One last hurrah with the BMW R 1250 GS Adventure Trophy X

2023 BMW R 1250 GS Adventure Trophy X

Motorcycle Test By Rennie Scaysbrook

One must tread carefully when reviewing a BMW GS.

It is a motorcycle that has garnered more worldwide acclaim than any since its release way back in 1980—that’s right, I said any bike—so you can deduce there’s an armada of GS riders ready and waiting to pounce on a wee journo should he or she throw any unnecessary shade at it.

The BMW GS is as close as we’ve yet got to a bike that is all things to all riders. I’ve seen Leon Haslam get his knee down on a knobby-shod GS in the rain, I’ve seen BMW’s Miles Davis pull 50 meter long stoppies on one, and I’ve seen GS’s in the depths of the Moroccan desert getting set to charge into the lawless lands of Mali and Mauritania. No other bike on the planet—at least one I’ve encountered in this last 15 years as a full-time bike journo, can lay claim to such a wide variety of mechanical aptitude.

The 2024 year is going to be the biggest yet for the GS as it’s finally going to join arch rival KTM and leap into the 1300cc category with the GS 1300 (we hope to be at the world launch in Spain in October bringing you the goodness on this one). And it’s not just going to be a bump in capacity. This will be an all-new GS, so we thought it fitting to have one final swing on the outgoing 1250 to prove to ourselves and everyone around, there’s life in the old dog yet.

The 1250 came to being in 2018, the second generation of the water-boxer powerplant that saw the light of day in 2013 (I had one for 18 months, still my favourite of all long term press bikes). However, for the 1250’s final fling, BMW decided to give it the Trophy treatment as a commercial doff of the cap to its GS Trophy adventure competition that takes place every year in some of the most exotic places on earth, where countries are pitted against each other in light-hearted contests with beers always ready for the evening.

The R 1250 GS Adventure Trophy X is not too dissimilar to your base model GS Adventure, but you get a few features to help you stand out. In addition to the racy paint job and 1254cc flat twin, standard equipment for the Adventure Trophy X is the sports muffler, a shorter Rallye bench seat (we turfed that and put the taller stock seat on for the test), black cross-spoke rims, Michelin Anakee rubber, a 30mm taller-set handlebar, and LED fog lamps.

There’s three packages you can get with the Adventure Trophy X—as we all know, nothing is ever kept stock at a BMW dealer—in the Comfort Package (keyless ride, chrome exhaust headers, heated grips, tyre pressure monitoring); Touring Package (preparation for GPS device, cruise control, aluminium pannier fasteners), and the one we went for in the Dynamic Package, which will give you Dynamic ESA, Gear Shift Assistant Pro, Riding Modes Pro, and MSR (Motor Slip Regulation/Dynamic Brake Control).

On top of that, BMW threw in the full luggage option with the 32L top case and right and left side cases that totalled 80L. And if you can’t carry everything you want with 112L of storage capacity, just go buy a car.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that should you go for the Dynamic Package, you get everything in the Comfort and Touring packages with it, so you may as well…

Aside from those highlights, the 1250 GS Adventure Trophy X is identical to the base model 1250 GS Adventure. One of the big highlights of the model is the gigantic 30L fuel tank, which I was getting around 510 km between fill ups as I cruised the backroads from my place in Orange County in California to Laguna Seca for the MotoAmerica round.

This is predominately where I believe the Adventure Trophy X really shines. With a claimed wet weight of 268 kg ready to go, this is not the ideal machine to take real off roading. It’ll do it, no problem, especially when you stick it in off-road mode and let the ECU soften the throttle delivery and suspension damping, but this is a machine best suited to the open road where there’s crap surfaces in your way, a few dirt passes and some choice tarmac twisties before you pack it in for the night. This is the bike’s Swiss Army Knife approach—or Jack of all trades, master of none—if you will.

Touring miles are helped by that massive screen that’s got a hand-knob within reach so it can be adjusted on the fly. It’d be nice if it were electronically adjustable but you can’t win them all.

GS’s rarely come, if it all, stock from the dealer, and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t get cruise control as an option for big miles in the saddle. This is the old cruise control system, mind you, not the radar-adaptive systems found on the R18 Transcontinental/bagger line-up, which you can expect to see when the GS gets its 1300cc upgrade.

Where the GS is truly at home is paved twisties. Take the adventure nature of it out of your brain for a minute, and revel in just how damn good a GS is at getting from corner to corner at a far, far higher speed than you’d give a bike of this size and look credit for.

And it’s not just one thing that makes it so. It’s a combination of the single-shock telelever front end, the paralever back-end, the upright riding position and the 136 horses droning out the pack of the single-outlet exhaust. The GS doesn’t leap from corner to corner like a sportsbike but more just orbs its way there, floating from one entry to the next. If you’ve never ridden a telelever front end, you might find them a bit vague in the steering, and that’s ok. Take the leap of faith and trust it, and you’ll be astounded not just how hard you can push it, but how hard in really tricky conditions.

The front-end doesn’t so much as dive under brakes as much as it lowers, and that can make it feel like the front tire doesn’t have enough weight on it, thus giving you that vague feeling. But that’s all part of the deal, it’ll stick, I assure you—you need to mess up real bad to lose the front on a GS Adventure Trophy X on the road. It’ll blow your mind how late and how hard you can brake when you’re really getting after it.

When you transfer this over to the dirt, the feeling isn’t quite as connected as something like a KTM 1290 Super Adventure R. The telelever can have a slightly heavy feel to it when the road is all silty, but, again, trust the process and you’ll ride over damn near anything.

This is a big, big motorcycle. With a seat height of 89cm, it’s about the limit for my 183cm frame to be comfortable on when off-road. You need to be deliberate with your movements on the GS when on the brown stuff, much more than on the black top, because once that weight gets away from you, there’s not much hope of it coming back. Having said that, if you’re a half competent off-road rider, you’ll be delighted in how much you can get out of the Adventure Trophy X. Large and little rocks alike are easily dealt with, and the overall girth and weight of the bike means you’ve got solidity and stability on your side, especially when going down hill.

Such is the selection, you can play around with the modes all day and still not find the ideal scenario. Compared to the early days of the GS story, the 2023 edition is a rolling computer. However, BMW’s been at the electronics game longer than anyone else and the ride suite is one of the more intuitive out there. Four ECU modes of Rain, Road, Dynamic and Enduro are all you’ll need, and the adjustment within the systems themselves will have you occupied for longer than you’d like (unless you’re into that sort of thing).

Dynamic Traction Control is a given that changes its intervention with the ECU modes selected, but the Trophy also comes with three ride modes of ECO, Rain and Road, which can be independently variable within the four ECU modes. There’s also Hill Hold Assist as standard, so you don’t need to hold the front or rear brakes while on a hill waiting for the traffic lights to change, and the TFT display allows you to use the BMW Motorrad Connected App for navigation and phone data like calls and messages. There’s also a full-size USB so you’ll always have you phone charged up.

When you look at all the electronics on a current GS, it’s a bit of a trip when you see what the bike was when it first started out. That 1980 R 80 G/S—which stood for Gelände/Straße (the German words for offroad/road)—was essentially a big, oversized dirtbike. This in no doubt was the bike that saved BMW Motorrad from the hangman’s noose, as the company’s line-up at the time was looking old, uninspired, and this arm of the company was looking shaky at best.

The BMW R 1250 GS Adventure Trophy X is thus the final paragraph in the 1250cc’s chapter of the GS story. It is an absolutely superb motorcycle, and holds the place in my mind that if I had to have one bike, just one, to do every form of riding that I do, this is what I’m taking. Considering I ride more motorcycles than I have hot dinners, I can’t give it higher praise than that. Time to see if the 1300 will live up to the legend…

2023 BMW R 1250 GS Adventure Trophy X Specifications