Pieter De Waal, vice president of BMW Motorrad USA, says he first noticed something amiss about BMW motorcycle ownership in the States six years ago, while he was working in Germany. The average age of a BMW owner was 47 years, and it was going up by 0.7 years annually. (By that math, the average is now 51.2 years old.) What BMW needed to do, says De Waal, is take a share of another market segment, and find new owners, preferably younger ones. Like, for example, the U.S. sportbike market, which attracts some of the country's youngest riders. But going after that segment is easier said than done. Sportbikes are those racer-type bikes that offer stunning performance for around 13 grand. And thanks to their popularity, the competition is fierce, especially among the Japanese manufacturers.
The right path is rarely the easiest, however, and BMW forged ahead. To succeed, the company needed to produce a machine that is as light or lighter than existing rivals, more powerful, and no more than $1000 above competing machines. For a producer of premium vehicles, that's a daunting prospect. Let's see how the company did.
The Specs
The architecture of BMW's new sportbike resembles the major Japanese players in every conceptual area. There's an across-the-frame inline four-cylinder engine with double overhead cams and 16 valves. There's a six-speed transmission with a chain final drive.
The frame is an aluminum double-spar structure typical to the genre, and the suspension uses straightforward telescopic forks and a beefy alloy swing arm with a single-shock rear linkage. In silhouette, the new BMW S1000RR looks very much like its Asian counterparts.
The differences lie with BMW's calculated attempts to beat the opposition. The bike's face is asymmetrical because, BMW says, using one headlight for high beam and another for low beam is lighter and takes less space. The fairing is different from side to side because there were different airflow challenges to be met at each side.
With a claimed 193 hp at the crankshaft, BMW's new superbike has more power than the opposition and about the same as the King Kong, the Suzuki Hayabusa, a 1.3-liter bike that has a third more displacement. A radically oversquare bore-to-stroke relationship (that means the diameter of the piston is greater than the stroke) facilitates very high engine speeds, abetted by light finger followers in the valvetrain--borrowed directly from F1 practice--that dramatically reduce valve reciprocating mass.
A trick exhaust-header system employs interconnecting pipes and valves to exploit supportive resonances, fattening the torque curve. Moreover, with available full race antilock brakes (ABS) and multi-level dynamic traction control (which uses a lean angle sensor to automatically dial the power back when the bike is heeled over in a turn), the bike brings more of BMW's involvement with F1 and World Superbike racing to the street rider.
Another worthwhile addition is BMW's optional speed-shift system, which allows you to stay at full throttle when making upshifts. A switch on the shift lever cuts engine power briefly to permit quick and seamless upshifts without recourse to the clutch.
The Ride
We started off in Rain mode, accessed by a button on the right-hand bar. The mode cuts power output to 150 hp, lowers the engine-speed limiter and shift-light warning, and provides the most aggressive traction-control intervention. When the lean-angle sensor signals any angle greater than 38 degrees, the fly-by-wire throttles back off to a preset position--dependent on vehicle speed--to optimize tire grip.
In Rain mode the bike is pretty much like a 750 with electronic nannies looking out for the rider. The provision of this mode has provided justification for the use of this bike as a school mount for the Keith Code California Superbike School--the first ever to use a multi-cylinder liter bike in that role. If you tip into a corner in Rain mode you can feel the power come in and go out according to the bike's lean angle.
Next on the instrument-panel menu (after Rain mode) come Sport, Track, and Slick-Tire modes, all with increasingly liberal interpretations of how much power, wheelie angle and tire slip is allowed. And then you can disable the ABS and DTC completely, and give free rein to the 14,000-rpm BMW engine.
The beauty of the DTC system is that track riders who are not at the level of professional racers can quickly increase their speed in the knowledge that they simply can't add too much throttle at the corner apex and slide the rear tire out. They can also simply mash the brakes and let the computer modulate the binders, an appreciated luxury on a bike that can attain astonishing velocities in short distances.
None of the Japanese sportbikes feature both systems yet, although Honda has ABS on its CBR1000RR, which goes some way to alleviate instability under braking. Traction control is still on the drawing board for most sportbike manufacturers other than Ducati (which has it on the 1198S).
On Palm Beach International Raceway's half-mile main straight we were seeing well over 160 mph, with plenty to come. And since the turn that follows is greater than 180 degrees, the slipper clutch--which allows rapid downshifts with no risk of rear-wheel lockup--was just as welcome as the two 12.6-inch disc rotors and their four-piston fixed calipers on the front wheel.
The real virtue of the new BMW is how easy it is to ride. It steers as lightly as a 600, and is about the same size. Yet the riding position is not extraordinarily cramped, nor are the footpegs uncomfortably high. At six-foot-five, I found it possible to move around easily and to get down into a full tuck for the straight sections--easier than on most bikes of the type.
Like most machines in this category, the suspension components (supplied by Sachs) are multi-adjustable, and we doff our hats at BMW's interpretation. The adjustment clickers can be turned by the blunt end of the bike's key, and they have numbered positions with a clearly defined indicator. Compare that to the completely inscrutable equivalents found on every other bike.
Those adjusters define the S1000RR perfectly. It's a case of logical and thoughtful analysis applied to super-high-performance machinery. If you thought up to this point that BMW motorcycles were quirky devices ridden mainly by a clique of affluent geezers, the S1000RR is here to break the news. It's potentially more rideable than any comparable machine for most of us, and as fast as anything out there in the hands of experienced riders. If the new superbike benchmark is accessible performance, then BMW got there first.
The Bottom Line
Here's the good news; at $13,800, the base BMW S1000RR is right in the liter-bike ballpark. Here's the bad news; to acquire the critical differences between BMW's superbike and all the rest, you really need the Race ABS and DTC package, which costs another $1480. If you plan to do a lot of track riding, you will also need the so-called gear-shift assistant (or speed-shift), at $450. Thus equipped, the bike costs $15,284, but now you have everything that sets this machine apart from the masses. And if the bike's durability is as good as its specifications, it will be worth every cent.
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