After
Kempton Park 2017
I
met up with Fred, another of the volunteers, at the Southern Classic
Bike Show and asked him for some pictures of his 250cc BSA Gold Star.
A question you will ask is that BSA didn’t make a 250 Gold Star. In
that you would be correct, but they do exist. What stirred my
attention was a 250cc Velocette made from a 350cc KSS I saw in an
article on racing Velocettes from the sixties.
250 KSS
Both use the 350cc
barrels but with a short stroke bottom end. There was even a Norton
ohc modified in the same way. Post World War Two there was nothing
being produced by any of the manufacturers to go racing with in the
lightweight category.
Jones Edward Special
It was not until the mid sixties that Greeves
got the ball rolling with their Silverstone race bike using Villers
engines. Greeves made a lot of parts to make these go better. This
was at the time when two stroke engines were ruling the roost in the
lightweights and massively out-performing the four strokes of that
era. Honda had a 250cc four and Suzuki and Yamaha had equal numbers
of cylinders on their two strokes with MZ joining in too!
In
the fifties there were a number of British engineers that were doing
some impressive things like REG who made a dohc 250cc twin that was
based on the racing NSU of 1951. Sammy Miller has got that one on
show.
New
Imperial won the best club stand with some excellent turned out bikes
As always DOT has something interesting to talk about, as with this
lightweight. 
A racing version now being restored at Brooklands has
the barrel turned around and the exhaust ports facing rearward. More
on that another time.
Around the show was a very rare Rover and some
Italian masterpieces with this MV and the Pesaro Aermacchi. I think
the Italians have some very stylish bikes from the fifties and
sixties that went extraordinarily quickly.
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