what bike was in silver dream racer?

[mikeoldcars]

does anyone know what bike was the star of silver dream racer?
(the 1980 david essex film)
who built it or what was the bike based on
i cant seem to find any information on it at all
found this picture https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v17/mikeoldcars/sdr.gif

[bazza]

[mikeoldcars]

cheers for that Bazza, next question is where is it now?
national motorcycle museum?
anyone know?

[mikeoldcars]

just had a thought, there must be more than one about, what would happen if they were filiming and someone binned it, couldnt all have been rear projection filming

[Ichy]

It was a revolutionary British bike built by Barton Motors (Caernarfon) Ltd who were Barry Hart and Graham Dyson. It did have a carbon fibre frame like they said in the film. A very few of these bikes were sold to privateers

quote:
The Barton square four is a 750 cc disc-valve water-cooled two-stroke. Barton used the design of the Suzuki RG500 engine but made it better and more reliable. Suzuki used Bartons design in later RG500 models. Two of these bikes were made by Barton, they wanted to race the bikes in the F750 class but that never took place. The bikes were used in the 1980 film Silver Dream Racer (see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081517/). They were ridden by Roger Marshall. After the film they were bought by Erik Buell, who still is the current owner. He was planning to race them in the AMA F1 class just before they banned them for this class.


To quote Graham Dyson...............

Hart wanted to build a F750 challenger and liked the idea of a 'big' RG square four. Sheene lent us his RG500 and we pulled it down to study it. We were horrified when we saw the crank arrangement; everything relied on four 6mm titanium screws. When we built our engine we did it properly, using a keyway and press fit. The basis was a Suzuki bottom end with a Yamaha top end, though there were considerable design differences. Scunthorpe-based national rider Graham Wood took on the role of development rider and, while testing at Oulton Park, broke the engine. We stripped it to find that the narrow drive gears to the cranks had broken, so we changed the design to a much tougher one with wider gears. In fact Suzuki copied our design on their later models.

It was this machine that formed the basis for the Silver Dream Racer - that most dire of films starring David Essex. The film boss was a pal of Tony Dawson, of Scitsu rev counter fame, who recommended us for the feature bike. We made two bikes, my brothers did the bodywork, It was a lovely bike, very futuristic but not very practical for genuine racing, but there again the film was a fantasy tale so it had to look the part. We kept the bikes after the film and put them back into proper racing trim.

So I guess that means that the bikes in the film don't exist anymore.
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[mikeoldcars]

cheers for that, bit of a shame though

[CortezTheKill...]

I did see the bikes race somewhere when I was much younger (about 11-ish I guess). Can't remember where though - may have been at Mallory or Oulton Park.
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