From what I've been told is the touring model doesn't have as much horsepower as the roadster but has a little more torque. If factory money was no object they should have made the touring model higher geared to use the added torque and left the roadster with the same gearing for better performance. The optimum would be to just add an overdrive sixth gear and leave the rest as is. The good thing is that the status quo is actually fine but anything can be improved. If I was designing it I would have put a chain on the rear of the roadsters and left the shaft for the touring. Triumph already has the speed triple for racing and the Rocket is just a completely different animal without a well defined category, it kind of overlaps some of their other models.