BMW K100

REMEMBER THE STORY OF THE UGLY DUCKLING? Well, somethings get better with age... I hope. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I don’t remember seeing a BMW – not a sniff. My mates rode BSAs or Triumphs, or one of the more exotic offerings pouring in from the Land of the Rising Sun. I have no doubt that there must have been a few BMWs knocking about, but we were working class lads and couldn’t afford a BMW, so it didn’t come across our radar.

Fast-forward 50 years and the world has changed dramatically. Take styling, for instance. There were generally three styles of bike back in the 1970s. There was your straight-out-of-the-showroom standard bike, the hybrid or mongrel mix (that included Tritons etc.), and finally the occasional badly done chopper with extended forks and upswept pipes. These fab creations arose from the fallout of the 1969 movie Easy Rider, yet not a single whiff of a two-wheeled Teutonic master machine. Nowadays there are a plethora of bike styles, because customising motorcycles has truly come of age and the well-engineered – some may say ugly duckling – BMW air head and its successor, the K100 and K75, have slotted right in. The model I wish to pay specific attention to is the K100 and its smaller sibling, the K75, unkindly nicknamed The Flying Brick. Fortunately, a very good pal of mine has a mint 1984 K100RS model, so I asked him nicely if he