Cafe Racers, Scramblers, Trackers, and Bratstyle
Porsche 917/20-inspired BMW from Germany’s Rindperformance… For the 1971 24 Hours of Le Mans, Porsche worked with French aerodynamics specialist SERA (Société d’Études et de Réalisations Automobiles) to create a one-off prototype that combined the […]
James Dean-inspired Boxer from Mr. Ludolf… In 1955, just as he was finishing the film Giant, James Dean bought himself a 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder dubbed “Little Bastard.” Though most of us know the […]
An Atypical Airhead from Sardinia… The Italian island of Sardinia (Sardegna) is home to one of our favorite builder collectives, Motocicli Audaci (MAAN), a “testing laboratory for special motorbikes and daring motorcyclists.” The team is […]
A trophy-winning roadster from 20-y.o. Cheyenne Keogh of CKM Designs… Motorcycles have a unique way of binding families together. BikeBound itself started as something of a father-son venture many years ago, and we’ve always […]
Slovenia’s Gas&Retro builds an R80 street tracker… The BMW “airheads” are some of the most iconic motorcycles of all time — modern classics that have won the Paris-Dakar Rally, raced in AMA Superbike, circumnavigated the […]
MotoBrix rebuilds a botched BMW custom… Though the BMW airheads were considered modern classics even before their production ended in the late 1990s, engineers and enthusiasts probably never considered that the air-cooled boxers would have […]
BUC It: Burn Up Company’s burly BMW, built for sidecar adventures… In the mid-1980s, BMW replaced the twin-shock rear suspension on their airhead models with a monolever (single-shock) system, whose asymmetric design was meant to […]
Judd Blunk builds a Marin County thrasher… Introduced in the early 1980s, the BMW R80RT was the touring version of the middleweight airhead, featuring a 797cc flat-twin boxer engine that produced around 50 horsepower and […]
The BMW R80, built from 1978-1994, featured an ~800cc version of the venerable “airhead” flat-twin boxer engine, offering 51 horsepower to the rear wheel through a low-maintenance shaft drive. The bike cost nearly 50% more […]
Introduced in 1982, the BMW R80RT was a slimmed-down, streamlined version of the larger R100RT, sporting a 50-hp, 797cc flat twin “airhead” engine, large fairing/windshield for touring, and weight of around 500 pounds. In ’84, […]
