LINE AHEAD!
Many things about quirky motorcycles appear intended to amaze the unwary. For example: how did BSA’s main board OK the decently amazing Sunbeam parallel twins for production? It is so entirely unlike anything else built in the UK that it is indeed entirely amazing that it got built at all. Almost as amazing is that it’s also amazing to ride … even today.
This is a sort-of personal story, as well as a collection of riding impressions of a bike which your (almost) humble scribe has always admired. I mean… Sunbeam twins are right up there with the Velocette LE and rotary Nortons as examples of seriously eccentric machinery from a notoriously conservative manufacturing industry, aimed at an even more notoriously conservative buying public. It should never have succeeded. And, in all honesty, it probably didn’t. Not commercially. But BSA and their Sunbeam designer, the gloriously monickered Erling Poppe, did succeed in producing an entirely remarkable machine. I’ve ridden lots of them. Always wanted one of my own. And recently – a mere 21 years ago – Rowena gave me one as a birthday present.
Pause here for a great big ‘Ahhhh!’
OK, that’s quite enough of that. We ran the S8 for a couple of years back when we lived up in the mountains which separate Wales from England … or is it the other way around? It was great. Of course I can locate hardly any of the pics I took at the time, which is probably a good thing, as I was a seriously large laddie back then, and dwarfed the elderly Sunbeam. Hands up if you remember when
