…on such a winter’s day, sang The Mamas and Papas, and this is the bike that turns those dreams to metal. Tim Britton hits the coast on the X-75 custom cruiser.

Are there more songs about California than anywhere else? Maybe, maybe not, but it wasn't only Mama Cass Elliot who was thinking about the Golden State in the 60s. The Beach Boys almost personified the dream and the Riveras' hit, California Sun, made the beach party scene sound so attractive and it's this last song that's playing on my mental CD as I follow the coast on a strip of blacktop yards from the sand.

It's long been a dream of mine to wend my way by motorcycle along the Californian coastline, maybe starting up near the Oregon border where the magnificent giant sequoias and redwoods grow some of which are more than 2500 years old, possibly the oldest living things on the planet. Now that is something to think about as I kick-start one of the last gasps of an ailing corporation, a bike just made for attracting bikini-clad beach bunnies.
I dare bet that the X-75 could only have originated in the USA, as I doubt the bean-counters of the top-heavy home industry were in tune with the motorcycling public to recognise a chance to sell bikes.
In fact, I seem to recall in the early days of my motorcycling Edward Turner, of Triumph design fame, being reported as saying something along those lines as the BSA/Triumph group finally collapsed in the 70s. Whatever the Hurricane's background it is true that the US group executive Don Brown set the project in motion by inviting young Craig Vetter to 'do something with the triple'. The project must owe a great debt to Brown who was to leave the company soon after the project was under way for without his vision at the start I wouldn't be thundering away on this factory custom.
For years I'd dismissed these radically-styled machines, even turning down a ride on a relatively-new one not long after I got my full bike licence in the mid-70s. To me at that time (and you TR3OC members can feel free to take me to task over it), they were the epitome of bad taste. What I'd missed was that Vetter's styling harked back to the early days of Triumphs, when they were slim and sleek. Edward Turner had a penchant fetish, you might say for doing more with less, and his bikes were always light. A little bit of research about Vetter told me that he, too, followed this philosophy. Some of his influences came from Buckminster Fuller a man not afraid of radical design ideas and fascinated by high strength-to-weight designs.

Though the Trident and Rocket 3 had been introduced to the American market in the late 60s, it sort of bombed. Not that it wasn't a good bike it was and is but the styling left traditionalists cold and the new buyers joining the market without any marque loyalty, and with only the idea that, as we already know, riding motorcycles is fun, went for the cheaper Honda Four in the emerging superbike sector. This was what Turner had meant when he is quoted as saying that the management were out of touch.

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