CarBrandLogos archive · BSA · 1938
Named for a lap of Brooklands at a hundred miles an hour, and built to keep proving it.
Discover the storyPhoto: Ronald Saunders · CC BY-SA 2.0
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the BSA Gold Star, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
The name came from an award. Brooklands gave a gold star lapel badge to any rider who lapped the banked circuit at over 100 mph, and in 1937 Wal Handley took one on a BSA Empire Star. BSA responded the way manufacturers did then: it built a road bike to trade on the result, launched in 1938 and sold as the Gold Star.
BSA - Flickr - mick - Lumix · Mick from England · CC BY 2.0
02
What separated it from ordinary British singles was that each engine was individually built and bench-tested, and the buyer received the test certificate. The alloy air-cooled overhead-valve single came in 348 cc and 499 cc capacities, with a 496 cc variant among the pre-war machines, and could be ordered in a bewildering range of states of tune. A single order form let a customer specify a machine for road use, scrambling, trials, road racing or the Clubman's TT, with matching camshafts, compression ratios, gearing and carburation. Very few bikes have ever been sold that way.
BSA 1956 DBD34 Gold Star Daytona 500cc 1 cyl ohv · Yesterdays Antique Motorcycles · CC BY-SA 4.0
03
On track it dominated. Gold Stars won the Clubman's TT so consistently through the 1950s that the class was eventually abandoned for lack of competition, and they were mainstays of scrambling and grass track racing. The definitive road version, the DBD34 Clubman, arrived with a big Amal carburettor, swept-back exhaust, clip-on bars and rear-set footrests — a bike that was genuinely unpleasant below thirty miles an hour and magnificent above sixty. It became the template for the café racer and the machine the Ace Café crowd wanted above all others.
04
Production ended in 1963 as unit-construction twins took over and BSA's priorities shifted. The Gold Star name has been revived since, but the original is remembered as the last great British single, and as the rare case of a motorcycle built to justify a piece of jewellery.
At a glance
Produced
1939–1963Engine
348 cc (B32)Technical specification
Contemporaries from the 1930s
Spotted something wrong on this page? Send us the correction — with a source, and we will fix it. How this site is written.
