Last wave of the flag Lucas, Frame and the Beebee BSAs
Run a Google search on Malcolm Lucas and second place in the 1980 World F2 Championship will probably pop-up – a nice footnote, to a long career. But that would only be half of the story. In a period when a Rob North triple was second only to Ago’s MV on every racer’s bucket-list, Lucas got to live the dream.
In the blue corner: Malcolm Lucas
“I got into bikes because of my dad. He raced sidecars as passenger to a fella called Alf Ellis. They were quite successful, but one day my dad phoned up ill to work, then went off to race at Crystal Palace. When he went back on the Monday morning the boss said: “Syd. Your cold better then is it?” holding up a newspaper. They’d won and there was a big photo of them in the Birmingham Express!
He got the sack but his racing connections led him to Norton, working on Geoff Duke’s machines and then to BSA under Gold Star luminary Cyril Halliburn.They also resulted in his photographic hobby being inexorably linked to the ‘TT Special’, as Malcolm explains.
“Fred Hanks initially asked him to come over. Dad had a Reliant three-wheeler and trailer and then used a big box, which would fold out as a dark room. He’d be taking photos in practice and rushing back to get them to print that evening. So it was always chaos. I had a 500 Triumph at the time and dad said: ‘Ah, you should take up racing. It’s safer than on the road.’ I didn’t have much money so he said maybe I could passenger for Fred. I had a test at Mallory Park that
