Back in 1980, BMW’s engineers had an idea. What if they built a bike that could handle rough off-road terrain just as well as long highway stretches and twisty back roads — to their eyes, a sort of two-wheeled Land Rover? That bike was the R80 G/S, its Gelände/Straße name referring to both the overland and street…
American car companies may have spoiled us into thinking that all V8s should be huge with tons of power and gobs of torque. From Dodge and their Hellcats to GM and its Big and Small Block V8s, its ingrained in us. But V8s haven’t all been massive, some of them came in displacements you’d associate with a 4-cylinder.