Hurricane born again

This BSA X65 special may be a very rare sight, but plans are afoot to give more the opportunity to build one.

Words AND PHOTOGRAPHY by Oli Hulme

THE TRIUMPH HURRICANE X75 is one of those motorcycles that is nearly impossible to dislike.

Ridiculously flamboyant and hopelessly impractical, the creators of the X75 had invented the factory custom nearly a decade before anyone else cottoned on.

It’s a bit of a ‘what if’ motorcycle too. What if there had been a bit more money about to make it even better? What if the American noise regulations hadn’t killed it off within a couple of years?

Plus there’s another… what if BSA-Triumph had been brave enough to use the style on other bikes? Kay Brewer’s BSA A65 Lightning X65 is an example of what might have been.

And, whisper it, it has a kind of class and subtlety that doesn’t appear on the brash Hurricane.

The frame and registration are from one of the first of BSA’s ‘power egg’ twins, a 1962 A65 Star.

The engine is from a 1967 Hornet, the high performance, no lights, US competition model.

The tank of a real X75 is just a cover over a tiny steel tank, but the tank and seat unit on the X65 is a bit more sophisticated than that.

For the X65, the glass fibre body was made for SRM in Aberystwyth to special order and uses special ethanol-resistant resin and fits the slender A65 frame rather better than Craig Vetter’s tank and seat unit did the Rocket 3 frame of the X75.

It is believed that at the time only about a dozen of these body kits were made to fit the A65 frame by SRM.

The exhaust downpipes are bent to provide two down pipes of the same length exiting on the right, aping the famous triple silencers of the Hurricane.

Read more and view more images in the October 2019 issue of CBG – on sale now!