Sleek, stylish, supercharged and supremely fast – the BMW Type 255 won both the 1938 European Championship and maintained its reputation by then winning the opening round of the 1939 season, the Isle of Man Senior TT.
Its 500cc engine had the same engine configuration that had been used by the German company since it began making motorcycles in the early 1920s – the ‘flat twin’ with its horizontally opposed cylinders which will be well familiar to all BMW enthusiasts today.
This one, however, was different from all such engines before or since as it incorporated a supercharger, a device that compresses the fuel/air charge into an internal combustion engine and thereby substantially increases the power output.
The bike was the brainchild of youthful Swiss-born BMW designer Rudolf Schleicher, who at the age of 28 in 1925 had designed the R37, the Munich-based company’s first sporting motorcycle that went on to win two German 500cc championships.
Despite this success, Schleicher left BMW in 1927 after a disagreement with his boss Max Friz about the potential of supercharging. This was technology that Schleicher wished to employ to take BMW performance to the next level and was one which the company had previously utilised on its aircraft engines.
Friz, however, was unconvinced of its application to motorcycles although he did get a hint that he might be wrong when BMW rider Ernst Henne gained the World Land Speed record for the German firm in 1929 with a 735cc supercharged twin that Schleicher had designed before he left.
That 137.66 mph record run was eclipsed in 1931 by Britain’s Joe Wright who achieved 150.73 mph on his 1000cc supercharged Zenith-JAP V-twin. So Henne successfully appealed to BMW president Franz Josef Popp to persuade Schleicher to return.
Schleicher did so and immediately extracted more power from the bike with an uprated Zoller supercharger. Even on an unsupercharged machine, this allowed Henne to regain the world record in 1932 at 151.77 mph and later raise it further to 159.10 mph.
Friz now had faith in the technology and gave Schleicher the task of designing a supercharged Grand Prix road racer which would allow BMW to pursue the European Championship. His Type 255 made its competition debut in May 1935 on Berlin’s ultrafast Avusring, a track situated within the German capital that used the two parallel lanes of an autobahn with a steeply-banked 180-degree turn at one end and a hairpin at the other.
Things didn’t go completely to plan, though, with BMW’s Karl Gall having to settle for second place behind victorious Swedish rider Ragnar Sunqvist on an un-supercharged Husqvarna V-twin.
BMW focused on development of the Type 255 for the remainder of that year but on return to competition in May 1936 at the Swiss GP it was again beaten by an un-supercharged machine when Otto Ley finished second to Jimmy Guthrie on a single-cylinder Norton.
Two weeks later Ley did score the BMW’s maiden victory on home ground at the Solitude road circuit near Stuttgart in front of 200,000 spectators but this was a non-Championship race and at Grand Prix level, in the Dutch TT at Assen, he was once more beaten by Guthrie’s Norton.
Finally, at Saxtorp in Sweden in August the Type 255 took its first Grand Prix victory. Otto Ley won from his teammate Karl Gall to defeat Husqvarna 1-2 on its home ground. It was a satisfying payback for that debut defeat on the Avusring!
In the following 1937 season it began to come good for the BMW Type 255. The season opened with a 1-2 victory for Ley and Gall at the Avusring in May and Gall took BMW’s first win of the European Championship season at the Dutch TT.
On the first weekend in August Gall won again, this time in BMW’s home Grand Prix at the Sachsenring. Then Otto Ley won the following week’s Swedish GP ahead of Gall and at the end of the month Jock West took victory for BMW in the Ulster Grand Prix. There the supercharged twin’s 140 mph top speed was a decisive factor in winning on the ultra-fast Clady circuit with its seven miles long straight!
Three GP wins in a single month said that BMW had finally proved that supercharging was the way to success but the Germans were not having things all its own way. In September the Italian GP at Monza was won by the home favourite combination of Giordano Aldrighetti and the four-cylinder water-cooled and supercharged Gilera Rondine. BMWs could only manage fourth and sixth places for Karl Gall and Otto Ley.
However, although the BMW twin was out-sped by the four-cylinder Gilera-Rondine at Monza, Ernst Henne took BMW’s revenge for that defeat on the Frankfurt-Munich autobahn in November. There he wrested the World Land Speed record back from Gilera’s Piero Taruffi, using a fully-streamlined Type 255 to achieve a speed of 173.683 mph.
For 1938 the BMW team was joined by a Bavarian army sergeant named Georg Meier who had earned the ride after substituting for a sick Ernst Henne in the 1937 International Six Days Trial. This mainly off-road event mostly took place in Wales but the final special speed stage was on the Donington Park GP circuit in the English Midlands. Despite never having road raced in his life, Meier won the speed stage and this alerted team boss Rudolf Schleicher to his talents. That obvious potential duly achieved reality when Meier led Karl Gall home in a BMW 1-2 in the first round of the 1938 German championship.
The first European championship race of the season was the Isle of Man TT on mid-June but it proved disastrous for BMW. Gall crashed in practice and sustained a fractured skull which sidelined him for the rest of the season. Meier was a highly-frustrated non-starter as he had stripped a thread in his bike’s cylinder head whilst changing sparkplugs after warming up the bike pre-race.
He made up for that Isle of Man error by winning the Belgian GP at Spa a week later and he then took another victory at in the Dutch TT and won his and BMW’s home Grand Prix at the Sachsenring. Finally, at the end of September he satisfyingly defeated the Italian Gilera and Moto Guzzi teams on their home ground at Monza.This clinched the European Championship for BMW and for Meier in his rookie year in Grand Prix racing.
Georg Meier and the BMW Type 255 took the 1938 European Championship
As 1939 began the clouds of war were already gathering and getting darker, when the Isle of Man Senior TT opened the European Championship series. BMW entered Georg Meier and Karl Gall as well as Jock West, who had won the Ulster GP with the Type 255 in both 1937 and 1938.
Sadly, Gall crashed at Ballaugh Bridge in practice and again fractured his skull. This time it was to prove fatal and he died four days later. After some soul-searching, the decision was taken by the BMW team that Meier and West should race as a tribute to their teammate. In doing so, Meier led West home in a 1-2 finish at a record average of 89 mph.
Georg Meier on his way to victory in the 1939 Isle of Man Senior TT
By September the world was at war and even in motorcycle sport things would never be the same again. When racing resumed after the war in 1946, the things Federation Internationale Motocyclisme banned supercharging from motorcycle racing and that technology has been excluded ever since. The all-conquering Type 255 BMW became essentially a museum piece or, at best, a reminder of past glories when occasionally demonstrated at classic events.
Words: Bruce Cox
Photographs courtesy of The Motorcycle Files Archive
