I’ve never known quite what to make of big, fully faired, bells & whistles touring bikes. A few months ago Rosa and I took BMW’s outgoing air-cooled boxer twin R1200RT out for a couple of hours, and we rather enjoyed it. Sure, it was big and heavy, but it was surprisingly light on its feet…
What is an adventure bike? Definitions abound, from two-wheeled SUVs to giant dirt bikes; from tall, upright sports bikes to the inevitable evolution of the sports tourer. Regardless, the industry, and indeed the biking public as a whole, seem to have latched onto the image of the tough, rugged, do-everything motorcycle, even if most bikes end up doing exactly…
It seems that everyone in the news is getting excited about the enhanced flavour of BMW’s water-cooled R1200GS Adventure, but I’m too short to be interested in something that’s even taller than the standard GS. Plus, I hate spoked wheels, and don’t have any intention of taking a 250kg motorcycle off-road. And I’ve never actually…
I finally got myself organised and booked test rides on BMW’s R1200RT and R1200GS. I’ve ridden BMW boxers before – an R1150R when I was shopping for the Bandit and my uncle’s R1150RT in Canada last year, so there really shouldn’t have been many surprises. Neither 1150 had blown me away at the time, but…
This will be the last in my recent series on horsepower, torque, and how silly they both are when trying to compare bikes. But rather than simply complain yet again about how bike manufacturers fail to provide actually useful information, I’m going to help them out by giving them a solution. You see, the bike…
If you’ve read my previous article on horsepower and torque, then you’ll understand why the whole top-trumps argument is completely irrelevant when actually choosing which motorcycle to buy. Those numbers tell you very, very little about what any given bike will actually be like to ride. If you’ve not read my article…well, you’re welcome to. But…
A lot of people get hung up on horsepower. The more a bike has, the better it supposedly is. A bike with less power than the other bike? Not as good at being a bike. Harley Davidson riders aren’t much better – they don’t know how much horsepower their bike makes (few people even know exactly…
Back in the 1980s, motorcycle manufacturers briefly tried forced induction out on production models, and then left it at that. The bikes were expensive, complicated to service and repair, suffered from turbo lag and in reality weren’t actually any quicker than their naturally aspirated stablemates. Suzuki’s GPZ750T was about as powerful as their bigger-engined GPZ900,…
Five months since my time with the Bandit was cruelly cut short, and four months since a new 2013 Triumph Street Triple R took its place in my garage. My RoadTrip map tells the whole story – the bike has barely been more than 50 miles in any direction, but I’ve still managed to put…
Regular readers will know that I’m a relatively recent convert to the fancy-suspension club, having been thoroughly impressed by the RaceTech GoldValve cartridge emulators and springs on my Bandit’s forks, and then astonished by the difference the Nitron Sport Shock made to the rear-end’s traction and stability. I’d taken the gamble and confirmed that, annoyingly,…
Boy Meets Bike 
You must be logged in to post a comment.