Motorcycle Sport & Leisure

We make no excuse at featuring both of the two new Suzukis in this issue. Important as they are for the brand – as both Johnny Mac and Mossy point out – they’re also important for motorcycling as a whole. This may sound like something of a glib comment, but the motorcycle world needs a major brand such as Suzuki, and its new engine, to remain competitive. Not merely as a form of antidepressant (did anyone else get frustrated at the negative comments and doom and gloom when Suzuki announced its departure from MotoGP?), but also because the factory has been incredibly efficient in the past at making engine designs last an incredibly long time. Taking two examples, firstly with the water-cooled vee twins. Stu Barker has an SV650 as…

Alan Cathcart Alan Cathcart has been writing about bikes for more than 30 years, and riding them for even longer. He’s regularly given the keys to factory prototypes and being on first-name terms with the bosses of bike companies around the world allows him to bag many scoops. John McAvoy Having written for various titles over the years, Johnny Mac has an inquisitive and methodical approach to testing bikes, epitomised by the tyre testing that he’s undertaken in the past and the work he does with international race star Michael Rutter. Chris Moss Mossy has made a living from bikes since 1985 – first as a motorcycle courier in London, and then as a journo from 1995. He’s raced, ridden and tinkered with hundreds of different bikes, but he’s the…

NEW Need to know ◆ Your letters ◆ First rides It’s 10 years since BMW launched its retro RnineT machine, which featured the old oil-cooled Boxer motor in a customisable roadster that harked back to the 1970s. The Bavarian firm has now released some info and pics of the next generation RnineT, with a new engine, and an ‘R12’ marque name, to fit alongside the giant R18 retro-Boxer. Unveiled at the BMW Museum in Munich as part of the firm’s 100 Years celebration, MSL was shown an early prototype of the new machine, with strict rules on what we could photograph, and limited information on the bike. Senior BMW staff took us through the new bike – which looked very similar to current RnineT models at first glance – but…

The hits keep coming from Bavaria, with a new exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of BMW motorcycles. Located in the famous ‘bowl’ at the firm’s Four Cylinders HQ building, the exhibition takes you through the history of the brand, from the basic mobility machinery built after WW1 and again after WW2, through to today’s super-high-tech superbikes, retros and tourers. There are plenty of landmark bikes are on show – from the original R32 and R37 through milestones like the R5, R75 /5, R90 S, K1, R80 G/S and the S1000 RR. There’s even the prototype BMW R1 superbike – a 996cc 140bhp Boxer, which used desmodromic DOHC heads, fuel injection and water-cooling in the early 1990s. The exhibition also showcases of famous names from the firm’s past including road an…

Another one in the ‘how old are we getting’ column here: the first Suzuki GSX-R1000 is now eligible for some classic racing classes. And Team Classic Suzuki has grabbed the opportunity to build a super-saucy GSX-R1000 K1 racebike to take part in the European Endurance Cup this season. And just look at it… The bike was put together by top Gixxer specialist Nathan Colombi and features a standard frame with a factory GSX-R750 endurance race swingarm, OZ racing wheels, K-Tech rear shock and K-Tech front fork internals. Race Brembo calipers and Bridgestone R11 race tyres round off the chassis setup. On the engine front, there are Yoshimura cams and some tweaks to the fuel injection system, together with a classy Yoshimura full titanium race exhaust. The bike was running well…

The notion of a ‘touring supermoto’ should have been ruled out as nonsense at the planning stage. But when KTM released the ‘T” touring version of its 990 SM back in 2009 it was hailed as genius. The firm’s bonkers big 115bhp V-twin supermoto was a superb road bike, and with standard hard luggage fitments it was transformed into a practical nutter machine. The 990 SMT gradually faded out of KTM’s range sadly – but now the near-mythical three-letter-acronym is back, in the form of a new 890 SMT. Like the original, it looks to add supermoto sass to an existing street-legal dirt bike, this time the 890 Adventure. That means we get the same 105bhp 889cc LC8c parallel twin motor in a steel tube trellis frame, with altered geometry,…