BMW get seriously dirty - Page Three
By, Trevor Hedge

Reflecting on BMW's dirty past - This page three history piece is taken from supplied BMW Material

The BMW name is not instantly synonymous with off road racing prowess despite the recent introduction of the HP2 variant of the R 1200 GS and the 2007 release of the 650 Xchallenge enduro machines.

Delving back into the history of BMW however there are numerous links to dirt competition.

It was an engineer who celebrated BMW’s very first off-road success exactly eighty years ago: in competition with the leading motorcycle brands, Rudolf Schleicher won the Six-Day Race in the UK on the R 37 he himself had designed. The young motorcycle brand from Munich gained overnight fame in the wake of the enormous press response.

In the 1930s, BMW factory riders achieved impressive success in international 6-day races, making the general public aware of the robustness, endurance and power of the machines from Bavaria. The serial production of the telescopic fork developed by BMW was ultimately only possible due to the merciless testing carried out at tough off-road sports events. The same applies to the straight rear-wheel suspension which was conscientiously tested at the major off-road competitions for several years.

Famous BMW road racing motorcyclists such as Ernst Henne and Schorsch Meier started their careers as off-road riders on BMW motorcycles. There are the wonderful memories of success in the German Championships of 1955 to 1980 with riders such as Hans Meier, Sebastian Nachtmann, Herbert Scheck and Richard Schalber, who lined up at the start on forerunners of the GS models. Rolf Witthöft even won the European Championship.

The Paris-Dakar victories in the 1980s were truly outstanding, when rally legends such as Gaston Rahier and Hubert Auriol celebrated off-road triumphs on the rally versions of the BMW R 100 GS. In 1999 Richard Sainct clinched the Paris-Dakar victory again for BMW on a modified F 650 single-cylinder machine. And even this was to be surpassed when BMW won a quadruple victory in 2000.

In the more recent past, Simo Kirrsi achieved impressive results on the HP2 Enduro at events such as the German Cross Country Series, the Pikes Peak competition and the Erzberg-Rodeo.