Tom Mellor’s record-breaking 1969 Triumph Trident T150

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Triple fan
Tom’s involvement with Triumph triples began 20 years ago, when he bought his first such bike from a friend who had just acquired a vintage Frazer Nash car and didn’t want the Trident anymore. After riding it for a while on the street, including a couple of touring vacations with Diane as passenger, Tom was tempted to go racing with it. He wound up a five-time British Columbia champion in 750 Vintage before he started venturing further to race with AHRMA in the U.S. “We do OK in AHRMA — I can keep up front,” says Tom modestly.

It was thanks to AHRMA that Tom’s first involvement with Bonneville came about in 2006, when he decided to race in the inaugural Bonneville VintageGP/AHRMA round at the then-new Miller track outside Salt Lake City, just 100 miles from Bonneville. “They said that for $75 you could do a run on the short course on the salt, so I came down. Well, you could only do 130mph there, but I ran through at 148mph, and the guy wouldn’t give me my ticket because he said I went too fast,” Tom recalls. “So I had to pay a bunch of money to get out onto the long course, but then I ended up with a 5-mile headwind and couldn’t go any faster. Still, the existing record was only 129mph, so last year I decided to get serious about breaking it. Remember, this was my production 750 road racer with the Slippery Sam bodywork, so we needed something more aerodynamic. My friend Shane Kenneally has six Bonneville records with Suzuki, Yamaha and H-D, and he had a mold for the bodywork which he loaned me. I had to cut it up quite a bit to make it less wide to fit the narrower Triumph, but that’s what we ran with in 2007.”

The Mellor Triumph first entered the record books in 2007 in the 750PG class — but not as fast as expected. “The weather was awful, so after I did 158mph one way, when I went to do my return run, there was lots of lightning and a big thunderstorm heading up, so they wouldn’t let me out on the track,” he says. “You have to make the reverse run the same day, so that meant I had to start over. The next day, the track was all wet and slushy, so the best speed I could do was 139mph, with lots of wheelspin. Still got the record, though. But we couldn’t wait around for the salt to dry out, because I had to convert the bike back to road racing spec with the Slippery Sam fairing to run at Miller that weekend. Did OK, too — I finished third in 750 Production!”
Tom says it took a day and a half to convert the Triumph from speed racer to road racer to combine competing at both venues: “I had to have friends bring the road race bodywork down separately, plus my forks and suspension, so for this year I decided just to focus on Bonneville, which was unfinished business.” So to address this most effectively, Tom bought another T150 Triumph frame and “cut-’n’-shut” the front end, raking out the head angle to 30 degrees, and adding an 11-inch extension to the swingarm, all for extra stability at high speed. “I also lowered the frame so that the upper rails run right down on top of the engine, which means the bar that I put across there to stiffen it up has to be unbolted to remove the engine,” he explains. “This brought it down another two inches, then I tightened up the aerodynamics on the bodywork by remaking the fairing and doing extra stuff like the front mudguard, which took me two days to make out of sheet aluminum. Looks nice, though.” Tom also made the 1.5 gallon fuel tank himself, covered by a silver foil shroud to keep the gas cool in the Utah sunshine. Believe it or not, Tom’s pushrod triple delivers 60mpg at 180mph, so that 1.5 gallons is good for five runs, including warming up and returning to the paddock after each one.

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