Forwoard thinker
The history of the British motorcycle industry is littered with innovative and radically exciting designs that promised much but failed to deliver, an example of which is this month's test bike. It's a 500cc twin with the name of Sunbeam on the petrol tank and now owned by West Country enthusiast Steve Morris.
In 1945, with the Second World War coming to its end, there came rumours that BSA were developing a new overhead camshaft inline twin which was set to be a class leader, a model which Small Heath hoped would be snapped up by the bike-starved population. Sadly this was not the case and subsequent sales were disappointing.
During the war, it was standard practice for captured enemy vehicles to be evaluated by makers of similar bikes and in England, BSA had been given a stream of BMW, Zundapp, NSU and DKWs to examine very carefully for their range of postwar machines. The R75 Army issue scored highly for both its comfort and handling, but BSA felt that an OHV flat twin would shout 'copy' from the rooftops from prospective customers, who would not be very pro-German so soon after the war. During 1946, a search was made for a suitable engine and for this Small Heath secured the services of
