My first thought upon seeing the BMW R12G / S was that it reminded me of BMW’ s HP2 Enduro wild-child from back in the early 2000s, a highly impressive machine, light, fast and very competent offroad – although nobody at the time seemed to quite know what it was and it has a far bigger following today than when it was launched. My second thought was of the old BMWs racing across the Sahara Desert, winning the 1980s Paris-Dakar races. Visually, the new 12G / S is a homage to the original R80G / S, a bike that, arguably, started the adventure riding segment when it was launched in 1980. My cynical, old test rider’ s mind moved straight to an obvious question... is the new bike Old School Cool or just Old School? Was I dealing with an updated HP2- look-alike or an R80G / S look-alike? All I knew at this stage, apart from the retro looks, was it would be fun finding out. Yeah, it was time to fire it up and hit the roads, trails, and tracks.
R1200GS HEART Dominating the new bike is a retuned version of the 1157cc horizontally-opposed boxer twin originally found in the incredibly popular R1200GS. Hit the starter button and the big air / oil-cooled twin bursts into life with plenty of engine twist, authority, and purpose, instantly settling into a perfect tickover – something its R80G / S muse never did( playing with the choke lever to find the happy spot was needed each fire up from cold). That initial engine twist is pronounced, perhaps more so than the late model liquid cooled motors, giving it some retro charm and character that’ s slowly being engineered out of the latest models.
KIWI RIDER 65