LIVING with LEGENDS
Whethera fan of the spinning propeller brand or not, there must be very few riders who wouldn’t recognise the silhouette of this motorcycle and fail to identify it as a BMW. After all, it’s got the sticky out cylinders, shaft drive, a huge petrol tank and that resting arrogance only German twins seem to have. None of those ‘curves for the sake of them’Italian bikes of the period are renowned for, just lines that resemble an assemblage of boxes, loosely piled on top of each other. And it’s got one of those huge BMW fairings that they seem to stick on everything nowadays. Ahh yes, that fairing.
BMW are the sort of company that, while unafraid of innovation, see little point in discarding good engineering practices over the whims of fashion. After WW1, the treaty of Versailles forbade them from producing aero engines, so in 1923 the first horizontally opposed twin motorcycle emerged, the R32. Capable of 60mph, the 486cc twin benefited from a wet sump oil design and shaft drive, and the motors rarely suffered from overheating due to the novel practice of sticking the cylinders out into the airstream. Having hit on such an ideal arrangement, the Bavarian factory saw no need to consider a different engine configuration, concentrating instead on refinement and suspension design in order
