A Golden Story
By Jeff Smith

The year was 1955. Winston Churchill was prime minister of the United Kingdom and Eisenhower president in the United States. I would be 21 in October and was in the final year of engineering apprenticeship at BSA. While training to be an engineer during the week I rode a 500 CB Gold Star on weekends in national trials. In 1953 I had won the national trials championship on a rigid version, but by 1954 we had seen the light. Swinging arms were all the rage, and with a hinge in the middle of the machine I won the championship again. But the allure of scrambling, already called motocross in Europe, had begun to attract my interest. It was more exciting than trials and more remunerative and in 1955 I set my sights in that direction.

This was the year that the British film censors banned the showing of The Wild One, out of concern about the antisocial activities which might be stirred up among motorcyclists. This was not the spur to my switching to motocross. My BSA contract was specifically aimed at trials, but providing I made a maximum effort to close the trials championship for a third year I would be allowed to race in selected scrambles and motocross. Because of the way the British schedule was put together in those days, such a program could work. As a broad rule trials were run between October and March and scrambles ran April to September. There were very few exceptions, but the most important was the Scottish Six Days Trial, which ran during the first week in May. The Highlands could still have driving snow and that special all-wetting rain called “Scotch mist.” Sometimes the sun shone too!

The BSA Competition Department put a DB 500 Gold Star at my disposal for my scrambling ambitions. This is a fine machine with predictable handling and gear ratios totally compatible with the long torque curve the engine produces. Jack Amott, BSA’s wizard of cams, was responsible for the basic engine performance and Bill Nicholson had tied the cycle parts into a formidable handling package.

I had raced a little during 1954 and had won a very wet Experts Grand National and an even more wet Dutch Grand Prix. In the Dutch win I had finished ahead of Victor Leloup on his fabled FN works machine. But because both these wins had been in very slippery conditions my scrambling prowess was not taken too seriously. After all, I was a trials rider who could be expected to perform well in mud. I had doubts also, because when the going was dry and fast my success ratio was down.

Albert Einstein of E=MC2 fame died in April, but I didn’t let it worry me too much since the Gold Star took me to the top of the British motocross championship with three winning weekends that month. Running second was BSA teammate Terry Cheshire, who raced very effectively on works 350 and 500 Gold Stars. I took the first week off in May to fulfill part of the trials’ side of my contract. The Premier award in the Scottish Six Days satisfied the factory and delighted me, although I was never to win it again. Winning the Scottish took six grueling days and the same number of restless nights as the next day’s imagined terrors crowded out sleep. But in the end, the Alexander Trophy was BSA’s and mine by one mark from George Fisher, who rode a 125 Francis Barnett. I would have never lived it down if George had won!

With a good start to the motocross season I buckled down to grinding out the points necessary to win the British motocross championship. As indicated, my rival all year did not come as we expected from the mighty AJS and Matchless factory but from my fellow BSA rider Terry Cheshire. Terry quite often preferred to ride a 350 Gold Star, and this may have been the weak point in his strategy. I always thought a “good big ‘un” would beat a “good little ‘un” and used only the 500. At the season’s end I scraped the championship by 2 points. The trials championship also went down to the wire; here I lost by 3 points. BSA was sufficiently happy with my performance to renew the contract for the following year. This was my first motocross series win on a Gold Star.

For the first time I was selected for the Motocross des Nations as part of a four-member British team. Harold Taylor, the one-legged disciplinarian who we knew as “The Colonel,” was our team manager. My teammates were Les Archer with his camshaft Norton, Geoff Ward on the AJS and Brian Stonebridge, like myself, on a Gold Star. Before the race we all agreed to share any prize money we might win. At first only Harold Taylor was at the signaling point. Stonebridge led, I was in second, everything looked perfect and the signal was to “hold position.” This meant we must be winning! Suddenly Les Archer was standing next to Taylor, waving us on. The next lap Stonebridge pulled off into the pits and I was now leading by 43 seconds from Sweden’s Bill Nilsson, who was also riding a Gold Star. Next time round all of the rest of the British team were standing with the Colonel, waving me on like mad. By the finish I had increased my lead on Bill to over a minute. But the Swedish team had won. This was the exact opposite of what had happened the previous year when Nilsson was the individual winner but the British team had won. Nevertheless, my teammates were overjoyed at my finish. First-place money meant we would have a party after all! My interests turned more and more to motocross and Gold Stars carried me to many successes throughout the 1950s. By 1960 the writing was on the wall for the Gold Star despite its spectacular performance, and the BSA Competition Department began the process of transition to smaller, lighter power units with integral gearboxes. The transition perhaps took three years, at the end of which the lighter, less powerful, but more nimble, B40 derivatives had extinguished the Gold Star. The two-stroke was also rearing its head as the major threat it would eventually become. I used the B40, 420 and 440 during the mid-‘60s, when BSA for a time dominated the world motocross scene. In 1962 Gold Star production slumped to six units a week and then was closed down. The great era of the multi-purpose motorcycle had end and specialization in every branch of the sport became the norm.

In the year 2000, because of the gift of a Dick Mann-built DBD 500 Gold Star from the AHRMA Board of Trustees the previous March, I had the opportunity to relive the Gold Star’s last stand. But on the opposite side. This time I rode the Gold Star and Claude McElvain rode a B40 in AHRMA’s Premier 500 class. We battled in a good natured replay of the events which settled the question—the big and powerful versus the nimble and not so powerful—although the truth was always that the advantage of the lightweights was a better power-to-weight ratio.

Claude is a very good rider who has improved his technique considerably over the last few years. His machine is basically a B40 350 in a very respectable state of tune. The Gold Star I rode is an excellent example and works well in every way. I had not seriously ridden a Gold Star until a couple of rides on this machine in 1999. Things came back that had not crossed my mind for 40 years! I remembered to get up on the gas tank when cornering to make the front wheel stick, to lift the cornering leg clear of the footrest to avoid dragging the ground, to change gear quickly to keep in that enormous torque band, to start in second gear and so much more.

McElvain and I met in the Premier 500 class on nine occasions, making 18 motos of contention. We raced each other at the best AHRMA tracks across the USA and under all types of weather conditions. A typical race would have Claude making a lightning start. My only counter was to dog him until he made a bobble or I could create a possibility. This meant that on many occasions we were extremely close together. These moments are some of the most dangerous of any race, when we have the least control over the situation. Any miscalculation can lead to the pair of us going down. I managed to win 16 motos and can report that Claude is very cool and trustworthy during close encounters.

So in the great rerun the Gold Star triumphed, but once again as long ago, the writing is on the wall. McElvain’s B40 won both motos in our final clash of the season at Peoria and I have won my last series on a Gold Star.

Jeff Smith, MX #4, is a two-time World 500cc Motocross Champion and retired AHRMA executive director. He lives in Wausau, WI.