I bought my first GS second-hand back in about ’02. I was a ’99 model – single spark, no ABS. I bought it with a view to going on a really serious trip, although at that time I wasn’t sure where. Sadly, that bike got written off fairly quickly after an uninsured mini-cab driver in a borrowed car and without a driving license pulled across a dual-carriageway and stopped right there. I was damaged, but not as damaged as the bike, which was a total write-off.

Fortunately my insurance company settled up very quickly and as soon as I was fit enough to ride, I went out and bought another one. Within weeks I was off on my first bike trip on it – I rode across Europe and up into the mountains of Northern Greece.

And so began my love-affair with the big ugly BM’s. I loved it, was proud of it and had many happy years of biking on it. I took countless trips, crowned in ’06 with a three month trip through Russia and into Central Asia taking in Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and back across Europe home. The highlight of this trip was riding the incredibly remote and lonely Pamir Highway in the Gorno-Badakshan militarized zone in Tadjikistan. There’s a blog of sorts and a million photo’s here.

The GS is undoubtably a great bike – a classic. It is rugged and generally reliable, once you get used to replacing rear crown bearings, pivot bearings, discs and brake-pads on a regular basis. Mine did eventually let me down quite badly when the ( 3rd ) clutch disintegrated catastrophically taking the gearbox with it and left me stranded on the M6 on the way to the Scottish Highlands – a trip I like to do every year if I can. I was gutted.

It’s an ‘unusual’ package with it’s agricultural boxer motor, it’s telelever front suspension ( which works brilliantly by the way ), clunky gearbox, shaft-drive, strange looks, noises and general bulk. However the whole thing just seems to ‘work’, and ‘work’ in a way that endears the rider to it more and more as time goes by. I suppose thats what they call ‘character’. But the weirdness and weight disappear the moment you start moving, and then you find a bike that handles amazingly on the road with almost perfect balance. It’s not a fast bike but it’ll take some well-ridden and pretty quick machinery to beat it through the corners. It’s amazingly planted, has perfect ergonomics and endless torque at low revs, which is just great for blasting out of those bends. You can hoon, scratch, commute, tour, bimble, do your weekly shopping – it really does do the lot, and very well too.

Off-road – it copes. We experienced all manor of terrain on our trip through Central Asia, some of it truly dreadful. I would describe the off-road experience of a laden GS as being ‘capable, but not fun’. You get the feeling that it will plough through or over just about anything, but the weight makes the experience a bit of a struggle.* The 19″ front wheel doesn’t help, and it can be particularly scary on soft sand and through wet mud. My pal Dan did the trip on his Africa Twin, which frankly danced circles around the GS off-road although was a lot less comfortable on the road so I suppose it all balances out. Where it does score points is with the endless amounts of drive you get through the rear wheel at low revs.

*To be fair to it – it’s a whole lot more fun off-road nearer to home where falling off and hurting either you or the bike is a lot less problematic than doing it in 500 miles from anywhere in a strange and foreign land!

Like most GS owners, I modded the bike extensively with various exhaust configurations, ‘fooling’ the basic EFI system into running fuel maps of my choice, upgrading the suspension with Ohlins units ( highly recommended ), different screens – that sort of thing. I like to travel light however, so metal boxes a’la Touratech and after-market engine bars and protection of that nature were out – it’s expensive and wholly unnecessary.

On the whole I loved my GS ( and the new Tiger has a lot to live up to, although I don’t intend to use this bike off-road ), but there are niggles. Reliability on the older 1150′s is usually very good, unlike the newer 1200GS’s which are basically better bikes but do have reliability issues – both mechanical and electrical, and are much less user-friendly when it comes to modding and self-servicing – which effectively counts them out for me.

I’ve already mentioned the parts that will fail on the 1150, and the front forks, bridge and engine casing will corrode at the first sniff of salt, but on the whole you feel you can trust the bike not to let you down. The major issue on the boxer-engined BM’s is ( or I should say – can be ) the clutch ( and more rarely, gearbox ). Because of it’s position slap bang in between engine and final drive, if you need to get at it – it’s a major job. The bike has to stripped back and then the rear subframe swung up and suspended from above to allow access to the problem parts. This is either a big job for the home mechanic or an expensive job for the dealer. Added to this, there are a couple of flaws designed into the system in the shape of cheap seals. Should the main output seal give way for instance , oil will leak onto the clutch plates ruining the clutch. Thats a £500 or £600 repair bill all for the sake of a poorly designed £5 seal. That happened to me. You also need to keep checking the clutch slave cylinder seal and pipe-linkage for corrosion and leaks, otherwise you can be left by the roadside with no drive.

On the upside, they are very easy to work on and there is not much that the competent home mechanic cannot diagnose and fix himself. Servicing is a cynch, and there is more technical know-how than you could ever want and more over at UKGSER, plus a couple of excellent independent engineers. My bike had a hard life, and at only 60k ( not particularly high mileage for a GS ) the gearbox and clutch failing quite as disasterously as mine did is pretty much unheard of – but it did unnerve me to the point where I eventually and with a very heavy heart decided to get rid of the GS, move away from BMW and buy something else. Maybe I’m getting old, but I can’t tolerate unreliable bikes anymore.

Enter the Tiger.