HAILWOOD COMEBACK
Mike Braid found the frame from this bike – Mike Hailwood’s 1971 Daytona BSA – which had been used as a factory jig, and decided to use it to make his own factory race replica. Here’s how...
How Mike Braid found Mike Hailwood’s Daytona frame and built a race rep around it
After Mike Hailwood’s retirement from the 1971 Daytona 200, his BSA triple was returned to the UK to be converted to short-circuit specification and raced by Ray Pickrell in the inaugural Anglo-american Match Races held over the Easter weekend of the same year.
Pickrell won three of the six races held, but crashed in the final one at Oulton Park on Easter Monday, on the approach to Knicker Brook, damaging the frame sufficiently for it to need replacement. The bent-up original was consigned to a role as a jig at the Triumph factory, where it was used to aid manufacture of the two types of aluminium fuel tanks built for Rob North’s new design of Lowboy frames.
After the factory closed, this tank jig was among many of the Experimental Department’s bits of kit which ended up in race-fitter Les Williams’ Triumph spares business. Mike Braid, who owns the ‘Hailwood BSA’ takes up the story: “In 1987-88 I was riding a couple of F750 Rob North triples in classic events, and while I was at Les Williams’s getting parts, I glimpsed a chassis behind the counter. It was the Lowboy frame that had been turned into a tankmaking jig. Les agreed to sell and I started collecting bits and pieces to build it as a proper factory-style bike, in the guise of a works 1971 Daytona machine.
“I bought a lot of stuff from Les, including wheels and various other factory parts. I took all this to Richard Peckett of P&M Motorcycles, who is generally accepted as being the world’s number one preparer of Bsa/triumph triples for classic racing, and asked him to repair the chassis.
“It wasn’t in a very good state, but Richard’s rebuilding crashed triples all the time, and his British TT F1 titlewinning P&M frames speak for themselves. So I asked him to cut out all the bad stuff and rebuild it as it would’ve been in 1971, which he did, finishing it off in 1990.”
“Without ever claiming to be the actual Hailwood bike, but a machine recreated in the spirit of it from a collection of parts, many of them ex-works, we built the bike as close as possible to 1971 Daytona specs.
“It has a factory squish cylinder head, with the re-angled centre spark plug. It’s got squish pistons. It’s got the original factory ignition system with the quill drive for the points and the Zener diodes. And it’s got the original Quaife five-speed gearbox as used in the factory bikes. The motorcycle has a lot of original factory parts on it. The tank was built by Don Woodward, who made the original fuel tanks using that very frame, and the bodywork is an original Screens and Plastics Rob North fairing.
“Without going overboard, I’ve tried to make it as close as possible to what that bike would’ve been in 1971, and Richard has done a really fine job in recreating it. It first ran at the 1990 Brands Super Prix, and I bring it out from time to time at major classic events, including Isle of Man TT Parades. There are only so many components in a motorbike, and if they’re reasonably close to the original then it’s going to be pretty much the same bike. The engine is as close as it’s ever going to get to the bike that was wheeled out in 1971, in an original frame that nobody disputes was raced by Mike Hailwood.”
‘NOT THE ACTUAL HAILWOOD BIKE, BUT A MACHINE RECREATED IN THE SPIRIT OF IT FROM PARTS, MANY OF THEM EX-WORKS’