The Bavarian company’s new cruiser is even more gorgeous in the flesh than it is in photos, and a joy to ride. Our man Hill returns from a day in the sun on it deeply in love and with a smile as wide as those two mammoth cylinders
By Geoff Hill, Mirror, England
This time around, BMW has taken inspiration from the lovely 1936 R5, and kept its simple and exquisite look, but super-sized everything else, with the R5’s 494cc, 24bhp and 165kg becoming a whopping 1800cc, 91bhp and 345kg.
That could have resulted in it going from young Marlon Brando to old Marlon Brando, but it hasn’t: it looked stunning in photos, and when I walked up to it in the sun at the dealers, it was all I could do not to swoon with Stendhal Syndrome, named after the French author who was so overcome by the beauty of Florence on his first visit that he fainted regularly and had to be revived with several large glasses of brandy.
I could have stood there and looked at it until the cows came home, although where those cows had got to is a mystery. Maybe being in the middle of a city had something to do with it.
Pulling myself together, I decided to sit on it and make a list of all the things I loved about it, starting at the front with the single classical headlight, and above it a single speedo with the minimum information you need – speed, gear, miles and which mode you’re in – Rock, Roll or Rain.
The old school circular mirrors are perfect, as is the ferruled chrome filler cap, the classic black tank with ivory coach trim, the boxer cylinders which somehow manage to be both massive and tasteful, the fabulous blossoming curve of the exhausts and the exposed shaft drive. How BMW got that past health and safety is a mystery.
Even after that, it took me half an hour to get away, what with people coming up to admire it.
Start up, it kicks to one side just to remind you it’s a BMW boxer, and the air fills with a gloriously subterranean grumble.
Ride off, click through the solid six-speed box, drink your fill from a well of torque so bottomless that it hardly matters which gear you’re in, and laugh at handling so effortless that even on a bike weighing 345kg, before long you’re swinging through bends as instinctively as if you and the bike are one.
Even at low speed, full lock turns are child’s play.
If I have to throw tiny pebbles of fault in the mirrored lake of perfection, there’s no fuel gauge, just a warning light which comes on when you’ve 25 miles left, and the combination of a fairly firm seat and short travel rear suspension means getting off for a stretch every hour or so…
You can even get it with highbars. See the whole story at mirror.co.uk
