The BSA-750/3: BORN QUICKLY

FRAME

Rob North bronze-welded duplex frame in Accles & Pollock T45 steel tubing. This is an original frame that was crashed at Oulton Park in the 1971 transatlantic meeting and went on to be the bike’s frame jig upon which tanks and bodywork was built.

ENGINE

Air-cooled pushrod ohv dry-sump transverse in-line three-cylinder four-stroke with 120° crankshaft. It has a compression ratio of 11.5:1 and makes a very healthy 83bhp @ 8500rpm at the crankshaft.

DIMENSIONS

The bike’s head angle is 28° and it has a trail of 121mm / 4.75 inches.The wheelbase is 1450mm / 57 inches long and it weighs 180kg/396lb with oil but no fuel.

The Highboy-framed BSA-3 which Mike Hailwood raced in the 1970 Daytona 200 is in the Barber Museum in Alabama, but the fate of his 1971 Lowboy bike is less certain.

Taking the frame of a bike as its genesis, there’s a good case for identifying the bike pictured here as being that machine. It belongs to Surrey collector Mike Braid, who has a superb collection of historic race bikes ranging from the ex-Bill Ivy 650 Monard twin to an ex-Loris Capirossi Ducati V4 Desmosedici MotoGP racer.

After Hailwood’s retirement from the Daytona his BSA-3 was returned to the UK to be converted to short circuit spec and raced by Ray Pickrell in the debut Anglo-American Match Races held in 1971. On it, Pickrell won three of the six races held, but crashed in the final one at Oulton, sufficiently damaging the frame that it had to be replaced. The bent-up original acted as a jig for Triumph’s brought-in metal-basher Don Woodward, in manufacturing the two types of aluminium fuel tanks he built for Rob North’s new design of Lowboy frames. The Highboys had plastic resin tanks supplied by Screen and Plastics, who also made the bodywork, but the Lowboys were fitted with either a smaller, lower short-circuit aluminium tank with a single filler cap, or a larger Daytona version with twin caps, one for filling the tank and the other to let the air out.

After the closure of theTriumph factory this tank jig was among the Experimental Department’s bits and pieces which ended up in factory race fitter Les Williams’ shop.

Braid takes up the story: “In 1987-88 I happened to be at Les Williams’s shop where I glimpsed a chassis sitting behind the counter. It turned out that it was the Lowboy frame off the ex-Hailwood 1971 Daytona bike. I asked Les if he wanted to sell it and bought it