IN THE CLEARING...
BMW’S air-head twins enjoy legions of dedicated fans and followers. Frank Westworth attempts to join that number. Again…
There is no mistaking the fact that the bike between the knees is a boxer from BMW. OK, it could possibly be a Ural, but if it’s mechanically smooth and quiet it’s probably German rather than Russian. If in any doubt – maybe you’re pondering that you are actually perched above a Moto Guzzi V-twin rather than a BMW flatster – give the throttle a decent twitch while stationary. BMW – no doubt. Sound and shake confirm this.
For the entirely of my riding life I have been surrounded by fans of the Meistershafters. I still am, remarkably. Back when we were able to attend lots of events it was a rare day indeed that at least a few cheery souls would fail to amble over and enthuse about their own choice of a flat theme machine. And every so often I would try another airhead – I even bought one! But we have never gelled, somehow, despite my favourite 1960s magazine – Motorcycle Sport – waxing ecstatic every month about them, and several of my friends riding them. But I did try.
Not long after I bought my first rotary Norton – an ex-police machine – in 1988 or so, a pal who was paid to ride current police bikes grumbled at me that although there had been two Norton Interpol 2 motorcycles on trial in his HQ they’d been monopolised by the sergeants and he’d never ridden one. Of course we met up and swapped bikes. He hammered off into the distance, leaving a vague aroma of burned oil and a rasp hanging in the steadily widening gap between us on the A49. I was insufficiently brave to risk binning a police machine by going racing, and my pal would have lost his job – or worse!
Eventually I found him again, parked in a layby and peering into the fairing. ‘Brilliant,’ he announced. ‘Can’t understand why we have to put up with these.’ He waved at the R80RT. The Interpol 2 was in fact worn out and needed an engine rebuild, and had 56,000 miles on its police-certified odo. But the Nortons were too unreliable to succeed, as you know. What did I think of the R80? Not much; slow, heavy and wallowy, mainly. But it was laden with radios, fire extinguishers and stuff, so maybe underneath it was a great machine. I will never know.
BMW twins start with characteristic solidity. Turn the key, press the button and, clunk clank purr… accompanied by a distinctive sideways twitch as the metal gets moving, followed by a sudden rattle from the top ends, subdued almost immediately by
the arrival of oil to do its stuff.
These clutches are nice, even precise. At some point in their long evolution BMW did something technical to their machinery, so that the tyre-wobbling klunk which followed first gear engagement was banished to a Teutonic outer darkness – this R100 engaged first with a satisfying click. I prodded the pedal twice just in case, not least because
I recalled with deep misery a previous experience when Bimmer and I – not this one – had bounded off down the road in front of Proud Owner in a series of seriously undignified lurches as I skilfully managed to entirely mishandle the clutch. This time: no such concerns. The once-familiar rise as the transmission took up the drive and off we rolled. Sweetness and light. The big engine was behaving perfectly, and we shifted up through the gearbox as though we were old friends. Purring along like both of us knew what we were doing. The bike probably did, I was less confident.
Not confident? Because I remember occasional bafflement at the handling – not the steering, which is fine, but with the way the cornering changed depending on the
amount of throttle the engine was taking. This becomes familiar after a fairly short time; just one of those quirky characteristics which often endear a machine to its owner, although I’ve never ridden one for far enough to grow accustomed. In practice, all this actually means is that I ride (even) more slowly than I normally would, which is probably not a bad thing.
An aside: After a sadly short ownership experience of an R100RS – a beautiful machine in beautiful condition – I understood that I simply didn’t like it and moved it on. My brother bought it and still owns it, which is impressive. Following what I felt to be something of a personal failure – millions of riders loved BMW boxers, and I could not be the only rider in step, surely – I largely avoided riding them. Other machinery is endlessly available. But then I borrowed a very late airhead; a Mystic, complete with a Paralever rear drive. This entirely banished all my reservations about airhead boxers, steered perfectly and led to my buying … an oilhead. Of course.
I really do like the engine in this R100/7. It’s very smooth, very easy to ride, entirely predictable and certainly powerful enough for what we once referred to as fast road work. The anchors match it perfectly, despite the occasional horror stories told about the ATE system. They were smooth, progressive, silent and completely confidence inspiring. Which just about sums up the whole riding experience. If you ride smoothly, progressively and indeed confidently, the R100/7 rewards you with an experience which is certainly pleasant, and you can cover big mileages without wearing yourself out with all that fearsome acceleration, hard braking and bend-flinging excitement.
Which is exactly as I was taught to ride when I was but a nipper. Back then it was seen as a virtue to be smooth and fast, and possibly the greatest exponent of this riding style was Dave Minton, with whom I rode a fair bit in decades past. Dave seemed to use the brakes hardly at all, and the only time he appeared to brake hard was when something entirely unexpected happened on the road ahead of him. Apart from those few times, he flowed, rather than rode. It was uncanny. Following him was exhausting … and also a little embarrassing at times.
The BMW rewards that riding style. Quite what more youthful, more modern, riders would make of it I have no idea. Nothing about these machines is extreme; everything is about balance, from the engine, to the bike itself and to the excellent match between Go, Steer and Stop. These are beautifully balanced motorcycles – another word to describe them would be ‘mature’. BMW themselves modestly described their range as ‘the ultimate riding machine’. Was it? You can go and ride one and reach your own conclusion. My view is that they are considerably competent, and that any motorcycle shoving 60bhp (less transmission losses) through its rear tyre can be decently exciting if ridden very hard.
However. I never find any of the airheads to be a machine shouting Ride Me Hard! Instead, they ooze dependability, comfort and, by the standards of their day, sophistication.
Once safely out of earshot, there is always a temptation to wind things on a little, to stretch the wire and to be a little less than entirely sensible. I couldn’t. The BMW somehow set its own pace for the roads we were riding together. Pushing on felt – and indeed was – unrewarding, whereas hitting the apex of a bend at the right point, in the right gear, maintaining the right balance between Go and Stop became a goal. Something to be attained and then relished. I do not normally ride like that unless I intend to be in the saddle for a full day and wish to achieve the relaxed mindset which comes from having a destination and a fixed time in which to reach it. This is a motorcycle with a mind of its own. The rider soon understands
what is expected, and respecting those long-ago faraway German engineers becomes the order of the day.
As you would expect from BMW, the machine is very quiet, especially if you adopt the flowing riding style. The exhaust will condescend to rasp a little if you are sufficiently uncivilised to rev it hard under a wide throttle, but that might have been because this machine has been fitted with the very common stainless steel exhaust, which could just about be a little louder than the original. No matter how hard you might push the engine (Who? Me?) it never sounds nor feels in the slightest bit stressed.
One limit to exploring the outer limits of the bike’s performance envelope – which I would of course never do unless I actually owned it – is the gearbox. The change is, naturally, entirely dependable. It is also clean – I found no irritating false neutrals, and the ratios suit the engine’s power and torque characteristics perfectly. However, quick-shifting it is not. It is unhurried, an adjective which describes the whole bike pretty well, in fact. Festina lente, as the Romans once said.
This all sounds very positive, no? Let’s move on to the bike’s ergonomics, its comfort and controllability.
BMW switchgear is often quirky and adventurous. I have no problem with this, and never have. In fact the considerably eccentric switchgear on the R1150R Rockster I ran for a couple of years was charming, once I became familiar with it. The switchgear on this R100/7 was unusual at the time, and it took me a little while to figure out the indicators – for a reason unknown I kept indicating the wrong way. Then I stopped indicating, fearing for either my sanity or my safety, whichever came first. Actually looking at the switch fixed this, of course, but the time to stare at a switch is not when you need to use it.
The real beef I had with the bike was its riding position. I have rarely ridden an airhead which was comfortable, and only managed a few hundred miles and just one decent trip aboard my R100RS before I decided that it and I needed to part, sweet sorrow though it was. And it’s not easy to describe. I even looked at the photos of myself riding the R100/7 and decided that I look to be comfortable – but I wasn’t. The bars felt too low and too narrow, the rests a little too high and I felt somehow perched. Not really at ease. Which is the problem with borrowing a bike for just a short time – especially when that bike is of a type I’m unfamiliar with.
I reminded myself at this time that after a similar mileage aboard the R100 Mystic I’ve mentioned already I was completely in tune with it. So what I’m saying is that a standard R100/7 is not the BMW for me. Which is not actually a criticism of the machine, merely an acceptance that what plainly suited tens of thousands of other riders does not work for everyone. But
it is curious, at least to me.
I took the bike over the same roads for a second bite at it, but enjoyed the ride no more. I indicated the way I intended to this time, and although it’s easy enough to ride quickly and smoothly on familiar roads I never once felt an urge to ride further. Which is fairly unusual. Plainly I wasn’t the only rider to feel this way. The machine was previously owned by James May, a television presenter of note, and judging by the 2600 miles on the clock he was also untempted to travel far and wide.
There is almost nothing to criticise about the bike, which has made this a difficult story to tell. Even the twin ATE front brakes, often the butt of abuse, not least because of the strange idea of operating a master cylinder which lives under the fuel tank by a cable from the handlebar lever, worked well. They were both smooth and progressive and were certainly powerful enough for the speeds I managed with the bike. The seat is comfortable. The bars were comfortable when my feet were on the ground, but the moment I lifted those same feet up to the rests all comfort and relaxation vanished somehow. The seat isn’t low, at around 32”, but it’s not exactly trail bike elevation either.
Although the roads were damp, the rubber gripped fine. The engine pulled perfectly well and was great for slowing the plot down, too. So why wasn’t I knocked out by it? I don’t know. I can offer thoughts, but the best advice is that if you fancy a BMW of this generation you could learn from my earlier expensive mistake and try before you buy. Untold thousands of motorcyclists can’t be wrong, of course, and when I mentioned this test victim on the RC Facebook group lots of folk leapt in to reveal that they love theirs. An only slightly smaller number felt the opposite way, which merely goes to show how broad a church is classic motorcycling – or old bike riding, as I prefer to think of it.
I rode the couple of hundred miles back to RCHQ Bude aboard my own modern American machine, which is also an aircooled pushrod twin, although it’s rather larger and a little more powerful even than the mighty R100/7. All the way I wondered what it was about the BMW that I disliked. Almost nothing – apart from the whole riding experience, pretty much.
A great bike. BMW claimed that they built The Ultimate Riding Machine, and this may have been true. Maybe I should buy one of my own and learn to love it. And maybe I should just ride the bikes I already own and enjoy them as I know I will and save money. However. While writing this I trawled the ethers looking for the very last Paralever-equipped airhead BMWS and found myself feeling strangely tempted. Something about the grass being endlessly greener on the far side of the hill…