Thirty years ago in 1992, BMW unveiled its born-again Boxer R1100, the descendants of which are still with us today in R1250 guise. This fuel-injected eight-valve twin with Telelever front suspension underpinned the German manufacturer’s resurgence in the following decade, when BMW Motorrad’s sales volume tripled from a mere 30,000 bikes a year at the start of the 1990s to close on 90,000 units annually by the turn of the millennium. BMW sold 194,261 motorcycles to customers in 2021 compared to 136,963 in 2015 – and that spiralling growth began exactly 30 years ago this year.
But back then, at the same time as creating an all-new high-cam five-speed engine, code-numbered R259, to power a resurgent Boxer family, BMW Motorrad’s technical director, Dr Burkhard Göschel, gave his 200-strong team of R&D engineers another task. This was to develop a liquid-cooled DOHC six-speed superbike racer, still employing BMW’s trademark flat-twin Boxer engine format but developed to deliver competitive performance versus the 90º V-twin desmo Ducati that was by then established as the bike to beat in World Superbike racing. For the Italian company won the title in 1990, when Raymond Roche overturned two years of Honda domination to prove twins could indeed beat fours – especially with a 250cc capacity advantage (1000cc against 750cc) and much reduced 140kg minimum weight limit against 165kg for fours and triples.
However, BMW hadn’t road raced competitively for 15 years, not since the dawn of Superbike racing in the mid-1970s when the Butler & Smith R90S Boxers ridden by Reg Pridmore and Steve McLaughlin won both the first-ever Daytona Superbike race and the inaugural AMA Superbike title, while across the Atlantic Helmut Dähne took his R90S BMW to victory in the Isle of Man Production TT. Since then, the German company had sat on the sidelines while its Italian counterpart Ducati swam against the tide with its desmo V-twin, eventually turning it into the dominant force of Superbike racing.
At the same time, though, BMW Motorrad’s four-wheeled cousins had transformed their brand image from slightly stuffy to ultra-sporty via a racing campaign yielding serial Touring Car race wins and titles, with spin-off showroom success in their wake.
So, as a means of
