The Japanese rise as a dominant force in the motorcycle industry during the seventies caught much of the established European motorcycle manufacturers off guard. The bikes from the Land of the Rising Sun had nice convenient electric starters and quickly earned themselves a reputation for dependability. The expression “boringly reliable” was quickly applied to anything made by Honda, because they were. A flat out ride on a Honda CB750cc was however anything but boring and the Kawasaki 900cc that followed it provided levels of excitement that beggared belief.
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For over 50 years automobile collectors have been hunting for the mysterious BMW 507 that was owned by Elvis Presley during his military service in Germany between 1958 and 1960. He bought the car off the showroom floor shortly after arriving in Europe, and he used it on an almost daily basis for the duration of…
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The R80 Monolever was built from 1982 to 1995 and enjoyed solid sales numbers, it was powered by a more-reliable-than-taxes 797.5cc boxer twin producing 49hp and 59Nm of torque. BMW built over 22,000 Monolevers during the life of the model, this means that they’re relatively easy to come by in many parts of the world and…
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The 67 hp 980cc boxer twin used in the BMW R100 is an engine that lends itself very well to life both on and off road, having the heads out in the air flow is an excellent way of keeping them equally cool in even the warmest of climates, and bulletproof BMW engineering mean that…
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The BMW 2002 is a car that only came into existence thanks to a happy coincidence and some pressure from Max Hoffman – the pre-eminent automobile importer in the USA at the time. At some point in the mid 1960s, Helmut Werner Bönsch (BMW’s director of product planning) and Alex von Falkenhausen (the designer of…
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The BMW R100 RS was released into the maelstrom of the motorcycle world in the late 1970s – the Japanese takeover was all but complete by this time and more traditional European and American marques had been struggling for close to a decade. The team at BMW Motorrad hired Hans Muth to come in and…
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The BMW K100 is a motorcycle that BMW created to take the fight to the surge of inline-4 Japanese motorcycles that were pouring into Europe and every other developed region from the late ’60s onwards. Rather than just installing an inline-4 transversely in the frame as had been done before, the engineers at BMW lead…
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The BMW S1000RR was originally developed to compete in the 2009 Superbike World Championship, for homologation purposes they produced 1000 road going versions of the model in the same year but due to overwhelming public demand they began a full production calendar for the bike from 2010 onwards. The specifications of the S1000RR would be…
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Blitz Motorcycles is a Paris-based workshop that have developed a reputation for building genuinely unique and oftentimes unusual custom motorcycles. It’s run by Fred Jourden and Hugo Jezebel, both avid riders and self-taught mechanics who have developed a style all their own. When Blitz first started building bikes in 2010 they split public opinion, with…
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Over the past few years, Revival Cycles have grown into one of the most highly respected custom motorcycle workshops in the world. This BMW Landspeeder is their latest creation, and instead of us writing about it, we’re going to publish the story of bike directly from the team at Revival. A year ago, a client came…
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When the BMW R nineT was released in 2015 it grabbed the attention of a lot of riders, its design was both modern and retro, the engineering was exceptional, and BMW had designed it to be a platform for customisation. Two of the men who were immediately drawn to the new Beemer were Montreal residents…
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The BMW R 100R was a bit of a precursor of the modern trend towards retro motorcycles. It was released in 1991 and sold until 1996, unlike the other bikes in the BMW stable it made no real attempt at being modern. BMW targeted the R 100R at an older generation who remembered the heady…
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