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. 

We asked Igor Spasojevic, a passionate adventure rider based in Canada why he wants to keep riding with TWE. 

What motivated you to do a ride in Rajasthan and Nepal? 

To be honest India wasn’t really on my radar. I wasn’t planning to visit it. My list of destinations to see was ever growing, but India wasn’t on it. Then, one sunny Tuesday in May, I think, I received an invitation to join the expedition to Rajasthan. It was a fantastic opportunity to ride motos with friends in an exotic land and I couldn’t let it pass. Following the joy and euphoria of this experience, when the opportunity came up to do it again in a less manic way and in a country that I had actually intended and desired to visit, which was Nepal, it was a no-brainer. 

 

Why did you choose TWE? 

They’re a bunch of ne’er-do-wells whom I have grown to appreciate as friends. I like the CEO with a “fuck everything” attitude, pink mohawk and a KTM. The TWE guide is one of the best humans in the world, great artist of life and an excellent guide. He works better without a GPS and takes better photos with his antique iPhone than with a DSLR. 

 

What do you ride at home?

KTM 790 Adventure R with some minor mods

Your next ride with TWE? 

Oh god!! Ha ha ha…once the borders re-open and once I can take some more vacation time, I’d love to visit Bhutan with TWE! or Ladakh! or Sri Lanka.. anywhere really. Marrakech? 

Reviewing a bike you have already purchased is like deciding whether you like kids after they are already waking you up at 3am for food or something: that ship has sailed. After swooning over it for a year as the perfect bike for my needs, I slapped down the £10,000 proceeds from an unused engagement ring and rode it home. Contrary to the proposal of marriage, there was zero question that this was the right decision. 100%. It is lighter and more off-road capable than the BMW GS I rode around the world, more street legal than my KTM 450 EXC enduro, and has more all-round usability than my Royal Enfield Himalayan. The perceptive among you may be bracing for some bitching.

Yeah, a bit.

The first thing I realized after a couple hundred miles on this bike was, if I was ever going to appreciate it, I needed to blow up everything I know about motorcycles .. and I’ve owned 16 .. because I have never ridden anything like it. The BMW R1250 GS is heavy and soft, the Triumph Tiger is cool but squishy and the Honda Africa Twin is pretty but fat. Not that they aren’t all beautiful machines because they are. This rethinking was necessary because the Adventure has more in common with my 450 EXC than my GS. Let me explain.

If a radical left-wing political party were scrappy enduro riders and the ultra-conservative wing were Fat Boy riders, the Adventure would be a dreadlocked, peace-loving supporter of Greenpeace. My EXC is tall and narrow, like the Adventure. My EXC has a 21” front wheel, like the Adventure. My EXC has WP shocks with lots of travel. Ditto the Adventure. The message is this: the 790 Adventure is more off-road orientated than any street-legal bike I have ridden and, depending on your intentions / expectations, you will either be super stoked and desperately disappointed. Let’s start with the disappointments, shall we?

The motor below 4,000 rpm annoys me. Even though it has two counter-balance shafts, below that threshold it feels crankily unbalanced with each powerstroke seeming to want to shake the engine from its moorings. Ok, I am exaggerating but you get the point.  I have ridden lots of parallel twins but none felt as unsettled as this one. The obvious solution is to keep it above 4,000 where everything just seems to fall into place and it begins to snarl. With about the same horsepower as the Africa Twin but 43kg less lard, it’s here you’ll appreciate the glory of power to weigh ratios.

The transmission has pissed me off from day one. If I ignore the fact that it ‘feels’ like the factory loaded it up with way too much sand before sending it out the door, getting it into neutral is an ordeal like no bike I have ever ridden, with the exception of some very old BMW airheads. The sales guy rolled his eyes about this complaint saying “it’s a new bike” at which point I grabbed his Canadian head and mashed it into the ground (in my mind). Having rebuilt a transmission or two I knew what was going on in there. Tolerance of the gears on the shaft and/or shifter forks too tight, perhaps? Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on it during the warranty period. Speaking of which, I have already had the front discs replaced under it due to warp. Shit happens.

Some additional, less mortally-wounding wind-ups:

-It doesn’t have a centre stand (WTFuck?) and the order I placed for one 5 months ago has yet to be delivered.
– The switch gear, especially coming from beauty of the GS world, is Dollar General / Pound Land quality. In other words, shit. Or at least looks that way.
– The design is particularly adept in funnelling furiously hot air from the exhaust manifold to your inner thighs and manbits necessitating periodic, unbecoming splaying of the legs, outrigger style, to cool off.
– The fuel gauge goes from “we’re good man” to “feed me now!” in the blink of an eye.
– The barkbusters are decorative only (crap) and should be upgraded if you are going anywhere near dirt.
– Obviously, if your grandparents cursed you with the short gene, that’s your (my) problem. But if you ever ride dirt or adventure bikes as a shorty, that is the reality of the geometry of ground clearance.

 

Ok, I’m done. After all that whinging you probably think I want to drive it back to the factory in Austria and ask for my money back. Nope. Wanna know why? Surprise!..it’s awesome off-road. Fit for purpose, as they say in the design world. It actually took a few hours of riding tractor paths through the chardonnay vineyards of Champagne for this epiphany to shake my buyer’s remorse. When I opened the throttle wide and let the orange madman tear through kilometres of rough gravel and dirt paths, terrain similar to what I have encountered in India, Pakistan, Laos, Cambodia, South Africa, Nepal and elsewhere on our planet, it…felt…perfect. Just like when when flying through the Nevada desert on my 450 EXC, nothing unsettled it. The dirt-oriented big front wheel smoothed out the ruts, the WP suspension polished off the rocks and holes, the ground clearance assured everything hard remained at an arm’s length. It possesses some of the most battle-hardened off-road characteristics of the EXC but it also swallows hundreds of kilometres of autobahn like an Audi A8..or at least an A4. But, and this is a big but, if your true intentions are to never roam far from the tarmac, the GS, Tiger, AT or a bunch of other adventure bikes will likely be a better fit.

I bought this bike for one thing: To use it as a platform to explore new terrain and create new expeditions for our company. And I am not aware of any other bike on the planet more up to the task.

 

 

Note: Expensive stuff I purchased to make the bike better, as follows:

– Offroad mudguard, bark busters and centre stand from KTM

– Offroad bashplate and crashbars from Outback Motortech

– Luggage frames and side panniers (Zega Evo X) from Touratech

– Enduro tires (Karoo) from Metzler.

Click for more on the KTM 790 Adventure