VOL. 55 ISSUE 39 OCTOBER 2, 2018 P75
ALAN CATHCART
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ARNOLD DEBUS, MARKUS JAHN & AMELIE MESECKE
BOXING CLEVER
BMW let us loose in Portugal on the all-new
1250 GS with ShiftCam Technology
I
n creating the new R 1250 GS
just launched for 2019, BMW
has had to address the single
most difficult task confronting
any manufacturer, which is to
improve on a bike already estab-
lished as the reference point in its
category. Making the best better
still is even trickier if the company
in question actually set the class
benchmark in the first place by
itself inventing that kind of bike
some years ago. And even more
so if the model in question is re-
sponsible for a substantial part of
its entire annual sales volume.
This very challenge confronted
BMW Motorrad in updating a bike
that has been so totally dominant
for so long in its marketplace seg-
ment, the R 1200 GS. Adventure
tourer, maxi-enduro, street play-
ing, call them what you will, the
GS family of bikes are the most
important models in the German
company's entire lineup. It's a
status earned over the past four
decades ever since the world's
first twin-cylinder dual-purpose
go-anywhere motorcycle made its
debut back in 1980, and that was
the BMW R80GS. The R 1200
GS has been the best-selling
motorcycle of any type or any ca-
pacity for the best part of the last
decade in the UK, Italy, France,
South Africa and, of course Ger-
many, as well as a major player
in Spain, the USA and Australia.
It's a true world bike—indeed,
given its go-anywhere capabili-
ties; it's very plausibly the single
most important motorcycle built
anywhere on planet earth today.
Intervening to freshen up the
design and enhance the perfor-
mance for 2019 of what is es-
sentially BMW's cash cow, and
doing so well enough to keep up
with the increasingly more potent
competition from the likes of KTM
and Ducati without throwing the
