Anything with too much electronic gadgetry like fuel injection and ABS is out. And generally speaking, anything that's too popular is also out, as a matter of principle.
And yet, there is a motorcycle in our stables that by all accounts should not be there, has no business being there! I'm talking about, of course, our 1988 BMW R100GS.
BMW have done something remarkable with the GS line in general. Starting with the G/S in 1980 that invented a new genre of motorcycles (yet using what they already had! More on this concept below), in and of itself no easy feat, they evolved them over 40 years (and counting) and it has always been an extremely popular machine. And to that I say "bah, humbug." in no small part because so many of these behemoths that are actually capable of touring around the planet spend most of their time going from home to the office and back, all within the safe confines of a city, with tow-trucks and filling stations aplenty. What's the point?!
I also refuse to believe that the Telelever front suspension system is something that would work for me, though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Add to all that the ever more complex cooling systems, fuel injection, ABS, traction control, riding modes, on-board computer nonsense and you've totally lost me.
I know the G/S and the Paralever GS. I like the G/S's aesthetics if taken within a strict 1980s context, but do not like how it rides, with its annoying torque effect that jacks the bike up and down, and its flimsy top fork yoke that gives a rubbery feeling to the whole thing. I don't really care how our R100GS looks like, I certainly can't say that it's beautiful or even cool for that matter, but by god does it work! Simply put, there is no other motorcycle that I know or own that comes close to delivering the experience you can have with this flat twin. Not in terms of sheer performance (speed, handling, torque), both the Norton and the Sportster will run circles around it all day, and both deliver a visceral, gut-churning punch that the BMW could never do; what the GS does do, is make everything so very, very... easy. And that's why they're so popular.
I think I've said it before: BMW motorcycles aren't really motorcycles. They're 2-wheeled automobiles and they have so many quirks and oddities (that for the most part work, mind you!), to really put them into a class of their own.
You could argue, very superficially obviously, that since the /5 series in the late 60s, all the way up to the early 90s, BMW have offered the same frame and the same flat-twin engine; it's always the same bike, always the same stuff.
Except it isn't.
Somehow, by altering the overall recipe ever so slightly, those crazy fun-loving Germans have managed to create vastly different machines; compare if you will an R75/5 (of which I want one, by the way) with Witold's R100GS PD: same mainframe, and both have a boxer twin, yet you couldn't possibly say they're the same bike, or attempt the same type of use or tour with both machines as if they were interchangeable. I think this reveals one thing: the basic design of that same frame & engine is intrinsically brilliant, and has yielded something so versatile as to be able to last a quarter of a century in production and provide machines for a wide variety of applications, with high build quality, better-than-average reliability, and decent performance to boot.
I will never say, or feel, that a BMW could be my favorite motorcycle in the world (that is and always will be the Norton Commando)... but damn, they're looking awful close in that rear-view mirror.
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