2024 BMW R 1300 GS Light Heavyweight

After adding to the previous GS over the years, making changes, some big, some small, the bike had become an amalgamation of accoutrement that added up to an excellent touring motorcycle. There’s nothing wrong with that and surely BMW has the sales numbers to back up that claim - the company actually cited 2022 as its best sales year yet with more than 200,000 units sold. At some point though, the dam has to break and something’s got to give. How and when does a manufacturer decide to start with an entirely clean slate to recreate its most important motorcycle from the ground up? Well, for BMW, that time was seven years ago, and what you see here is the result of nearly a decade of engineering and design.
Lighter weight, more compact, and perhaps most importantly, more power - three key features of the GS that also happen to apply to the new Boxer engine propelling the latest member of the Gelände Straße family. Losing weight isn’t easy. Dropping weight and adding muscle is even tougher. Yet BMW has managed to pull it off with the GS’s new 1300 cc power plant.
Increasing the bore by 4 mm and decreasing the stroke by 3 mm along with a higher compression ratio (up to 13.3:1 from 12.5:1) has BMW claiming 145 hp at 7,750 and 110 lb-ft of torque at 6,500 rpm. Not surprisingly, BMW’s Shiftcam technology was carried over for optimizing valve lift and stroke at varied loads. The intake valve is quite a bit larger at 44 mm with the exhaust side bumped up a smidge as well to 35.6 mm (up from 40 mm and 34 mm respectively). The 52 mm throttle bodies are a couple of the only things to be carried over from the 1250 GS.
In repackaging the engine, BMW moved the transmission from behind the engine to below it thus creating a much shorter package from front to back. They also managed to keep the center of gravity the same by removing a third shaft driving the transmission which has, in turn, allowed ground clearance to stay the same and the actual height of the engine to be almost exactly the same, too. We’re told the engine is slightly more forward biased overall. In the reworking of the engine/transmission, astute GS-ianados may notice upon standing over the bike that the cylinder heads are now totally symmetrical thanks to BMW placing the timing chains on opposing sides of the cylinders.