MIX ‘N’ MATCH

You have to give BSA credit for try, try, trying again. Their first post-war attempt to cater to the gentleman motorcyclist with a refined touring twin didn’t quite set the world alight. It was almost immediately obvious in 1947/48 that the ground-breaking new Sunbeam 500 was just too weird and wonderful to lure buyers away from Turner’s well-proven and extremely pretty twin.

BSA tried again with the revised S7 and the slightly sporting S8. Same result. Sigh. The Sunbeam experiment rattled on unremarkably through the 1950s, but it must have been deeply disappointing to the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer, particularly when potential wealthy customers were spending cash not only on Triumph but also Norton, AJS, Royal Enfield and Matchless twins.

Everyone was getting in on the game – not least BSA themselves, of course, with the Val Page / Herbert Perkins long-stroke A7. That essentially pre-war design was rapidly replaced by Bert Hopwood’s more modern A10 and its A7 counterpart in the early 1950s.

You might think that such a solid platform for a range of 500 and 650 twins would suffice, but it appeared that BSA’s customers would – at least at this point in history – only pay so much and no more for one of their motorcycles, regardless of its actual quality. There’s a reason why Toyota launched Lexus, after all, and someone at BSA must’ve been mightily aggrieved that people would pay £234 for an Enfield 500 twin in 1953, but only £213 for BSA’s flagship 650. The A10 was awkwardly hemmed in by Triumph’s big twins, forced to compete on price with the 6T which cost just £200 – while Triumph scooped the big bucks with their Tiger 110 at £240. Meanwhile AMC commanded around £235 for their