Launched in 2006, Triumph’s original Scrambler was always a motorcycle with one foot planted firmly in the past. Its high pipes, spoked wheels and stripped-back styling evoked the Triumphs that once tore across the Californian desert, but underneath sat a road bike far happier cruising the highway than hammering through a hundred miles of Mojave whoops. Utah-based racer and ALTR MOTO founder Tyler Condie decided to find out just how much of that could be changed without throwing away the motorcycle Triumph had built in the first place. Meet the 2012 Scrambler, built on a budget, destined to win trophies and conquer the harshest of environments.
Tyler came to the project with plenty of experience, having raced everything from motocross to the Baja 1000, along with an engineering background that still influences how he approaches motorcycles. His donor arrived almost by accident: a remarkably clean 2012 Triumph Scrambler with only a few thousand miles on the clock, having spent much of its life sitting in an aircraft hangar. Then registration opened for the 2025 Biltwell 100, Tyler impulsively entered, and the mint old Triumph suddenly had an appointment with 100 miles of desert racing.
Rather than build a money-no-object machine, Tyler wanted to discover how capable the stock platform could become with a handful of carefully chosen changes. The conventional forks stayed, but their travel was extended by 30mm before heavy-duty progressive springs, cartridge emulators, preload adjusters and heavier oil went inside. Out back, Burly Stiletto shocks added around an inch and a half of ride height. The changes necessitated a longer front brake line and some wiring adjustments, while simultaneously giving the Triumph the ground clearance and stance of a genuine desert sled.
That extra room also allowed Tyler to fit the super chunky Motoz Tractionator front tyre seen in the photos, paired with a Tusk D Sport at the rear. The original low front mudguard was replaced by a high-mounted item, the rear was bobbed for clearance, and wide Renthal bars put Tyler in a much better position when standing on the pegs. Those stock pegs quickly proved useless with proper dirt-bike boots, so aggressive adjustable off-road items went on, joined by CNC-adjustable levers and Cycra Pro Bend handguards.
But some of the smartest modifications are hidden away. Knowing what Mojave sand and silt can do to an engine, Tyler wasn’t prepared to trust the road-oriented factory filtration arrangement, so he 3D-printed his own airbox basket and adapted a KTM 300 two-stroke filter frame to accept a Twin Air dirt-bike filter. He also fabricated the substantial skid plate, crash bars and front brake-line guide himself, while a lithium battery, replacement fuel pump and filter took care of a few more reliability and weight-saving details.
There was no corresponding chase for horsepower. The 865cc parallel twin was already making more power than Tyler could comfortably put through the modified chassis in the dirt and dust, so his attention stayed firmly on making the bike survive and handle the terrain. An Arrow high-rise exhaust preserves one of the Scrambler’s defining visual features, while the JNS Engineering LED headlight was borrowed from another project and fitted neatly into a Yamaha TW200-style cowl, now topped with Tyler’s number 24 race plate.
The real test came at the 2025 Biltwell 100, made considerably tougher by the fact that Tyler had undergone gastrointestinal surgery only weeks earlier and consequently arrived with far less testing time than planned. Nevertheless, rider and machine held together, and Tyler won the Expert Scrambler class. Instead of retiring the Triumph to easier duties, he subsequently took it into the Coral Pink dunes, tackled Hell’s Revenge and Fins and Things at Moab, and completed the roughly 100-mile White Rim Trail solo in around seven hours, including time spent fixing a flat.
Then came the return to Biltwell in 2026, this time with an even more ambitious plan: race both 100-mile events over consecutive days. Tyler won the Scrambler class again on Saturday, earning the Hardass Award in the process, before lining the same old Triumph up against fancy modern machinery in Sunday’s Expert race and finishing fifth. Two class victories and 200 miles of racing later, the experiment has delivered its answer: Tyler never needed to turn his 2012 Triumph into a glorified race bike, nor replace everything that made it a traditional Scrambler. He had to find the sensible centre, and then do seriously silly shit at high speed, while having a hell of a time.
[ ALTR Moto ]