Victor GP BSA
BSA’s production Victor GP MXer’s history is inextricably bound up in the story of how Jeff Smith’s championship-winning machine emerged from an experiment by competition boss Brian Martin. In these pages we have covered this development of a C15 250 roadster into a world-beating, near-500cc MXer before, so we’ll point you to those more in-depth history features while we talk about this superb, if not 100% original, genuine BSA Victor GP. Just in case you’re new to CDB or even new to BSAs, we’ll take a few sentences to condense the model’s development from early 1961 to being launched to the public in 1965.
Even before the lighter two-strokes began their domination of the smaller MX classes Brian Martin and Jeff Smith were well aware their Gold Star was coming to the end of its competitive life. There were mutterings from Lucas that its magneto was to become obsolete and BSA was unitising the bigger bikes in its range. As the purpose of being in competition is to sell road bikes then the company couldn’t really have its team mounted on non-unit construction motorcycles for much longer. The Goldie was still competitive and Jeff Smith was British champion on the big bike and as far as the public was concerned all was well.
However, Smith was having to work harder and harder to keep ahead and the bikes were probably at their limit of performance. Okay, the factory could make things which would keep it ahead a bit more but probably couldn’t use such parts on production machines. As ever with the comp world, the lighter a bike is, within reason, the better it will go and the old adage ‘if you want to end up with a light bike
