The history of the BSA Rocket 3 is an excellent example of how the British motorcycle industry put itself out of business.

It was designed at the Triumph works at Meriden by Doug Hele, Bert Hopwood and Jack Wicks, as BSA owned Triumph by this time.

Hopwood had the idea in late 1961, and Hele had drawings by October 1962, but the idea was not officially shown to Triumph management until 1964, when rumours of a 4-cylinder street bike from Honda began to surface.

The triple could have been in showrooms by 1967, two years ahead of the Honda CB750, but management slowed the bike’s development when it handed the job of styling the new triple to Ogle Design, an outside styling house with no motorcycle experience, which spent more than a year on the job.

The first triples looked unappetizingly bizarre (Ogle was famous for styling avant-garde toasters, which goes a long way toward explaining the styling on the first Rocket 3), and needed extensive re-styling following the America-only launc...