First Ride – 2022 BMW S1000R

Plush Performance Personified

Story by Mike Seate and Jay LaRossa
Photos by Jose Gallina and Mike Seate

Sportbikes, with their back-breakingly low clip-on bars and excruciating riding positions, are dead, goes the theory. They’ve been replaced, for all but dedicated racers and track-day junkies, by high-performance naked bikes that offer slightly more forgiving ergonomics and similar cutting edge thrills. We have a soft spot for these modern-day cafe racers as their stripped-down aesthetics and focused intent makes them the perfect motorcycles for backroad blasts and rapid daily transportation.

BMW’s S1000R, we were told, is the top of the current heap for its combination of awesome power, precision handling and enough electronic gee-gaws to keep techies fiddling for months on end.

The Beemer certainly is pretty and purposeful-looking what with its white, blue and plum livery. The version of the S1000R we tested recently in So Cal is the top-shelf M version thus named for its links to BMW’s race-bred M-series cars. An already impressive slugger in the 1,000cc World Series, this bike has the added oomph of a GPS lap timer, a throaty Akrapovic exhaust, an up-and-down quickshifter, semi-active suspension (more on this later), lightweight forged wheels and even a tiny lithium battery to help keep weight down. All this gravy will set buyers back $20,675 or nearly six grand over the base model price, but this isn’t a motorcycle you’d want to scrimp and save on.

Instead, the S1000R, derived from the company’s title-winning S1000RR superbike, is meant to push the performance envelope – and it does so with startling comfort and ease of use.

Right off, we noticed the semi-active suspension in a very big way. One section of Mulholland Highway we often ride contains more dips than a cult meeting and on most bikes, an audible clunk can be felt as bikes vault over one particularly nasty section. Not the BMW. Even at speeds that would have the CHP setting fire to one’s license, the S1000R’s Marzocchi shock and thick 45mm forks swallow up bumps as if they didn’t exist.

The front and rear damping can be adjusted manually for rebound and preload, and two separate electronic damping modes  (sel­ected by the click of a left-side handlebar switch, naturally) can either soften or tauten the ride quality.

Handed over to Jay LaRossa, a connoisseur of exotic European sportbikes, the bike duly impressed after charging through a dozen or so miles of Southern California’s most chal­lenging canyons. Jay didn’t spare any of the bike’s 165 horsepower during his hour-long session, pulling off into the far dis­tance as the Akra pipe emitted the coolest-sounding overrun noises allowed by law.

Skidding to a slightly sideways stop, he whipped off his well-worn helmet to offer a gush of praise. “I thought the other naked bikes we tested were refined, but this thing manages to feel as comfortable as a Gold Wing while being fast and planted enough to feel like a race bike,” he said. “I’ve been hearing about semi-active suspension for a couple of years, but until you experience it yourself on the street, it’s hard to describe how well it works.”

He was also mightily impressed by the S1000R’s ability to both hold a line tighter and display ease with rapid direction changes. This time of year, softball-sized clods of dirt and similarly-endowed rocks dislodge themselves from the canyon walls, planting themselves squarely in the apexes of our favorite roads. No problem, the BMW smirks, flick-flacking around obstacles in nanoseconds. Get overzealous with down­shifts and there’s a smooth slipper-assist clutch that prevents the rear Pirelli from hopping and skipping. We found there’s so much torque on hand that once the revs cross the 6,000 mark, we could easily leave the S1000 in third or fourth gear and pass cars – and other bikes – with embarrassing ease.

There’s no need to praise the Brembo monoblock radial front brakes which have become an industry standard on bikes of this high echelon. The ABS is flawless and once braking hard enough to activate it, the system is so smooth, you barely notice it’s working. There’s also something known as Electronic Engine Braking Control at work here, but we’ll have to take BMW’s word for that. The peg-to-seat ergonomics were a bit tight for my 34” inseam, though 6’ Jay had no problems on longer rides.

The very flat handlebars offered a nice reach to greet them and for one of today’s more-info-than-a-credit-report full-color dashes, this unit proved easy to read on the fly. The two main electronic riding modes were either Road, which proved best for semi-rapid travel along big four-lane highways, and Dynamic, which creates a more stiff motorcycle that seems to turn faster and accelerate harder.

So just how fast is the S1000R? Well, being paragons of understated taste and tech­nology, BMW would never stoop to so crass a marketing calculation as advertising such things. But while climbing the five-mile face of Kanan Dune Road from Malibu, the S1000’s digital speedo revealed 139 MPH while still in the fifth of its six gears, the sweeping multi­color tachometer barely kissing 9,000 RPM with an additional 3K revs to go.

Despite the lack of wind protection, Jay says his helmet wasn’t getting buffeted too much from the windblast, but this still isn’t a motorcycle for cross-country jaunts.

For everything the S1000R does, there is room for improvement in fuel economy, poor at 38 MPH. And you’d better be sure of having both the cajones and the skill to best explore the serious performance capabilities of a bike like this before signing a loan agreement.

This 2022 version of BMW’s top naked roadster is a far cry from the excellent 2015 version we tested back in issue #39. Since then, the S1000R has lost nearly 20 pounds, gained a Radio Shack’s worth of electronics goodies and become decidedly more fo­cused. It’s a very, very fast bike, but is kinder on the body than most machines in its rare­fied echelon, which says plenty when dish­ing out upwards of $15,000 for a mo­torcycle. If you’re fit enough, focused enough and fast enough, this is the bike to have.