will never be able to buy. It’s the same stuff that Burt Monroe, Giacomo Agostini and Rollie Free have in spades; authenticity. Often created by random acts of insanity and then distilled by history, it’s a licence to print money for brands when their planets align and they find themselves part of it. For Triumph, those planets mostly revolve around Steve McQueen’s star. His bike building activities with Bud Elkins in the early ?60s to create Triumph off-road racers are now the stuff of legend. Here’s Frenchmen FCR Original with their ?Green Legend?, an homage that makes us want to watch On Any Sunday for a 42nd time.
When the name Steve McQueen is mentioned, most ?normal? people will think of movies like The Thomas Crown Affair or Bullit. But not us. We all think of British Racing Green Triumphs and the fence jumping scene from The Great Escape. So when the FCR team decided to use a Triumph Bonneville for their latest design and manufacturing efforts, it’s probably fair to say that they didn’t exactly go into the exercise with a blank piece of paper. In fact, its purpose was clear – it was to be a tribute to the now mythical McQueen Triumph enduro and scrambler bikes from the ?60s.

But to do the legend justice, a mere cosmetic makeover or a bunch of superficial changes just wouldn’t do. Yes, the bike’s a...