A New Kudu – The BMW R1300 GS

When the news of BMW’s latest GS incarnation flashed across some app somewhere, I swiped left. The first thought that came to mind was ‘have they lost their effing minds?’ Did they not see Ewan MacGregor and Charlie Borman in tears as their GS’s fell for the N-teenth time on the Road of Bones or some other gruesomely named off-road stretch? “Too heavy!” they whined. “Big mistake”, they sobbed. I rode my 2007 1200GS around the world and the only reason it made sense in retrospect was that my future ex-wife was on the back seat and I needed the storage. I remember sitting on a 1250 Adventure in a showroom once and proclaimed it a stroke of madness. Unless you are a hardened Dakar racer, riding that bike offroad would be zero fun. So, when the time came to upgrade my 1200GS, I went to the KTM 790 Adventure. It eats miles for breakfast on the motorway from London to Marrakesh and then magically transforms into an enduro once the pavement ends and the Sahara begins. My sweetspot has been found.

So yeah, I swiped left on the 1300. But then, somewhere, I came across a bike review and read about the total ground-up redesign of the bike. One of the biggest complaints I had on the recent versions of the bike was girth and top heaviness, attributes that are not particularly welcome on the undulating, unpredictable surfaces found once the pavement ends. But when I read the centre of gravity has been significantly improved by placing the gearbox under the engine rather than behind it, I decided to keep reading. Words never uttered to convey the Gelände/Straße’s stature – ‘slim, light & agile’ – kept appearing on my screen. 3 days later, I was riding one through London.

I’m 5’7” and several other fractions tall (i.e, not tall) and the biggest complaint anyone under 5’9” always has is it is too tall. I don’t remember the last time I was flat-footed on any adventure bike (never) so I am pretty used to using the balls of my feet. But this bike has a mind-blowing solution to the seat height / ground clearance conundrum: a suspension that can lower itself by an inch and a half as you come to a stop and then raises itself as you ride away! My test bike didn’t have this feature but wow – what a great innovation!

Despite the lack of this wizardry on my test bike, the first time I creaked my leg over and gave it the hard jerk needed to get the tall, heavy bike off its side stand, I noticed the difference in balance. With the centre of gravity so low, it came upright with surprising ease. The bike felt lighter, more nimble and hence more flickable while doing a dance between the buses, taxis, Bentleys and the ultimate pariah – UberEats scooters – of London traffic. Find a hole, squirt power, go.

I have a 1974 BMW R75 bolted to a Watsonian sidecar and I ride it around London all the time. The half century old drum brakes have the worst arrestng power in the history of stopping. The brakes on this GS, from the same company but 50 years later, are a masterpiece.  Or in my notes, ‘like custard’. Smooth, consistent, reassuring. Even with one finger, they have a progressive feel from the lightest touch to the hardest, ABS-releasing grab.

On propulsion, one thought came to mind: if Tesla made a motorcycle whose motor provided a completely linear relationship between twisting the throttle and forward movement, it would feel like this. I don’t even care what the horsepower and torque numbers are: I can feel it and it is perfect.

And finally, the aesthetic. How does its appearance make you feel? It reminded of the new Africa Twin I test rode in 2019. Every bit looked refined, robust and important. The spoked wheels are sublime. The engine doesn’t look like an internal combustion engine at all. It looks more like a mystery power source powered by crystals or alien life juice. There are no cooling fins. It’s power-coated black. It is omnipotent. The ‘X’ shaped LED headlamp is interesting, but the weird guy who has designed Dada-esque GS headlamps for 25 years seems to always get his way and is always ahead of his time. A board member (Elon Musk?) perhaps.

The wheels, especially the rear, looked jacked from a scooter. I thought it was the clearance that made it look small, but no, the rear is only 17” and the front 19”. Why oh why, if this is ever meant to be taken off-road? I’ll ding you here, BMW.

In the end, the new bike has somehow lost some of its GS-ness. The chunky two-wheeled rhinoceros of the past has been dismissed for a spritely kudu. Sure, when you look at its girth from behind it’s still got the shoulders of an NFL linebacker. But viewed from the side, it’s gone from Valerie Adams (Google her) to Kate Moss and this is a good thing: I’d take Kate over Valerie anytime I’m riding through endless mud tracks in Cambodia.

Of course, when I arrived back at the hyper posh BMW of Park Lane on London’s Hyde Park to return the bike, I was accosted with the hard sell. ‘Sorry mate, you can’t sell a seller’, I said. ‘Well, what did you think of it?’, the young Aussie pried. ‘It’s a solution looking for a problem’ was my response and I let him chew on that while I walked out the showroom door, jumped back on my KTM and popped off the sidewalk onto Park Lane toward Buckingham Place. 

Roro La Velle

Roro La Velle is the founder and Maharaja of Client Experience with Two Wheeled Expeditions. He has ridden around the world twice and laid tracks through over 40 countries on 4 continents. He is also the author of ‘The Places In Between‘, an account of a husband & wife team circumnavigating the world on two wheels