this is the bmw r9t and in this video i'm going to give you my impression of this bike now from
the get-go this is a very easy bike to ride so you won't have any problems there at all
i was thinking while i was going along if you were fairly new to riding and you bought one of these
you'd find it absolutely fine and it's a really lovely bike to ride which we'll go into now right
from the start as you get on you can see it's not a big bike so as a guy who's six foot three myself
judged by looking at me how i look on the bike but it's a compact bike but at the same time
that makes it a dynamic ride so it's good in the corners and what have you but looks wise it
looks fairly small and if you were say 5 foot 8 9 10 11 you'd be absolutely perfect on that
on this bike anything above or below that then like anything you have to do various things
like you can raise the seat and what have you and even the pegs can be lowered if you're a tall guy
it has an air slash oil called two two-cylinder boxer engine and boxer means that the cylinders
are horizontally opposed and um it's 1170cc to be precise so it's little a lot of bikes
in this sort of range and price range which will come to the prices later it compares quite nicely
to say the harley-davidson 1200cc this is more powerful and feels more meaty and it's actually
a very very nice engine to ride along with now i've just moved the bike under the trees here
to try and get out of the wind and hopefully that will help um talking about the engine first of all
it's 81 kilowatts of power or 110 horsepower at 7550 rpm and it's got 116 newton meters of torque
at 6000 rpm that's the peak but it pulls all the way through the rev range so right from low right
the way through this engine doesn't struggle at all and when you do get it into the revs it
really does shift and it's a lovely uh bike to ride the gear change is silky smooth up and down
it's beautifully engineered and you can feel that when you're riding it now bmw quote a maximum
speed of over 200 kilometers an hour which is 124 miles per hour which is pretty quick
obviously that's illegal in pretty much every country in the world
but that's not the point it's got the power and the speed if you want it which makes overtaking
effortless and going up hills easy and it's a great bike to sort of ride around whether
you're on the motorway or in the country lanes or in the tower now like all the boxer engines when
you blip the throttle it does a little shift like that um the triumph rocket three did it also and
that's not a boxer engine so it's to do with the camshaft and the torque and the action reaction
but i tested it going along pulling the clutch in and just kept the revs open and it doesn't do it
all the time so it's only as a blip that it does that as a continuous rev it doesn't do it at all
now looks wise is this the bike for you it's a very modern looking bike at the same time it's
kind of got a retro feel to it and if you look at all the parts and the quality of the welding
and everything on it it's first-class manufacturing i can say and you've
got a shaft drive to one side and it's all attached on this side it's open wheel this side
the exhaust is this side this is the standard pipe it's got a lovely tone to it and when you
decelerate it pops and bangs nicely and of course you can get other pipes for these with a lot more
noise and that opens it up a bit and gives you a little bit more power too
now i'm not going to go into tons of figures and specs in this video it's all about what the bike
is like to ride how it feels how it handles first of all let's talk about the brakes there's double
discs at the front and a single disc at the rear this side and the stopping power is extremely good
so no issues there you've got a steering damper on the front here which stops the head shake
when you're accelerating hard or perhaps braking hard into a bend you've got an almost flat bench
style seats in two sections you do have a rear bit and rear pegs i wouldn't want to take a passenger
very far on a bike like this but it's fine for a little trip to the shops or something um the
seat's comfortable and the tank's narrow at the front so you can grip it with your knees it
feels very narrow but when you look down the tank goes wider at the front obviously the cylinders
stick out a bit so it's wider than it feels when you're going along the tank is 18 liters and it
does about 58.85 miles per gallon official figures obviously in the real world you're unlikely to get
that but that would give you a range of about 216 miles on a full tank so you'd probably be looking
at 200 be interesting to know if you've got one of these how many miles you get out of the tank
so
now the steering head angle or the rake is 26.8 degrees which is relatively steep uh and the trail
is 107.9 which is relatively short uh which may be one of the reasons he's got a steering damper
because it makes the handling could be a bit twitchy but it doesn't feel twitchy when you're
riding along and it's got very good cornering so this is about you can chuck around and have
a lot of fun on if you want to but equally if you just want a relaxed ride it's ever so nice too the
wheelbase on this bike is 1487 millimeters and as i said before it's a short bike so the wheelbase
combined with the rake and the trail mean it's a an agile bike to chuck around that does obviously
impact stability somewhat but saying that it felt perfectly stable at higher speeds
and you could go anywhere on this bike motorway freeway
dual carriageway town city countryside it does it all and it does it all very nicely
the seat height is 805 millimeters and as you can see i'm sitting on it once you you compress the
suspension a bit my legs are quite bent so you're going to be fine if you're five foot eight or nine
or ten the weight is 222 kilograms and it doesn't feel at all heavy the center of gravity is low
and it feels much lighter than it sounds now i must admit i'm not a particular bmw
expert um i'll be totally honest with you i've never really looked at bmws before the bmw r18
came out and as soon as i set my eyes on that i thought oh my god i've got to get on one of those
and if you look on our videos we recently test rode the r18 and we are going to be revisiting the
r18 again because it's such a good bike we want to go into more detail but that sort of sparked
my interest in the bmw so we're starting off as this is our second bike very kindly lecturers from
williston bmw in northampton uh great dealership lots of knowledge very friendly and helpful and
according to them this is the r9t pure it's got some optional extras on such as the spoked wheels
there is a model that just comes with the basic spoke wheel they look a lot nicer to me than
the alloy wheels excuse the helicopter we can never get away from human impact wherever we go
what i'll do is i'll stick the prices in in a second so you can see the basic price and
the prices of the different variants of this bike they're all based on the same chassis and engine
and what have you but there's different styling options with different wheels and handlebars and
various things and seats and there's lots of customized ones and actually
williston bmw in northampton have got some gorgeous looking custom bikes so
really go and have a look at those if you're in the local area because they're fabulous
now in this price range there are a lot of bikes to choose from and like everything you
get an impression before you see something and get on it what you might think it's like
within a few minutes i found this to be much nicer than i was expecting it to be
and i actually went a little bit further than i intended to because it was so nice
it's got a lot of character so similar to the harley davidsons they're full of character and
um charm and and what have you this is the same it makes lovely noise it decelerates and pops and
bangs uh accelerates with a lovely sound uh this is this is a very characteristic bike so if you
want something that's a bit unusual and not just the run of the mill then i would definitely go for
something like this because it's good the mirrors i'm being quite tall i could see half of my body
in a little bit of the road behind me so you have to sort of squeeze out of the way most bikes are
like that to be honest so they could be better but that could be changed if you were taller
but on the whole yeah a pretty pretty nice bike
now controls are nice and minimalistic um you've got heated grips very nice to have
if you've ever been out riding in the cold winter you'll know how useful they can be
basic start stop button the key obviously in the middle there goes on first you've got hazard
lights abs button you've got your menu button and your indicators which self cancel brilliant and
your hooter not bad so nice and simple the only thing this one doesn't come with is a rev gauge um
i believe the other models they've got the twin uh clocks do have that um so just a bit of check on
that but i absolutely if that's the case so yeah very simple so i started up off you go kind of bye
now this bike's got conventional forks which i must say do look nicer than upside down forks
a lot of manufacturers go for an upside down fork because it's perceived to be better but
sometimes it depends what's inside the forks but looks wise these are far better on a retro
style bike or a modern classic they perform perfectly well and in the real world you don't
need high grade upside down forks unless you're going to get 10 tenths out of a bike and you're on
a track and that little tiny bit of a difference does make the difference but to the average normal
rider it doesn't so don't get hooked up on that this looks better and it's perfectly good this
has 17 inch wheels front and rear got a nice big wide tire on the back uh the metzeler tyres are
grippy and they've got enough tread for the wet weather and it's a bit slippery on the road today
a little bit wet and it's been perfectly fine so our verdict on the bmw 9t is it's a very nice bike
um it's stylish and modern and it would appeal to people i believe of all ages it would make a good
first full license motorcycle because it's not too aggressive yet if you learn to ride it and open
it up you can get plenty of speed out of it so you can grow with the bike which is great it's not too
heavy it handles nicely so on the whole very very nice and as i said before i'm pleasantly surprised
i wasn't thinking it was going to be as good as it actually is so uh yeah another good one from bmw
you