BMW F 800 GS Adventure

This entry is part 5 of 320 in the series Adventure Rider Issue #1

Improving BMW’s F800GS was never going to be easy. It was a great bike when it first hit dealer floors back in 2008. The motor was smooth and torquey, the bike was big and stable but felt slim compared to it’s big-brother 1200, and, being a BMW, it was beautifully engineered and very quiet and comfortable.

What could be done to improve a bike like that? Offer it in an adventure format, of course. Bigger fuel capacity, more rugged crash protection, boosted lighting and more technological gadgetry.The new gear on the 2014 F800GS Adventure works, and whether your riding is commuting or death-before-DNF adventure epics, the additions to the standard 800 are big winners.

Above: The extra protection for engine and bodywork is easy to see, but the new electronic rider aids make just as big a difference.

Above: The LED spotties are awesome. After a couple of night rides on the 800 Adventure, we’re not looking forward to riding bikes that don’t have them.

On board

The parallel-twin, liquid-cooled, fuel-injected 798cc powerplant is still the heart of the bike, and it’s a brilliant motor. Somehow BMW has made the parallel twin feel like the boxer twin of the 1200. It’s turbine-smooth and torquey, and will deal with just about any situation with a minimum of fuss, driving through a six-speed box via chain to the rear wheel. The cable clutch is far from light by today’s hydraulic standards, but it’s far from heavy too. The clutch on our test bike was smooth with a nice, easy take-up and a progressive action.

Mechanically, the bike is pretty much the F800GS we’ve all been used to for a few years. The changes to earn the Adventure badge are the interesting bits.

First up, and a huge bonus, is a 24-litre fuel cell. It’s an under-seat tank, as usual, but it bulges out the sides a little, and in a great piece of design work it doesn’t interfere with anything. Its doesn’t even feel like it’s sticking out. Somehow the Beemer boffins have made it fit like it just belongs there, but it’s holding a whopping eight litres more than the standard tank, giving a realistic range of around 500km of mixed riding.

ABS is standard, and as always, it’s an ‘opt-out’ system. If you turn the key and start riding, you’ll have

the ABS operating. If you jiggle the button on the left switchblock before you ride away, you can turn it off, butyou have to make the decision and take the action.

A big screen, crash bars, pannier racks, a bigger bashplate and some superb extra lighting round out the basic adventure package.

There are a couple of optional extras available that were fitted to our review bike. On the dash they light up as ESA and ASC. ESA is Electronic Suspension Adjustment, and although it sounds all very exciting, it actually only alters the rebound damping of the shock. The three choices are Comfort, Normal and Sport, and they can be selected on the fly as conditions change. Preload is still a 30-second job of winding the small hand wheel on the right of the bike. No problem

The other interesting factory option is ASC – Automatic Stability Control. It’s a traction control system that, as near as we can figure it, allows a kind of ‘medium’ setting between completely off and completely on. According to BMW’s description the Enduro setting allows the rider to “increase the slip threshold”, which we figured means being able to hang the back out ‘a little bit’. It allows more aggressive braking, too.

Getting lazy

It’s easy for good riders to turn their noses up at traction control and ABS, but we reckon if you’re being honest, it’s just too good to not use these days. It doesn’t matter how good a rider you believe yourself to be, there’ll still be times when there’s oil, ice or moss on the road or some knobber who’ll prop in front of you halfway around a roundabout, and that’s when those features can save you. On the road we hardly notice the ABS and traction control except when we need it.

Off-road is a different story, of course, but even then, towards the end of the day when we were feeling a little ragged, the traction control made things very easy as we attempted to pilot the 800 through some slippery single track. For sure, if we were feeling all full of ourselves we turned everything off, but there are times the systems worked well and made things a great deal easier.

The traction control was interesting, though. The BMW motor is so tractable we turned the ASC off and had a ball until we got a bit tired (after five minutes). Then the Enduro setting allowed us plenty of fun, but kept the rear of the bike well under control. The rear wheel can still light up to a certain degree, and the ABS will allow stronger braking for more stressed conditions, but the safety factor is vastly increased, especially for a rider who may not be a national champ in the making. We can see that with a little more time to get used to the new settings we could
become big fans.

Shocker

The suspension on the 2014 F800GS is good. It’s about what can be expected from a good dualsporter these days. At sensible speeds it copes well and the action is smooth and progressive at both ends. Still, if you go launching off erosion mounds or smashing rocky creek beds at speeds, both ends are going to bottom out hard. It’s not an enduro bike, and for its intended purpose we thought it was well set up.

The electronic shock settings didn’t change our lives, but they did work.We started off with a heap of bitumen, so we left everything on, selected Road, and off we went. We had a ball, too. The motor isn’t a banshee screamer like a four-cylinder sports bike, but it does a damned good job of smoothing along the tar at legal – or maybe a little better than legal – speeds.

Then, when we hit the dirt, we pounded along having a good time until, after a few hours, we started to feel we were being treated a little harshly. It took us a while, but finally

the light dawned, and we selected the enduro setting. It wasn’t chalk and cheese, but our ride definitely became smoother. When we hit the bitumen again we tried messing about with the settings, and sure enough, on the road in Sport mode the 800 is definitely more precise.

The comfort zone

Not too many brands can match BMW for sheer comfort. The tall screen and wide, comfy seat on the 800 Adventure combine with an incredibly smooth power delivery and excellent handling manners to make this a supremely comfortable dualsport bike. We know there’s a bit of web chatter about the throttle responding too sharply in the initial application, but we just don’t see it. It’s snappy, but all fuel-injected bikes seem to have their quirks, and this one we adjusted to, and forgot about, very quickly.

On the tar or on the dirt, it’s easy to cover whopping long distances with only very minimal fatigue. Things like heated grips and good shelter from windblast play their part, but the way so little effort is required to get the bike to do anything is the biggest factor. It’s a real pleasure to ride, and for riders around the 175cm mark, the seating, standing, ’bars/’pegs/seat arrangement is going to be close to spot-on. Handling is good, especially off road when the pace is on a little and the rider stands up and gets aggressive. As the sun goes down those little spotties fire out an amazing spread of clean, white light that’s a huge improvement over the squint-and-hope technique we’re used to.

The base model Adventure sells for a recommended retail of $18,550. Our optioned bike would go for a smidge over $20,000, and we reckon the value was easy to see.The 800 may not suit the diedin-the-wool fans of the 1200 because it doesn’t have the outand-out horsepower or the full-blown tech aids of the big girl, but hoo-aah! It suits us.

BMW F 800 GS Adventure
Web: www.bmwmotorrad.com.au.Rec retail $18,550+ORC (base model) Above: The new Adventure version of the F800GS is a very capable dualsporter indeed

Engine Type: Liquid-cooled four-stroke in-line twocylinder engine, four valves per cylinder, two overhead camshafts, dry sump lubrication
Displacement: 798cc
Bore/Stroke: 82.0mm X 75.6mm
Compression ratio: 12:1
Rated output: 63kW (85hp) at 7500rpm
Possible reduction: 35 kW (48hp) at 7000rpm
Maximum torque: 83Nm at 5,750rpm
Possible reduction: 63Nm at 4000rpm
Engine Management: Electronic intake pipe injection,
digital engine management (BMS-K+)
Emission control: Closed-loop three-way catalytic
converter/emission standard EU-3
Starter: Electric
Fuel tank capacity: 24 litres
Transmission: Constant mesh six-speed gearbox
integrated into crankcase
Length: 2305mm
Width (including mirrors): 925mm
Height (excluding mirrors): 1450mm
Seat height, unladen weight: 890mm (860mm
low seat)
Wheelbase: 1578mm
Brakes front: Dual, 300mm discs, floating brake
discs, with double-piston floating calipers and ABS
Brakes rear: Single 265mm disc, with single-piston
floating caliper and ABS
Unladen weight, road ready, fully fuelled: 229kg