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26th April 2004
Can you say 'Expensive Mistake'?
A few days over a year ago, myself & Mr Campbell took a
wander down to Rydale
BMW in Cardiff one Monday morning, with the intention on my
part of purchasing an R1150GS
Adventure. Obviously, I was there to test ride the
standard GS, but I didn't want to leave Geoff behind in the showroom (I had no
reason to hate the dealership staff at the time) so we prevailed upon them to
find a loaner to let him play on as well. They gave him the keys to a K1200GT!
Having moved to Wales, and trundled c.230 miles each way to London by bike
extensively through a particularly foul and unpleasant winter, I'd decided that my
Sprint ST (a perfect all-rounder in many respects) wasn't the ideal bike any
more, and punted it in to the grateful arms of Dave Holladay. As an aside, and
in retrospect, if I'd treated it to an Autocom
system and thus given myself some in-helmet tunes to listen to on the ST when
droning up and down the motorway for hours, I'd perhaps have been a little less
inclined to consider another later-&-faster-model ST as an unsuitable replacement.
However...
I'd read various positive magazine write-ups on the K1200GT in the February
issues of various almost grown-up motorcycle magazines, all of them featuring
numerous journos traversing vast chunks of the Italian Autostrada network at
silly speeds in the depths of winter, and I was intrigued by the concept, having
ridden bigger brother K1200LT .
However, I'd assumed it wouldn't appear in showrooms until much later in the
year, and so I put it out of my mind...
Incidentally, if you read the conclusions I drew at the end of that K1200LT
write-up, you'll see why the GT intrigued me, and perhaps understand why I
was prepared to drop £11,000+ on a bike that I'd never considered buying before
that brief test-ride last April...
Anyway, back to the plot. Myself and Geoff went out for a brief bimble around
Cardiff, in fairly ropy conditions. Traffic was very light, but the roads were
wet & greasy and it was raining on and off. We took a run out on a route
recommended by the dealer, myself on the 1150GS and Geoff on the GT (and the GS
was as good as I remembered it, although the weather didn't flatter it), and
then we swapped for the trip back to Rydales, mainly so that Geoff could try the
Gnarly Thinge. And lo, in the brief trip back, I found the GT a little lardy but
quite competent. There was no real cornering possible in the extant conditions,
but I was able to take a couple of easy overtakes and the weather protection was
most welcome after the GS. I noticed that compared to the GS, the suspension
felt harsh over bumps, but as criticisms go, this isn't exactly a damning
indictment.
Back to Rydales then, and I sat down to talk money and delivery dates on the GS
Adventure I wanted. I even left a deposit and shook hands on the deal. Then, as
we drove away from the dealership, Geoff insisted that I'd bought entirely the
wrong bike. What I needed, he assured me, was an R1150RT, since it had decent
weather protection. I disagreed, at some length, having ridden one. It handles well enough, though nothing like as well as the GS, but I found
it gutless to the point of inadequacy on the motorway, despite having an engine
tuned for more power than the old 1150GS.
However, the discussion set some wheels turning in my brain. "OK, I haven't
ridden the K1200GT in anger, but it is surely just BMW's interpretation of a
sports bike (i.e. the K1200RS) in a more voluminous frock, isn't it? If it's a
sports bike under that extra plastic, it must handle OK, right? And during our
test ride, the weight was never really an issue for either of us, was it? The
equipment level looks truly excellent (luggage, servo-assisted ABS, cruise
control and heated everything), doesn't it?". Anyway, ten minutes after we
left Rydales, I phoned them back and shifted the deposit across onto a
K1200GT... can I just say D'OH now?
Aside from the fact that the K12GT looked more like a whale than a motorcycle,
and only came in two foul colours, I had no reason, initially, to regret my
purchase. Indeed, upon picking it up, I put 300 miles on it in one hit, in cool
but sunny conditions, and marvelled at many aspects of the K1200GT experience,
as I cruised the dual carriageways and fast A-roads of the West of England and
Wales. In hindsight, there was a great deal of deja-vu in my perceptions of the
K1200GT versus my much earlier verdict on its big brother; the handling was
taught, stable and predictable, the great weight didn't tie the suspension in
knots, the servo-brakes hauled the whole
bloated plot to a halt with stunning alacrity, the grunty engine gave it a
degree of get-up-and-go that was if not electrifying, at least better than one
might expect from such a heavy beast, and at least on A roads, the bike could
be... if not chucked, at least heaved about surprisingly effectively. The
cruise control was hugely useful, and the heated stuff and electric screen
stopped me getting cold when the sun went down. Still, if this is how BMW think
a sports bike should perform, by any measure, they're obviously smoking a lot of
crack in Bavaria!
The first epiphany came when dealing with Rydale Cardiff, after purchase. They have the
phone system from hell, which makes talking to them hard work to begin with, but
they were on the phone to me frequently before they got my money. There were,
apparently, no discounts available when I bought it because the K1200GT was
going to sell out, it was such a great bike (smell anything yet?), but I did
manage to persuade them, very grudgingly, to throw me in a free set of pannier
inner bags with the purchase. Sadly, they weren't in stock when I collected the
bike, but they were going to call me when they came in. I'm still waiting for
them a year later, and I'm hoping (although it is largely now academic) that
they might recover from the amnesia they later developed on the subject. I had
the bike booked in with them for a first service, but having spent well over
half an hour on my mobile failing to get through their telephone system on the
morning of the appointed day, that inevitably went down the shitter, and
frankly, the entire post sales experience had 'We've got your money, now fuck
off unless you want to spend lots more' written all over it. They had the cheek
to get snotty with me because I needed to get the first service carried out in London rather than
Cardiff, meaning that they had to divvy up the price of said service to Park
Lane BMW. Apparently I was being disloyal by not supporting my local BMW dealer
and shovelling yet more money their way (the stench is now overpowering). Where
exactly are my pannier inner bags, anyway, you money-grubbing gits?
A quick Google shows me that the Cardiff branch of Rydales' and customer service are not well
acquainted, on either the car or bike side, an impression they reinforced more
than once, most memorably when I turned up there on the K one afternoon 15
minutes before their published closing time, hoping to drop in for a chat
(re-establish diplomatic relations) and a cuppa and maybe to collect my freebie
pannier inner bags (ha!), to discover the doors locked; one of the guys from the
attached BMW car dealership saw fit to poke his head out of another door and
tell me curtly that they'd all gone home, but he singularly failed to invite me
in to their inner sanctum or inquire in any way as to how he might assist me; smelly motorcycle people clearly not welcome in trendy
besuitted 5-series land. Obviously, dropping 11 large their way wasn't really
enough to qualify me as a paying customer...
By contrast, when one of the electric cooling fans on my GT seized en-route to
the first service at Park Lane BMW, they couldn't have been more helpful. From
serving me tea in fine china and a silver teapot while I waited to collect my
bike, to lending me their GT demonstrator for the weekend while they waited for
the part to fix mine under warranty (I put at least 700 miles on their bike over
the weekend, with their blessing), I felt like somebody who just bought £11,000
of motorcycle should feel. Except I hadn't spent a bean with them.
As a consequence, I wouldn't piss on Rydales' if they were on fire, and they
neither have (bar for the GT) nor ever will again get a bean from me for
motorcycles, accessories or servicing. If they treat enough people the same way
they treated me, they won't be getting much repeat business!
Anyway, it was while riding the (fully run in) Park Lane demo bike that I first
started to have doubts. My weekend started with a run out of London back to
Carmarthen, continued with what should have been an entertaining hoon from
Carmarthen out to the Welsh Motorcycle Show at Builth Wells and back again, and
ended with a run back to London. The GT was seriously hard work on the way out
of town, since despite quite radical steering geometry for such a heavy bike,
the wheelbase is very long, the low-speed dynamics awful, you can feel every kilo of the weight, most of them twice, and the
full-house system-case style panniers are out of sight behind you and the widest
part of the bike by far. Oh, and little round bar-mounted mirrors, which are
crap at the best of times and utterly useless when the bars are deflected (as
they often are in heavy traffic) - what the hell is that all about? I was still
assuming that as I got more familiar with the GT, I'd become better at hustling
it through the traffic, and while I know I did (practice makes perfect), it was
and is a completely unmanageable pig in town. Once clear of town and onto the
M4, the performance of the engine enabled comfortable and effortless cruising at
any speed one might want to aim for without (I'm extremely relieved to report)
requiring the pilot to attempt use of the gearbox (although I've never aimed for
more than 140 as it happens).
The bizarrely arranged longitudinal crank/laid down engine has all the character
and refinement of a rather buzzy coffee grinder, which is connected to the shaft
drive via quite the worst motorcycle cog-box it has ever been my misfortune to
have to try to live with. It took BMW 80 odd years to develop a gearbox as
execrable as this, and the callouses and bone-bruising on top of my foot are
testament to their success. Having achieved everything there is to achieve in
the field of actively unpleasant motorcycle transmissions, they've now proved
(with the new R1200GS) that actually, if they could be arsed, they could have
been building proper gearboxes these last 40 years. Good joke, Fritz! In the
same spirit, next year we will get the new BMW Evo indicator arrangement where
cancelling the indicators will require us to head-butt a switch mounted
centrally on the head-stock, and the current thumb buttons will be reversed left
to right, then the year after that we'll get a sensible single thumb switch, as
fitted to all normal motorcycles. Also, although there are 130bhp and bags of
torque on tap, more of them than one might wish for are absorbed on acceleration
in shifting the vast bulk of the GT, which can make overtakes a lot less snappy
than one might find ideal, and of course every time you twist your wrist, you
can almost hear the huge sucking noise from under the fuel tank...
Having said all that, the GT is a great motorway bike (see also great piscine
bicycle, great nuclear hand-grenade, great water-soluble roof-tile), with the
trick electronic cruise control especially handy on our scamera/talivan-infested
motorway network. Great, that is, apart with one major and quite unexpected
flaw, which I quickly discovered once summer struck us; airflow, or rather lack
of it. Even with the electric windscreen fully retracted, the fairing which
ensures a pocket of still, relatively warm air for the rider in winter, ensures
that in high summer, a rider clad in black leather will die of heat exhaustion
before the pitifully small tank range is exhausted.
That small tank range is infuriating on a bike that allegedly has distance on
its mind. 140 miles is insufficient range for an autobahn-stormer, and it would
of course be much less than that at flat-out speeds on the real autobahn!
Clearly, the fact that this is a sports bike in a big frock is relevant here,
not that the fuel capacity is particularly limited; rather, consumption is truly
awful!
Mind you, that small tank range would be even more annoying if it wasn't an
opportunity to un-knot myself after suffering the sub-optimal riding position. I
should say here and now that I have no problem with radical riding positions - I
did 12,000 miles one year on a Triumph T595, and I've put in well over 50,000
miles on sports tourers with rather more 'sporting' riding positions than the
K1200GT offers (Honda VFR, Sprint ST). the problem with the K12 is that it is
neither one thing or the other. If the 12 had pull-back bars and was an upright
bike, like the Triumph Trophy, Yam FJR1300 or either of the Honda Pans, that
would be one thing. If it used the same riding position as the K1200RS, that
would be another. Instead, it sits somewhere between the two, in a position
probably recognised by torturers and interrogators the world over as a
'stress position'. Not canted forward enough to be able to rest one's weight on
one's wrists temporarily at any point, and not upright enough to be able to
properly relax ones arms, stomach or back muscles either. Worse, the lack of
airflow below neck level means that whereas on most bikes, at speed one is
supported by the wind blast on one's chest, on the K1200GT, there's no relief to
be had without stopping and getting off the bike. Or using the cruise control
and sitting up, arms akimbo. Which tends to cause consternation in rush-hour
motorway traffic.
In the last couple of years I've suffered from back trouble, linked to a
displaced sacroiliac. A misaligned pelvis in old money. Merely heaving half a
ton of K12 off the side stand with my left leg regularly was definitely not
helping; I realised after a while that every run into London or back on the bike
was followed inevitably by a sore lower back the next day, and once putting the
whole plot on its centre stand with a back that was already grumbling helped to
precipitate a full-on relapse. Holding the aforementioned stress position with a
dodgy lower back did nothing to make the bike feel any more comfortable.
Anyway, the Park Lane demo bike was making short work of the M4, and was equally
happy to devour the A419 Dual Carriageway (not, you may have imagined, one of
the world's greatest biking roads, but grist to the K12 mill). Hauling it around
the A40 near Ross on Wye counted as more of a wrestling match than a pleasant
riding experience, though; subjectively it was damned impressive what the big
old bus could be made to do, but objectively it was very hard work, and only fun
for the novelty value. Good progress could be maintained on the faster and more
open sections of the A40, but the bike was something of a handful on the more
topographically exciting parts of the run from Abergavenny back to Carmarthen.
The next day, the run out and back to Builth on the A40 & A483 wasn't
actually fun either, although riding the big K fast was something of a
challenge. It was also deeply deficient in the ground-clearance department,
which means that the pegs & centre-stand on mine were scuffed to buggery,
with absolutely no heroism required; had any heroism been attempted, I am quite
sure that the result would have been a very large hole in the scenery. The rear
suspension was woefully under-specified, as well; with preload wound up to
maximum at the rear on mine, it was still too soft. I know I'm a fat bastard,
but even so... Addition of a pillion completely overwhelmed it, ensuring that
the bike steered like a chopper and that the undercarriage touched down
impressively at even gentle angles of dangle... By the time I delivered the shop
bike back to Park Lane and collected mine, I was more than a little concerned.
this wasn't working out the way I'd hoped at all. Still, I hoped it would grow
on me...
Over the next few weeks as summer started to bite, I tried very hard with the
bike. I took it out on sunny Sunday scratching runs up the A40, I used it as
transport round the town, I ploughed up and down the M4 on it but took the
scenic route home on several occasions. It would do all those things, defying
its bulk, but it did none of them (apart from the motorway blasting) well, and
once the novelty of hauling it round the twisties palled, none of it was any
fun. I took it out for social runs with friends down here, and discovered that
although on paper it would far out-drag an ancient GSX-750, stopped much much
better (the GSX had crap brakes even by single-pot GSX standards), and handled
more stably than a GSX with knackered swing-arm bearings and blown fork seals,
it couldn't actually walk away from said cattled GSX (even two-up) when ridden
sanely on welsh twisties. In addition, every roundabout was accompanied by huge
welts of sparks as stuff decked, even when barely trying. Finally, 'trying'
meant climbing all over the bike to get purchase for aggressive counter-steering antics and to try to shift
weight to maximise the pitiful ground clearance, even in the context of sensible
road velocities.
I think the last time that I took the GT out for a ride just for the sake of
going for a ride was the evening I tagged on with the local IAM observer's group
of 1150 GS aficionados. His route for the evening was classic GS territory,
featuring fast B roads down to tarmac goat-tracks, with lots of tight swervery
to keep things interesting. Basically, roads that the GT was specifically
designed to either dislike (fast B-roads), hate (tarmac goat tracks) or avoid
like the plague (tight swervery). When I got my stint on the front of the group,
we started on the B roads and I worked up a sweat just making decent progress
(because the bike was slower than the road allowed unless you really worked at it), and then started to really wrestle with
it once we turned on to the goat tracks. Smooth? Composed? Do fuck off! I mean
yes, you can ride the GT in a smoothed and composed fashion in the mountains,
but only if you don't mind travelling at walking pace. It's too much of a pig to
ride briskly and smoothly in tight spaces, and to be honest, 'brisk' in the
nadgery stuff on the GT still isn't very brisk at all. When we stopped to
analyse my run, our observer - who had never seen me ride the GT before -
suggested that he'd 'never seen me ride so aggressively' before. I think that he
might have been hinting that I was ragged as fuck. The sweat running out from
under my jacket was the clue that perhaps I was already aware of this! Anyway,
we continued for a while until it was time to go home. As the group went their
separate ways, I offered him the keys to the GT, then swung a leg over his GS. I
let him lead back to Carmarthen and then watched him struggle with the dynamics
in much the same way I had. When we got back to Carmarthen, he was rather redder
of face than he had been earlier, and not wanting to be rude about my £11,000
two-wheeled potential boat-anchor, he described the ride as 'interesting'. It
looked interesting from where I was sitting at a very relaxed pace atop his
1150GS, certainly! Recently, since I told him I was getting rid, he has
explained that 'Interesting' meant 'Bloody awful'.
Since about June last year, the GT has been relegated to the role of functional
transport only. If I didn't have to deal with the issue of parking in Central
London, I think I'd have rather used a car for my motorway commutes, as the GT
barely filtered better than a cage once town was reached, and I wouldn't have
needed to stop for petrol half way down. However, come high summer, as the
temperatures rose, riding the bike became increasingly impractical, since the
lack of airflow on the big GT meant that keeling over with heat exhaustion at
80mph became a distinct possibility. At this point I discovered useable
air-travel from Swansea to London, and spent my summer flying up and down, while
the bike gathered a nice layer of dust in my garage. I did ride - the TT600 got
a day or two in the sun, and the newly acquired trail bike got several outings -
but until the end of the indian summer late last year combined with the start of
the Air Wales special fucked-up
winter schedule, the GT barely turned a wheel. It didn't actually need its 6K
service until December last year...
The writing has been on the wall for this two-wheeled
monstrosity for a while. In the year before I sold the ST, 3 months of which it
was in dock having blown its engine up, and only 5 months of which had me
working in London, it did over 12K miles. In the almost-year I've owned the GT,
ten months of which I have spent working in London, and in which I planned to
use the bike almost exclusively as transport, I actually managed all of 9,000
miles, when I had expected to have done nearer 20,000. Of those 9,000, after the
first couple of K, not a single one was pleasure riding. All were spent
ploughing up and down motorways, latterly while listening to Radio 5 in-helmet with brain in neutral.
Trading the bike in after 11 months, my £11,500 investment (£12,000+ if you
include accessories like the
Alarm, the Baglux & the
DataTag) turned into a £7,500 pay back. Looking at the prices they were
selling similarly specced used GTs for in the showroom, I wasn't being ripped
off, either.
Expensive lesson to learn!
Conclusion - K1200GT: Expensive pile of shite guaranteed to put you off
motorcycling. Useful if you:
a) have a long motorway journey to do,
b) in cool or cold weather,
c) have a motorcycle parking space but no car parking space
available at the far end,
d) have other motorcycles to ride on any other kind of journey
you might make,
e) have more money than sense
f) don't care if buying the GT costs you a fortune in
depreciation.
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