Hailwood’s Beezer

“In 1965 I had instructions from Clive Bennett that Mike Hailwood was going to ride an A65 Lightening Clubman, at Silverstone. I was asked if I would build the engine. “We went down to Silverstone, with Clive in tow of course, it would have been on the thursday as then we had another day messing about. they went to the trouble of making two frames would you believe.the only difference was that the steering head angle on one was slightly different – I can’t remember the degrees – so Clive says: ‘Oh we’ve made another frame for you as well, it’s got a so and so head angle. We can change that tonight if you like and you can try it tomorrow?’ Hailwood says: ‘Well if you want to do that, but this is okay, it doesn’t worry me.’ I can’t remember whether we did in fact change it, but he won that race, blew them all away with a virtually standard engine. “The crankshaft had its flywheel lightened a bit and re-balanced, but the oil supply was still through that dreadful plain bearing on the timing side.the cylinder had a standard twin port head, opened up a bit and tweaked, with the valve seats narrowed down a bit, just normal type tuning stuff. that was the A65 engine at that time. So if everyone tells me that BSA engines ain’t no good, stuff ‘em I say, they were better than triumphs and Nortons. Fighting talk eh! But it’s a fact they were a better engine when you got them running properly.”