How lucky can a restoration
project be?
We thought we were
doing well when ex- BSA employee Colin Washbourne got in touch and
offered us works photos of the twins.
We thought we were
doing really well when we were offered colour slides from the
beach in 1954.
So when we were
offered some film from the 1954 200 miler we could hardly contain
ourselves!
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BSA
poster celebrating the 1954 win |
In January 2004
BSA owner Skip Kologski read about the Daytona Project on our
website. He was pleased to see people keeping the BSA name
alive and remembered he had a VHS tape of vintage races that
included some footage of the 54 race.
He wondered if we
might be interested and contacted
team member Don
Bradley in Florida. Don was immediately enthusiastic so Skip said he
would send a copy.
Now at this point
Don called me and to be honest, we worried that this might all turn
out too good to be true and we'd never hear from Skip again.
But Skip was as good as his word and a couple of days later a tape
popped into Don's mail box.
And there is film
from Daytona in 54... and 52... and 71! There is also footage
from the 64 Jack PIne, 50's Laconia and others too.
At time of writing
we're still going through the film trying to work out exactly what
is on the tape and where it originally came from. Quality is
variable, we believe the originals are a mixture of 8mm and 16mm but
all are very watchable and some are great!
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BSA magazine advert from 1954 |
Some of the film
appears to be promotional material filmed by or for Triumph, so
copyright issues may apply. But the Daytona footage is not and we're
currently trying to figure out how we can edit and convert this into
downloadable MPEG files or streaming video that we hope to put on
the website. If this is possible it won't happen until after Daytona
2004 - we're too busy with bike restoration and event planning.
But we do plan to
take a copy along to Daytona so your best chance of seeing the film
wil be at the Project Daytona Banquet on the evening of Thursday 4th
March at the Edmonds Centre, Stetson University.
This very special
will be the climax of our 50th anniversary celebrations and will be
attended by the BSA riders from '54 and other BSA 'guest stars' like
Dick Mann, Jeff Smith, Norm Smith, Bill Tuman.
They will be YOUR
guests for the evening with awards, talks and a Q&A session - we
hope to see you there!.
Myles Raymond
01/02/04
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