Nearly-There Sportster

In the dusty archives is this road test of the LS from 1983. The scan is from the yellowed pages of "Two Wheels Road Tests: Full tests of the year's top bikes" and includes other bikes like the Kawasaki Z750GT and Honda CBX550.

The LS was new at the time and wasn’t necessarily seen as an improvement on the recent BMW models or the R75/5 from 10 years previously. It wasn’t seen as a cost effective way to purchase a motorcycle: it carried the premium associated with BMW but didn’t have the robustness of its pedigree nor the performance of its peers.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Z750GT or CBX550 on the road, though…

Access it here (file is 20MB). 

My Bikes

I rode a Honda CB400T in 1985, and at the end of the year swapped it for a 1983 BMW R65LS. This I rode for more than 2 years before swapping it for a Ducati SD900 Darmah. After this I had various BMWs: a R80G/S, a 1985 R65 Mono, and a R100TIC (the police special R100RT). After selling this I went without a bike for a year or so, and when in 1996 the itch again rose I found another LS, identical to the one that I had sold in 1988.

In 2019 I found a 1984 LS in good condition at reasonable price and purchased it. It took 6 months to sort out the teething issues, particularly with the carburetion, but it now provides the advantages of identical historic bikes: I can ride one while I work on the other; I can troubleshoot problems by transferring components; the restriction to 60 ride days per year is now two rides per week; and their performance can be routinely compared.

The two bikes are in everyday use. The 1983 model has just over 185,000 km on the clock and the 1984 model 140,000.