Nuts & Bolts
Autumn 2022
A friend has been kind enough to say she likes these articles as they have a biking & roads angle, an eating & drinking angle and a light smattering of history & geography. Never having owned a bike or gone pillion, the last two perspectives are of more interest to her than the first. Fair and useful criticism in the truest sense of the word.
So if you’re like Laura, this piece and the next may only be of limited interest. They are about the nuts & bolts of putting this journey together for anyone interested in doing something similar along with some ruminations about my choice of bike for trip, not the experience itself. That will come later…
I’d put a note on my calendar to contact Bryant Motorsports (AKA Treasure Coast BMW of Hobe Sound), Florida in October 2022. By then, BMW would have released details and prices for the 2023 model of their K1600GT, the bike I have at home. I intended to buy new from Bryant and then sell it back to them at the end of my trip.
When Richard and I had called in at the dealership in March 2022, I was also toying with the idea of a Ducati Multistrada V4S. I have a bit of a fetish for Italian exotica and indulged myself with a Panigale V2 in 2021 that I still own. Continuing on the same tangent, I also have a 1981 Laverda Montjuic but this crosses the line between fetishism and outright, sadomasochist perversion.
Back to the Panigale, it’s sublime and has proven surprisingly practical, covering nearly 15,000 miles, mainly on Spanish, Portuguese, German and Belgian roads. There is nothing like a thunderous, L-twin through the titanium Akrapovic exhaust system and that blood-red sculpted bodywork to get the pulse racing every morning. Cranked over on the perfect road surfaces that European governments provide for their customers (in stark contrast to the increasingly rubbish infrastructure UK taxpayers have to put up with), it’s the perfect device for a trip of up to ten days.
Ducati Cambridge had leant me a Multistrada when my Panigale was being serviced. Everything you may have read about it is true: blindingly fast with great ergonomics and superb handling. It’s practical too with good weather protection, lockable hard luggage and useful, intuitive electronic aids including Adaptive Cruise Control and Blind Spot Detection. It really does have the lot while retaining that elusive sense of drama and occasion that only Italian motorcycles seem to deliver.
Did I ever consider a Harley-Davidson? After all, we talking America here and Harleys look so right when framed by the great American landscape in the same way they look frankly ridiculous when ridden by carpet magnates around the Batley ring road.
In truth: No. But this is not the result of ignorance and blind prejudice, for once.
I first rode a Harley in 2001, together with pal Tom, from San Francisco to Los Angeles down Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). I was a year back to riding motorcycles and still wobbling about unsteadily on either a Ducati 748 or BMW K1200 RS. By contrast, I loved the Harley with its low centre of gravity, the tolerance of the engine to fluffed or missed gear changes and the relaxed riding position.
In 2007, I did a similar trip with my son, Oliver, on the back. The lack of power, minimal ground clearance and lack of creature comforts compared to the K1200S I had at the time were marked and beginning to grate, but still tolerable.
By 2016, when Swith and I rented a pair to do the classic California trip of Los Angeles, Death Valley, Yosemite, Napa Valley, San Franciso and - of course - PCH again, my point of reference was the K1600GT. Over fifteen years, BMWs had become almost unrecognisable from what they were in 2001 but the Harley had remained exactly the same.
Some of you may be frothing: “That’s the whole bloody point!”, and I do get this. But the gap in capability had become a void, and the deficiencies so manifest that the appeal of the Hog was now diminished to that of purely ornamental. Characteristics that were once a contrast and point of affection were now just an irritation and not something I could put up with for up to four months.
Although comfortable and fast enough for USA road, I find overtaking on them nerve-wracking. The much-vaunted torque is there, but delivered in unhelpful great lumps and it’s all out of puff at 3000 RPM. Also, footrests or running boards touch down on even the most modest bends, causing the thing to try and go straight on, usually into either rock on one side or incoming traffic on the other.
Without an axe to grind as they are dealers for all three marques, the consensus from the Bryant crew was overall reliability and an extensive dealer network gave BMW the edge. I didn’t need too much convincing…
In the UK, I’m now on my third K1600, my first dating from 2011 and one of the first UK models to be delivered. At the time, the bells and whistles on the options list were way beyond any other bike: an adaptive headlight that peered into corners based on the angle of lean and speed was a ‘must-have’, as was the traction control and adjustable suspension. The Bluetooth-enabled audio system featured an FM tuner with RDS that fed traffic to the integrated Satnav. As icing on the cake, the iPod and phone connections were godsends when flogging up and down motorways regularly.
Many of these baubles and the standard bike itself borrowed heavily from the car heritage, none more so than with the central locking and alarm system. This also secures the panniers and top-box with integral high-level brake light, gas-strut supports, interior light and - joy of joys - a trimmed carpet that fits ‘just-so’ like in the footwell of a 5-series saloon. I can offer no explanation for how absurdly happy this made me feel, other than knowing that Swith did not have one on his GS in 2011 and still doesn’t.
While the K1600 has improved gradually over the years with keyless ignition, hill-start assistance, a reverse gear and intelligent suspension, other bikes have now mostly caught up on the innovation front. But the principal appeal of the K1600 and its Unique Selling Proposition is that enduring icon of BMW brand identity: the straight six-cylinder engine…
In October 1979, the cover of Superbike magazine was a cartoon of the then-new Kawasaki Z1300, a six-cylinder, water-cooled behemoth with the strapline ‘Goodbye Golden Age’. The bike was depicted as made of stone, like some antiquity from a lost civilisation, and placed on a Doric pedestal. The gist of the editorial was that geopolitics and the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuels had conspired to ensure we would never see the like of it again. This sombre prediction came just before the world embarked on the greatest period of economic expansion ever seen, and so proved baseless.
Honda with their CBX and Bennelli’s Sei were also six-cylinder models of the time but neither of these really caught on either. The weight, bendy frames, crap tyres and useless brakes of the era were no doubt contributory factors. So the industry seemed to abandon the concept until the mid-2000s. Then, BMW Mottorad inherited an engineering facility from the Formula One division, following their exit from the sport. With this came expertise in building extremely compact sixes, so this vital component of BMW DNA became an option for the motorcycle range as well as the cars. The K1600 then, in various guises, has been a feature of the range ever since.
My loyalty has not been unquestioning. Six replacement switch clusters, new front wheel bearings, a new engine for the first one at 24,000 miles (corrosion of the engine block; the internals were fine) and replacement of the rear suspension of the current one have all been dealt with without question under warranty. But that’s hardly the point. Rusting of most low-down fasteners and blistering paint on the wheels after a couple of years is not what you expect when you spend upwards of £25,000, and then see ten-year-old Hondas costing a third of this without a mark on them.
Leaving all this to one side, if you want something that can deal with a 300-mile day in absolute comfort in all weathers, that can hurl you at the horizon with a turbine smoothness as if propelled by an unseen hand, stop and go round bends like a Yamaha RD200 with a spotty, malnourished teenager aboard and then show up for the full bowing and scraping treatment at a Relais & Chateaux hotel, the K1600 remains peerless. Add in the convenience of shaft drive and gargantuan luggage capacity, and the bar is nudged yet higher.
Bryant had warned I would need to order early to ensure it would be delivered in time, the usual culprits of component shortages in a post-Covid world being the reasons. So I listed the specification by email and I steadied myself for their quote and terms. After four weeks, I heard nothing and called to find they had lost my email…
Another four weeks went by and no response. I called again but could not even get to talk to anyone. Honestly, how hard can it be to spend $30,000? I think I tried a few more times and then gave up.
My fear was if I persevered, I’d eventually get that famous "Yessiree, one K1600 cummin’ rahrt up!” can-do customer service treatment only to pitch up fourteen months later to find they hadn’t ordered the bloody thing. The nightmare would then, no doubt, continue with the cheery, rhetorical inanity of “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
In my mind, I would then curtly inform them with an icy, pedantic, British politeness that they hadn’t actually been of any help at all, so the concept of ‘anything else’ was somewhat redundant in this context, getting a “Huh? Whadzee sayn?” by way of response. Finally, with only the gratingly insincere “Well, have a great day then” to cling to, I’d be staring into a pint at nearby Conchy Joe’s, my meticulous plan in tatters.
Richard reckoned my experience was pretty much par for the course. Having lived in the US for three decades, his learned experience is that provided you are buying exactly what someone wants to sell you in exactly the way they want to flog it to you, then everything works out just fine.
But… even the slightest variation off-menu can cause the wheels to fall off the process completely. In this case, a UK customer ordering a bike for delivery to a US customer, twelve months in advance was probably just too much to cope with.
So instead, I started to look at how to ship my K1600 from the UK to Florida and back. How difficult can this be?