FEATURES
26 Coming to America
BMW’s KI: Poised to take on
the Japanese.
—by Camron E. Bussard
29 The Road to the K1
BMW Hall of Fame.
31 CW Q&A: Hans
Koudella
36 Boxer-Twin Believer
New bikes? Not spoken here.
—by Jon E Thompson
42 Vance & Hines
Hot Rod GS
A better Suzuki GS500.
— by Camron E. Bussard
43 Want-Ad Wonders
What has 11 cylinders and
costs $2600?
54 The Changing Cost of
Having Fun
Money for motorcycles?
Sounds like a good trade.
—by Jon F. Thompson
56 Superstar for a Day
This sure isn’t Yucaipa.
—by Ron Lawson
60 Supercross 101: A
Primer
Learning to speak double-
jump.
EVALUATION
40 The Tapeworks
Helmet Graphics
High fashion for heads.
RACE WATCH
62 24 Heures du Mans
French for fast.
—by Doug Toland
COLUMNS________________
7 Up Front
Here’s what’s wrong.
—by David Edwards
8 At Large
The Fat Cat of Pitcairn Island.
—by Steven L. Thompson
10 Leanings
First Impressions.
—by Peter Egan
DEPARTMENTS
15 Letters
16 New Ideas
18 Roundup
75 Service
78 CW Showcase
82 Slipstream
COVER
BMW’s new KI,
caught in mid-turn.
Photography by David
Dewhurst
For our money, its impossible to make a
motorcycle too good. In fact, almost anyone can
find ways to make a streetbike better, no matter
how technologically sound it may be from the
factory. Touring riders add plush seats, beefed-up suspen-
sions. high-mileage tires and so many lights that their bikes
sometimes look like scale models of Las Vegas casinos. V-
Twin riders make their bikes better with engine hop-up
parts, free-breathing exhaust pipes and as many gold-en-
crusted eagle medallions as will fit.
Sport riders, however, have a much harder job. because
their bikes are so good, it almost takes someone with the
skills of an Eddie Lawson to push them to their full poten-
tial. Sportbikes come nearly ready for battle on the track,
so they have about as much horsepower as the street rider
could ask for, and they have handling limits that most
street riders will seldom explore. When it comes to horse-
power and handling, sportbikes are about as good as it
gets. But. if there is a down side to all this competence, it
has to be sportbikes’ upwardly spiraling prices.
It's those stiff prices that make a machine like the new
Suzuki GS500 an appealing motorcycle. The GS is a
sporty, simply styled, lightweight, 487cc parallel-Twin
that sells for under $3000. Part of the reason for the low
price is that the GS uses a “low-tech" air-cooled engine
that has been around for years in various guises. Further-
more, the bike doesn't come with a fairing, and it doesn't
come with arm-stretching horsepower, so it won't do 160
miles an hour unless you kick it out of the Space Shuttle’s
cargo door.
The GS500 will, however, ferry riders around town
sently enough to please even the most cautious of moth-
ers, yet it handles precisely enough to ricochet up and
down backroads like a cat with a bad attitude. It is in many
ways a reincarnation of a mid-Seventies standard motorcy-
cle. although one that has had its chassis and styling recali-
brated for the sporting predilection of the late-Eighties.
And that’s where Terry Vance and the bike you see here,
the Vance & Hines GS500, come in. In the GS500. Vance
saw a good bike that could be made better. And while his
company is noted for its complete line of exhaust pipes
and other hop-up accessories, it's clear that Vance's afi'ec-
tion for the new Suzuki goes beyond the potential sales of
the parts he has designed for his GS kits. In fact, his attrac-
tion reaches back to his roots in motorcycling. "My father
bought one of the first Honda CB750s,” says Vance, “and
I bought it from him. Before I knew it, 1 was putting on
shocks and building the engine. 1 just kept adding to it."
That's not far from the approach Vance took when start-
ing to think of ways to make the stock GS a more-stylish,
more-comfortable and more-powerful motorcycle.
Vance believes that the GS500 is in many ways an at-
tempt by the Japanese to tap into their early success in
America. “This bike," he says, “takes us back to the begin-
nings of the sport, back to where you could buy a standard
motorcycle. You didn’t have to buy a high-performance
machine and you didn’t have to pay the extra money for a
fairing that you didn’t want. Now the challenge is to find a
way to make it cool again to ride something other than the
fastest and quickest motorcycle you can get."
With his version of the GS, Vance has built a bike that is
a lot like some late-model. Carroll Shelby-modified auto-...