The performance of a static Kramer drive is substantially affected by the DC voltage waveform of the thyristor recovery bridge and the inductance of the DC link smoothing reactor. The paper describes a novel method of analysis of the periodic transient performance of such a drive, in which full account is taken of these practical aspects of the recovery system. The analytical model obtained has been verified by comparison of calculated and measured performance for four different types of recovery bridge. The computed results have allowed a more comprehensive examination of drive performance than is possible from the results of practical tests.