The R1150GS is like rocking-horse poo, but they happen to have a second-hand 12,000 miler in at Hughenden M40, and they let me take it for a play yesterday. It's a nice bike. A very nice bike. A more solid and better engineered looking machine than the Tiger, as far as I can tell. That much I already knew from my previous brief play, off-road and on. This example had ABS and heated grips, the latter somewhat redundant on a hot sunny day. Although it only puts out around 85bhp, compared with 105hp for the new and sexier Tiger, the wall of torque it generates means that at pretty much all normal road speeds, there's no need to change down, it's just squirt'n'go to overtake on a wall of torque. Just like on the Tiger, the view from atop the GS is excellent - as you'd expect - and worth about 20mph on most twisty roads. Handling is genuinely sublimely good, much more precise than the Tiger is, and the GS can pull a stunt that no other trailie can emulate - you can grab /huge/ handfuls of brake, rippling the tarmac with your front tyre, and the front end dives all of about 2 millimetres. You can brake late as you like then tip it into a corner there and then, in the sports bike hoolie stylee, without it rebounding all over the shop and pinging you into orbit or knackering your line. Even the new Tiger, which has much improved spendies over the old model, can't compete with that. The presence of ABS on the GS adds another dimension to the braking - not that it helps you stop any better per-se, in most conditions, but it certainly gave me the confidence to brake as hard as I felt like, knowing that the ABS would kick into action if I overcooked it. As it was, on warm tyres, and on hot, dry tarmac, I couldn't get the front tyre to lock at all if I braked progressively - the back wheel started skipping, but still the front wasn't going to slide, or trigger the ABS. Truly excellent.

On paper the GS apparently runs out of puff quite early, although I didn't find anywhere to test V-Max, and the boxer layout means that when you blip the throttle on downchanges, it shimmies disconcertingly. The gearbox is better than the 1998-2000 Tiger jobbie (and infinitely better than the tractor-derived item fitted to Jezzas old R80) but perhaps not quite as slick as the item fitted to the 2001 Tiger. Weather protection I couldn't test, but wind protection with the standard screen on wasn't all that good. A quick flit between junctions on the motorway told me all I need to know about its motorway manners - which are excellent but really rather too draughty for long-term comfort. I noticed later that the Tiger comes with fitted plastic hand protectors - the 1150GS has bark-busters as standard now, I think, but the one I was riding presumably pre-dated their fitment.

On the noise front, I'm afraid it's just crap. The Tiger pisses on it from a great height, and by the time it has a race can, the Tiger sounds utterly wonderful. Having said that, I know that a boxer twin doesn't have to sound like a fart in a bean can, although as standard, that's the way all the bikes in the current line up have been set up to sound. Methinks the Bavarian R&D people need to take a trip over to Ducati to learn how to make a stock twin sound good without busting the noise limits....

Fitting the currently-being-beta-tested Van-der-Linde (sp?) hop-up kit to the GS gives it another several bhp (which may help solve the top-end problem), and if it includes a new exhaust as well, loses the catalytic converter (which is the thing that stops you being able to run the bike on LRP during the next fuel crisis, and which probably objects when you ford an icy river on your GS); it also and hopefully makes it sound like a proper motorcycle. Or that's the theory, anyway.

There's very little not to like about the GS. Top-end performance for the rare occasions when you want to use it, wind and weather protection on the motorway or in winter (but I'd like to try one with the bark busters and a higher screen fitted just to confirm that the problem is easily soluble), love'em/hate'em looks, catalytic converter and a horrible exhaust note apart, it's really the perfect all-rounder...

...except UK bikes are apparently now all sold up until autumn, despite the recently requisitioned extra stocks. Hmmm... do I want to wait that long? Do I know for sure that I don't want a saner tourer? Do I need to find a dodgy backstreet parallel import dealer? Do I need to go abroad and ride one back? Or do I need to see what the alternatives are first?

Best try a Varadero, then... and an FJR1300...