BSA Rocket 3
BSA Rocket 3 Background & History
The BSA Rocket 3 has a very interesting story behind it. But it doesn’t start at BSA. By the early 1960s, the major British motorcycle manufacturers practically owned the motorcycle market. Their bikes, mostly 500 and 650cc vertical twins, were fast, powerful, good-looking and they handled well. The newest of these engines had been designed prior to 1950 and they were starting to show their age. In the never ending quest for more power, each manufacturer had stretched their engines to their limits in three key areas: Displacement, power output and engine speed (RPMs). To push it any further brought with it destructive engine vibration that was hard on man and machine alike. Many things were tried but nothing seemed to work.
In 1962 Bert Hopwood left AMC (Associated Motor Cycles), aka: Norton, Matchless and AJS, to take over engineering at Triumph, and BSA owned Triumph. Matchless/AJS had done something about the vibration in their own twins that no one else in the British motorcycle industry had tried. They added a center main bearing to the crank which greatly improved the vibration problem but didn’t eliminate it altogether. Hopwood was well familiar with the vibration issue. When he landed at Triumph, he made it his personal goal to solve it once and for all.
A rare photo of the 1966 Triumph Trident prototype. Note that it's built on the bones of a Bonneville, so only the engine was all-new.
Birth of the BSA Rocket 3
What he came up with was a totally new direction of thought. What if we packaged three component sets from the Triumph/BSA 250cc single, creating a 750cc three-cylinder (triple)? By late 1964, a running prototype was being tested and demonstrated. It was a fairly natural process since the new triple would use the same frame and running gear as the Triumph Bonneville and TR6 lines. The bike performed well and the green light was given to move toward production.
To be named the Triumph T150 Trident, the plan was to release it to the market in 1966 as a 1967 model, a move that would have changed history. This would have put them a full two years ahead of the release of Honda’s game-changing 1969 CB750 Four. It would have been the first ‘multi-cylinder’ (ie: more than two) motorcycle on the US market and would certainly have been the fastest bike on the planet for several important years. Alas, it didn’t happen.
ABOVE: When introduced, the 1969 BSA Rocket 3 had clunky styling with its "shoebox fuel tank" and "ray gun mufflers".
BELOW: The 1969 Triumph Trident shared the shoebox tank and ray guns, but was styled to appear more 'Triumph-like'. Both were ugly and not well received.
BSA Rocket 3 Different than the Triumph Trident
BSA owned Triumph, and while the Triumph brand was outselling BSA in the crucially-important US market, BSA resented Triumph for it’s success. They were literally jealous! BSA had always been the top-selling brand in the UK and throughout Britain’s vast global empire. But in the US, the Yanks loved Triumphs! And it goaded them. So, when BSA got wind of this new 3-cylinder Triumph super bike, they would only approve it if Triumph could create a BSA version. And it couldn’t look like the Triumph triple. Instead of ‘badge engineering’ the two bikes to share major components but be styled and tuned differently (like General Motors did with Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and Oldsmobile around the same time), which would have been the smart move, prideful BSA demanded that the engine for the BSA version look different than the Triumph version. And that it come in a standard BSA frame, so that it would look like a proper BSA.
LEFT: The Triumph Trident has vertical cylinders.
RIGHT: The BSA Rocket 3's are slanted forward by 12-degrees. Why, again?
While the Triumph Trident’s cylinders were vertical, BSA decided they wanted theirs to be slated forward at 12 degrees. It sounds like a small change, but it required a completely new set of lower-end engine cases, the costliest and most complex component of the engine. They also wanted the outer covers to look less ‘Triumph-like’ and more ‘BSA-like’. All of these changes cost money and time that they didn’t have. BSA slow-walked the whole project until in 1968, two years after Triumph’s original proposed launch date, Honda announced the pending release of it’s new 4-cylinder superbike. Suddenly BSA and Triumph were behind the 8-ball. BSA hit the gas and rushed the project to completion to try to beat the big Honda’s release. In the end, instead of beating Honda to market by two full years, they barely made it by two months.
1971 BSA Rocket 3 engine, left side. Note the dove gray frame. All 1971 BSAs had dove gray frames. By 1972, their final year, they'd gone back to black.
Star-Crossed Launch of the BSA Rocket 3
The new Triumph T150 Trident and it’s sister-bike, the BSA A75 Rocket 3 were released to rave reviews at the time, and performed quite well in testing. They were certainly fast and handled well. In early magazine tests, the Trident out-accelerated a Honda CB750 at the drag strip, and prior to the launch of the big Honda, the pair of British triples were officially the fastest production motorcycles you could buy at the time. They stole the title from the Norton Commando, and it was stolen from them again by the Honda CB750. It just went downhill from there.
Despite the great performance numbers, they lacked a 5-speed gearbox, they were still running drum brakes when most of the industry was switching over to front discs, and no electric starter, you had to kickstart this bad boy. Two months later the Honda CB750 Four was released to an adoring market. It had it all: Big, powerful engine with all the latest technology, 5-speed, front disc brake, and that all-important electric starter. And, they were totally reliable and never leaked oil, two things that couldn’t be said about the two British triples. AND, they were cheaper. Thanks to a favorable currency exchange rate between Japan and the US at the time, and the opposite, an very unfavorable exchange rate between the UK and the US, the British bikes were going to cost more, no matter what. But the Japanese also had the full weight of their government and the banks behind them, supporting them in every way to strengthen their industries at home. In Britain, the Socialist Party was running things and they hated businesses, manufacturers, management, investors, etc. They offered no help to the beleaguered motorcycle industry there, or the car industry, which also collapsed during this era.
This 1971 BSA Rocket 3 shows just how handsome they'd become. But still no disc brake, no 5-speed, and no electric starter!
BSA Rocket 3 gets Clunky Styling at First
The last nail in the coffin was the styling of the bikes when they were released in 1968 as 1969 models. BSA, in their infinite wisdom, hired an automotive firm called Ogle to sale the bikes and the results were horrible. It’s interesting to note that while BSA slowed this entire project down so they could have a bike clearly not the same as the Trident, and while the engines looked slightly different, both bikes were released with identical bodywork, with slightly different styling, trim and paint. And what bodywork it was. The tanks were square and boxy, and quickly gained the nickname “shoebox gas tank”. The mufflers were even worse. There were three little ‘guns’ poking out of the backs giving them a Flash Gordon ray gun look, which is why they were nicknames either ‘Flash Gordons’ or ‘ray gun mufflers’. Surprisingly, they flow incredibly well, often better than the aftermarket pieces that replaced them on many bikes.
It took less than one model year for BSA and Triumph to get their acts together on this, and by the end of the 1969 model year, Triumph was using the handsome Bonneville bodywork, and BSA’s was straight off of the A65 line. Early bugs were worked out and the triples became very fine machines, in light of their shortcomings. They were always fast and great-handling, the sounded great and looked astounding! Improvements were steadily made, year-to-year.
1971 BSA Rocket 3, left side
BSA Rocket 3 in the Oil-in-Frame Era
Of course, BSA was on the verge of financial collapse. In 1971, with barely enough money to carry on, BSA redesigned all off BSA and Triumph’s 650 twins with all new oil-bearing frames, new bodywork and running gear. The biggest area that needed to be updated though, that being the engine and gearbox, were left alone. Everything else changed around it. The results were handsome machines, although many BSA and Triumph purists rejected the new looks at first. Both bikes benefitted from the new bodywork and more modern running gear of the 1971-and-later Oil-in-Frame twins, all except the frames themselves. Both triples continued to run their pre-1971 frames as always, and instead of carrying their engine oil in the backbone of the frame as the twins did, they both had oil tanks under the seat, as always. By this time, the BSA Rocket 3 had matured into a great-looking bike, but still no 5-speed gearbox, or front disc brake or electric starter.
1972 was the last year that BSA manufactured BSA motorcycles. Triumph was doing better than BSA by far, but not nearly good enough to survive against the withering competition coming out of Japan. Faltering BSA attempted a merger with the only other motorcycle company left in Britain, Norton-Villiers. Just as the deal went down, BSA closed their doors and Triumph ended up in Norton’s hands. But that’s another story.
1973 Triumph X-75 Hurricane
This is an interesting story. Remember that BSA suffered from corporate envy toward Triumph. When the new triples came out, BSA wanted a limited-edition ‘halo bike’ that might get buyers into BSA showrooms, and one that would outshine Triumph's Trident.
In 1971 BSA, on the verge of bankruptcy, hired American fairing guru Craig Vetter to style a special, limited-edition of their triple. What he came up with was a factory chopper, all the rage in the day. Harley-Davidson had just done it with the Super Glide. Vetter took a stock BSA Rocket 3, extended the front forks, created a whole suite of gorgeous fiberglass bodywork (his specialty), and a wild set of pipes. All three pipes ran along the right side and splayed upward at the back in a very striking fashion. The bike is just jaw-dropping to look at.
Alas BSA failed in 1972 and tried to merger with Norton-Villiers for form the new Norton-Villiers-Triumph. BSA was out and now Norton owned Triumph. Triumph inherited the project in 1972 and rebadged it as a Triumph, and released it as the 1973 Triumph X-75 Hurricane. Everyone loved the bike, but it was a very limited model with only 1,183 made.
If you look closely at one, you’ll note that the engine and frame are straight from the BSA Rocket 3. It’s not Triumph stuff. Again, the bike was designed and engineered on BSA’s watch and Triumph wasn’t about to re-engineer everything. So it was launched just as it is seen here, a BSA in Triumph clothing. But with BSA now out of business, they only had enough BSA parts to make around 1,000 bikes.
This 1973 Triumph X-75 Hurricane is, in my humble opinion, one of the most gorgeous motorcycles ever produced, with a heckuva back story to go with it.
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