The roll call of motorcycle racing ‘Great British World Beaters’ is a long but scarcely illustrious one. Machines like the Read-Weslake 500cc twin, the KRM Superstreak 350cc four have all flattered to deceive. Not since the Manx Norton’s heyday, has there been a British-made GP world champion.
Among such abortive projects, most of which never reached the starting grid, the BSA MC1 250cc single that was created in the 1950s by the world’s then largest motorcycle manufacturer, seemed to have a genuine chance of fulfilling a nation’s expectations – only to be stillborn when the directors of BSA refused to allow it to be raced, on the grounds that it could not be guaranteed to win its first race.
The fruits of five years of development of the kind of innovative, forward-looking engineering which the British industry needed so badly to invest in were thus discarded. Within two decades, the company itself had followed its abortive road racer onto the scrapheap of history, a casualty of the technical innovation and quality engineering which the Japanese had brought to the marketplace, as manifested in the abortive BSA MC1 Grand Prix racer today preserved in the Sammy Miller Museum www.sammymiller.co.uk on England’s South Coast. What might have been, if only…
The MC1 was conceived by Bert Hopwood, who in the immediate post-Second World War era worked at Birmingham-based Norton, for whom he created the legendary Dominator parallel-twin. This caused him to be headhunted by a much bigger company on the other side of Britain’s Second City, and in May 1948, Hopwood, 40, became Chief Engineer at BSA. There, he was eager to use BSA’s massive resources, both technical and financial, to develop an innovative new generation of customer products, and in 1949 he roughed out the concept of a 250cc single with a horizontal cylinder, and four radial valves operated by two short, chain-driven, vertically arranged overhead camshafts positioned in an inverted vee, and connected by bevel gears. At a time when a longstroke engine format was the norm, the engine’s ‘square’ 68x68 mm dimensions were also unusual. That same year, Hopwood’s assistant at Norton, 30-year-old Doug Hele, followed him to BSA, and in 1950 was charged with putting this concept into metal as the prototype for a family of roadsters, with a possible view to going racing, a sphere where the Moto Guzzi singles of comparable overall format were already dominant.
With a completely free hand, Hele took the Hopwood layout as his starting point, retaining its overall architecture with the air-cooled cylinder inclined slightly upwards at 15º from horizontal, helping deliver a reduced frontal area. But he opted for even more oversquare dimensions of 70x64.5mm that were quite aggressive by the standards of the
