Originally Posted by
motrheadsroadie
why do you think this frame would have come stock with some deep track drops? it has fender mounts. why would a track bike need fenders?
Because it came from the era when a bike was expected to perform multiple tasks. It's a classical road-track machine. You could take this bike and ride to the race on your daily wheels with clinchers, with your sewup "sprint" wheels attached to your handlebars and special bolt- or clip-on fittings near your front dropouts,
like this. Upon arrival, removed mudguards and rear brakes and saddlebag, install racing wheels, compete, come back and put it back together and ride home. It also probably would work nicely for grass track racing, depending on how big a tire you can fit.
This is a
Mid-October, 2017 by
Russ Fitzgerald, on Flickr]
2002 Mercian inspired by these bikes - another vintage bike to look at for ideas would be any older Holdsworth Typhoons. Or there's this really
early Mercian, equipped as it would have been back in the day - and since he had indeed been a cyclist in those years, I'll take his word for it!
While you could go with deep drop bars, I suspect you'll want to trawl through a bunch of old British time trial photos from the 40s and 50s and see what sorts of bars they used.