If you don’t know who Ricky Carmichael is, here’s the short version. He is an unrivaled professional motocross racer, and isn’t too shabby at driving cars, either. Basically he’ll ride or drive anything with wheels and a motor, faster than you or (probably) anybody you know.

So it makes sense that Triumph would hire that guy to try out the (newly redesigned for 2022) Tiger 1200 prototype on the road, and then with quite a rear-skid flair, on dirt. He rolls it around a dirt track and makes it look like a tiny dirt bike.

We all know “it ain’t the bike, it’s the rider,” Ricky’s smile is hopefully a giveaway that this new machine is pretty fantastic even to a serious pro like him.

We’ve seen a couple of teasers for this new bike. Zac told us about the t-plane triple engine here and so it makes perfect sense that Carmichael remarked that the new Tiger 1200 was “like a Tiger 900 on steroids.”

Like a lot of you, I’m waiting impatiently for more information on the bike and the engine. I was excited about a test ride when Triumph first stuffed a 1200cc engine into the Tiger, but I came away less than impressed. Don’t get me wrong, Triumph did a lot right with the current iteration of the bike. The seating position, the cockpit, the TFT screen and its options – all great.

I parked my Super Tenere and hopped on the Tiger thinking it could very well replace that ‘Ten. But halfway through the demo ride on a perfect, dry, cool, late-summer day I could not wait to get off that bike. Its heat management, or lack thereof, had me absolutely roasting. And kudos to the group ride leader; we were definitely not dawdling, so it wasn’t like we were all crawling through city traffic.

Has Triumph heard any complaints about cooked Tiger riders? Will they address it in this update? It seems like a ground-up redesign, so I remain hopeful.

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