The design offices and workshops of the British motorcycle factories of the 1950s, 60s and 70s were littered with promising designs which were supposed to transform the industry but came to nothing. Built by dedicated designers, engineers and apprentices, they include Norton’s Unified Twin, Bert Hopwood’s modular range of Triumphs, the BSA-Triumph Bandit / Fury twins, Triumph’s Thunderbird 3 and four-cylinder Quadrant and Ariel’s 10OOcc flat four version of the Leader. They were all, it was promised, going to keep dealers busy or, by the 1970s, to turn around falling sales. After assorted efforts these machines appeared in prototype forms (except for Hopwood’s modular efforts, which only existed on paper) and then vanished into the mists of time and dusty corners of motorcycle museums. Sadly, senior managers in working environments riddled with corporate infighting and jealousy ordered many of the prototypes destroyed. At the time there was a kind of logic to this wholesale destruction. You certainly wouldn’t want technical innovations on stillborn models lurking around for other manufacturers to borrow
One of the earlier lost gems was produced by the biggest company of the lot, BSA, in the form of a 250cc single that could have changed the way buyers looked at the solid, stolid and sensible BSA range.
In 1949, BSA appointed Bert Hopwood he wrote: ‘Although we at BSA had no intention of entering the Grand Prix arena, it was essential to have such power outputs available from the basic design structure, for it is a simple matter to detune but much more difficult to reverse the process.’
