BSA DBD34 Gold Star walk around and start (sorry about the wind noise!)

Apologies for the wind noise, it was very breezy! This Clubmans goldie has been fitted with a Mikuni carburettor, helping hugely with its road manners. The clubmans had clip on bars, the hottest camshafts, highest compression etc and was usually supplied with the RRT2 (Road Racing, Two Torrington roller bearings) gearbox. It was in this form that goldies won either the junior or senior TT pretty much every year between 1949 and 1956, so of course, the boy racers wanted it too, irrespective of how tedious it could be to ride around town! It’s difficult to potter around on a clubmans, it wants to go fast, so your friends quickly tire of you either hanging back, in order to catch up, or blasting off into the distance! It’s better to ride alone, in truth.
Out of town, the goldie offers one of the purest motor cycling experiences it’s possible to have and really is more than the sum of its parts. At nearly 90bhp per litre, the Gold star engine is very close to the limits of what a normally aspirated 2 valve single is capable of producing and is very much the Fireblade of its day. Fifties and sixties rockers invariably aspired to either a Gold Star or Bonneville , even though their own bikes were likely to be more mundane. I’ve owned this particular bike for years and bought it from an original 59 club rocker, Jerry F.
Uncomfortable, challenging, difficult to manage in traffic, hard to start and expensive - all fair criticisms of the BSA Gold Star, but on a quiet winding road it remains the very essence of what riding a classic British motorcycle really is.
You can’t really hear the exhaust ‘Twitter’ but trust me, it’s there 😉