BMW R1100S Boxer Cup Replica

At some rally or other towards the end of 2010 I must've mentioned that I quite liked the look of the Boxer Cup Replica BMWs. Soon after I got a call from Darlington that they had just got the bike for me a 2003 Boxer Cup that had all the options, was the twin plug 1150 model and just what I was looking for. This was the disadvantage of having friends in the trade!

Here we go again, sports bike time, but this one came with hard panniers so a bit of rally use would be no problem. Riding it home I noticed my first problem with it. I had ridden a standard R1100s but the Boxer cup version has longer suspension units for more ground clearance. My legs were not really long enough. I got no sympathy from my wife Heather as she has that problem on ALL her bikes.

The Boxer Cup Replica, as the name implies, is a replica of the bikes used in the Boxer cup race series. They can be in standard tune or as with the one that I got in full race trim. With this you get a race exhaust system, a rechipped black box, Ohlins suspension etc etc.

If you want a track day bike this is the one for you, but if you just want a sporty bike to use for rallies and a blast about on Sundays - big mistake!

Around town it was too noisy, you had to give it plenty of revs to set off due to the state of tune plus the very high first gear. This was enough to set off car alarms and endanger any shop windows nearby! This was fun at first but started being annoying and embarrassing before long.

I enjoyed riding it, it was fast and smooth on the motorway and was a good handling bike for A road use, but there was no getting away from it - I had bought a race bike for the road and it was hard work.

Just less than a year after I bought it, at a camping weekend in the Lakes, my friend turned up on a low mileage Honda ST1300 Pan European that he had just bought in. He said "This is more like what you should have bought". I had to agree I borrowed the Pan and soon had agreed to buy it when I had sold the BCR.

I put it on ebay and sold it to a chap who was looking for one to use for track days. As far as I know he still has it and I hope he's giving it more use than I did.

- Ted Trett