Ladies and gentlemen, the saga of Thornton Hundred’s fastest Triumph Bonneville Bobber in the world have finally moved on to the next chapter.
The story of Thornton’s Bobber ends on a high note—or high price, rather, because it fetched an astonishing sum at auction. Turns out, the marketing efforts worked and a lot of people bought into the hype, including me. We first caught wind of Thornton’s pandemic project back when it was still going drag racing dropping jaws everywhere.
Equipped with a Rotrex C15 supercharger, forged pistons, TTS machine cases, Thornton’s V4 Wide Kit, and a nitrous oxide kit, the bike made crazy levels of horsepower that were beyond Triumph’s standard of a parallel twin. Even with 1,200ccs worth of displacement, a stock Bonneville Bobber made about half of what Thornton made its Bobber do when all was said and done. At 200 horsepower on nitrous, it makes superbike figures and looks drop-dead gorgeous while it’s at it. Oh, that’s too much power? What about 160 without it? Anyway, it’s fast enough in the quarter-mile and is stated to have achieved a 10.49-second run.
The story continued when the bike went for a little hill climb action in the 2021 Goodwood Festival of Speed. Thornton entered the bike into the hill climb category and posted all about it on their social media pages and website.
Following that, the bike was headed over to the auction house. The listing was posted on the Collecting Cars website, and it was subsequently sold on November 12, 2021, for £38,000 GBP, or just over $50,000 USD.
There’s really no going around it, that’s a crazy price. However, the bike does have a great story behind it, and that alone can be worth more than just the sum of this Triumph’s long list of parts.
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Sources: Collecting Cars, Visordown