Bike of the Year celebrates the machines that are genuinely improving motorcycling. The bikes that bring something new, exceed our expectations, and move the world forward rather than rest on yesterday’s laurels. In the past 12 months the Bike team has ridden at least 85 all-new, updated or tweaked models. Only 20 have earned a place in our countdown – and only one is worthy of being crowned Bike of the Year 2026.

Elsewhere this issue we’ve asked a real-life professor of engines to rank the craziest motors ever fitted between two wheels, from 49-cylinder two-stroke to 8-litre V10 to 400bhp jet-bike. Back on planet Earth (albeit a far-flung corner of it) is Ferdia Durkin and his gripping tale of riding a temperamental 23-year-old BMW R1150GS deep into the Sahara Desert. And if all that’s not enough, we’ve also found out what it feels like for a motorcycling mortal to pin the throttle of Marc Márquez’s 300bhp Ducati GP26 MotoGP race bike. Beware: it’ll pull your brain out of shape…

All this and plenty more, only in the latest issue of Britain’s best-selling bike magazine – out now.

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Out & about

Martin Fitz-Gibbons spends an afternoon looking for somewhere to cool off while out on the Triumph Tiger 900 Desert Edition

PHOTOGRAPHY ADAM SHORROCK

When the Tiger 900 Desert arrived in late spring, I quietly dreamed I’d find a way of riding it to the parched, barren wasteland that inspired this special edition. I didn’t imagine that I’d have the time (or guts) to ride it to the Sahara (like Ferdia’s incredible adventure on p80) – but a pixel of positivity in the back of my brain had half-hoped I could squeeze in a hurried trip to the Tabernas Desert in Almería, or the beautiful Bardenas Reales badlands just a few hours from Bilbao’s ferry port.

In the end I didn’t have to go to the desert; the desert came to me this summer, thanks to five successive heatwaves between May and August. After the warmest spring ever recorded in England came record-breaking temperatures in June (peaking at 38°C), then the driest-ever July (just four per cent of expected rainfall). Halfway through August, more than 70 per cent of England is officially in drought.

Meandering along miscellaneous Midlands back roads on yet another sweltering afternoon, the countryside looks like it’s been bleached blonde. There are still patches of green to be seen, but even these are now tinged with the burnt brown and terracotta tones of a ‘false autumn’ – a stress reaction where trees and plants shed leaves earlier than normal to cope with the extreme conditions. They’re not the only ones adapting to survive: out in the fields, farmers are scrambling to deal with the earliest harvest in 50 years.

‘As the ambient temperature climbs to 30°C, bonus blasts of hot air flow over my legs’

Unfortunately, things aren’t any cooler aboard the Tiger 900. Even as the ambient temperature climbs towards 30°C, I’m acutely aware that bonus blasts of hot air are flowing over my knees and thighs. They’re pouring forth from the back of the dual radiators, which seem to have been designed so as to deliberately duct engine heat directly into the rider’s lap. Come on, Hinckley brainboxes; my groin is not your heatsink.
But while things downstairs may be getting hot and sticky, so too are my tyres. The original Bridgestone A41s felt fine but boasted an overwhelming road focus, looking and feeling like pure sports-touring rubber. When a terminal puncture in less than 1000 miles saw them consigned to the skip, I opted for something with more off-road ambition: Michelin’s Anakee Adventure 2. The blockier tread and deeper grooves are a better visual match for the Tiger’s adventure aspirations, but don’t create any unpleasant noise or vibration on the road. And today, they’re still letting me chuck the Tiger around until the pegs scrape.

Beneath the Desert Edition stickers, what we have here is essentially a lightly accessorised Rally Pro – a former Bike of the Year. The Tiger 900 earned our crown in 2020 by being a convincingly capable, cohesive and consummate all-rounder. ‘There’s no standout “wow” moment with the Triumph,’ concluded editor Hugo Wilson at the time. ‘It’s simply a bike that’s astonishingly complete.’ Amen, H.

Six years on and the exact same sentiments echo around my lid today. Despite a subtle-but-significant 2024 update that smoothed out the T-plane crank’s sharp vibrations, found an extra 13bhp down the back of its crankcases and modernised the electronics, at its core the Tiger remains a bike that’s a delight to live with day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month – but, perhaps, not a thrill-a-minute.
Joining the dots between a few of my favourite B-roads, it’s incredibly hard to pick fault with any individual aspect of the Tiger’s dynamic. The 888cc triple serves up linear power and flat torque via faultless fuelling, a slick two-way quickshifter and a pleasing, gurgling growl through its Akrapovic pipe. Bundling into turns, the Tiger stops sharply under its Brembo Stylema brakes, then pitches in keenly and crisply giving away little hint of its 21in front hoop or leggy 240mm-travel forks. It’s never fussy about gear choice, equally content pulling from 3000rpm or revving until power tails off above 9000rpm. But as polished and proficient a package as it is, and as swiftly as I find myself charging through the charred countryside, something still feels missing.

‘It’s a feat that the same bike I’ve been commuting to work on can also prowl the undergrowth’
Time to mix things up, then. We’ve got an adventure bike on adventure tyres; why don’t we have an adventure? I spot a ‘Byway’ sign and choose to accept the invitation. Pull over, then pick ‘Off Road’ mode by pressing the button that looks like the Masterchef logo. Stand up on the pegs then gently drift the rear end, kicking up a cloud of desiccated dust as we join a baked-hard dirt path leading past old farm buildings. Where will this mystery lane lead us?
It’s a dead end; cock. Never mind. One careful full-lock U-turn (the Tiger’s too hefty for me to confidently risk one of those jazzy Elephant turns you see on YouTube), and we retrace our steps. But trundling back to the tarmac ignites a spark in the distant recesses of my memories, recalling a huge water splash that I know is somewhere near here. When I tackled it a few years ago the water level was higher than the front wheel of my Honda CRF250, a surging stream that saturated socks and threatened to pour over the top of the screen if you hit it too fast. Sounds like the perfect place to cool off and create a memorable moment.
Onwards then – follow the hard-packed track downhill to the same secluded, sheltered spot I remember from five years back and… oh. The once-mighty river is today barely a dribbling trickle, so shallow and slow you’d struggle to drown a thirsty ant. Still, we’ve found water in the desert – or at least, on the Desert – and it’s still a hoot to charge through, front wheel slicing the stagnant streamlet into the air.

Out the other side and the trail carries on, tracing the treeline as it weaves between frazzled fields. The Tiger laps it all up, with its natural standing-up stance, a forgiving ride over rocky ground from quality suspension, and predictable punch from the engine. We both agree to take things gently – it’s way too hot to try any hyperactive heroics and, in hindsight, probably not a great idea to be out without a riding buddy. This might not actually be the Sahara, but it’d still be a fair wait until anyone passed by to help…
When the track ejects us back out on to a road I hop off for a drink and look over the Tiger. It’s no ‘middleweight’ – it’s more than 230kg on Bike’s scales, that weight carried high by its 20-litre tank, and it’s broad between your knees due to the inline triple. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive feat that the same bike I’ve been commuting to work on for months, that slogs smoothly and serenely up and down England’s motorways, can also – with no tweaks or changes – happily head off for a prowl through the undergrowth.

And then it dawns on me. As I quietly admire the Tiger’s nose-to-tail splatters of sand, soil, dust, dirt and manky river residue, I remember that there’s a hosepipe ban on at the minute… MFG

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Tech

Crazy for capacity? Delirious for displacement? Nuts for number of pistons? You’ve come to the right place. Professor Jamie Turner reviews the loopiest lumps in the history of biking

Words: Jamie Turner
Professor of Engines at KAUST, two-stroke lover, BMW K1200S and Ducati Monster owner.

I like being a Mad Professor. One of the remarkable things, though, is that it doesn’t matter how mad people get, it would appear you can always find someone madder – or more eccentric at least.

Fortunately, one of the best arenas to demonstrate this is where I reside in the automotive world, where it seems we have an endless supply of mad/eccentric right-thinking people all trying to put odd powertrains into bikes, with varying degrees of success.

In the August issue I described a concept which to me is eminently right-thinking – a two-stroke twin with direct injection and charge trapping valves – but I know many people would think that ‘mad’. Personally, for things eccentric, I’d always recommend a four-rotor Wankel rotary, if for no other reasons than (1) it’s not been put in a bike before, and (2) go and search YouTube for the Mazda 787B. Best sounding engine ever – and reason enough to continue research on rotaries. Which I do. Mad, eh?

Eight-cylinder 280bhp two-stroke

Anyway, one engine that ignited a lot of interest recently – and featured in last month’s issue – is the Veloce Aperion, a 1000cc, eight-cylinder two-stroke producing a claimed 280bhp. This output is eminently believable because each cylinder is 125cc and so likely comes from an existing donor design. The fact that each would similarly have to produce 35bhp suggests a lift from an existing design too, avoiding too much performance work. However, what will definitely require development is (a) the cranktrain, and (b) fitting the beast into a manageable chassis.

It was shown at the Bike Shed, and there are plenty of images to look at if you want an excuse to sit there with your mouth open for a while. You see, while the engine is generally in an ‘X’ arrangement, it’s not a classic radial layout, because it has four crankshafts geared to a common output shaft. Each bank of two cylinders seems to be at different angles – which doesn’t matter because the cranks can be timed for even firing (if so desired), and if the counter-rotating output shaft is geared 1:1 to them, then the whole shebang can be balanced. The reason why I am unsure of the bank angles is that the necessary forest of expansion chambers is so big you can’t actually see much of the engine…

The Aperion has a slightly less-odd relative in the Veloce Ethereal, with its four cylinders described as being in an ‘L’ configuration (so a 90° V4 then) and thus a lovely thing and all very sensible. Except that the bulk of the transmission appears to be in front of the cylinders and, in fact, the output shaft is between the two cranks. Wow. Let’s hope these things aren’t just vapourware and someone gets to ride them one day, because ideas and renders are one thing, but making a go of something so unconventional is something else.

Still, starting with a two-stroke is actually thoroughly sensible – just ask Langen – because there’s no shortage of misty-eyed stroker fans, some of whom have deep enough pockets to get such ventures off the ground. It is said that the difference between madness and eccentricity is purely down to how much money you’ve got, after all…

48 cylinders – plus one for luck

Now we have calibrated our minds, let’s mention some other bizarre engines that people have dreamed up to put in bikes.

In at the top, cylinder-wise, is the Whitelock Tinker Toy. Not a very descriptive moniker, but you are unlikely to forget it once you know it has 48 cylinders. Built from 16 Kawasaki KH250 triples (arranged as six inline-eights), it’s a Guinness World Record holder for the most cylinders ever put into a bike engine. Aside: in case anyone feels inclined to go after the absolute record number of cylinders ever put into an engine and then put that into a bike frame, let me mention here that even the Tinker Toy’s excess cannot approach that of the 383-litre Zvezda M507 from the Soviet Union, which was a 112-cylinder 16-row inline radial diesel engine. I know of no engine with more cylinders – if you do, please get in touch.

The Tinker Toy has six cranks and uses a 49th cylinder running as a slave to crank it. You know you’re onto a good thing when you need a second engine aboard solely to start the main one…

Fans of the downright odd may recall we’ve previously featured the Bistella (Bike, May 2023). It’s also a two-stroke – and beautifully built, it must be said – but has a meagre 10 cylinders. At least it’s a true two-row radial, and claws back bonkers points by using one specially made Roots blower per cylinder for scavenging. Packaging-wise it’s also an example of why we haven’t seen many radials in bikes – although I do seem to recall once seeing something where a similar-ish engine layout was directly in the rear wheel (technically that was a rotary, I think, but let’s not quibble).

In a similar, but slightly more modest, vein we have Allen Millyard’s extensions of Kawasaki two-stroke engines. We’ll return to him later, but these are gorgeously wrought jewels typically starting with a small Kwak triple and adding cylinders on either end. The five-cylinder is especially nice.

While this piece is not meant to be extensive – how can you be objective about madness? – eccentric people seem to be fond of making left-field two-stroke engines. While all the previous examples are essentially new creations, we should acknowledge those who take an engine from the non-biking world and transplant it. Here we have the Tul-aris, a Polaris snowmobile engine in a bespoke racer chassis. I’ll also give a shout out to my friend Dave Blundell, who’s bridging genres by taking two

Polaris engines and forming a 200-odd bhp 1400cc V4 with direct injection and Lotus-style charge trapping valves. Eminently sensible.

Millyard madness

Let’s change tack to four-strokes now. Since we’ve already mentioned him, let’s start with one of Millyard’s confections. The Flying Millyard is a favourite – who wouldn’t want a big chunk of aero engine in their bike? This V-twin is made from two cylinder sets from a Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp radial, for ‘just’ the 4894cc. Fantastic. There was another V-twin built from two cylinders of a Rolls-Royce Merlin, by Lucky Keizer in Australia, but logically that would have been only 4504cc – positively emaciated in comparison, although it was supercharged, too. (‘Lucky’, I presume, because he seems to have survived riding it…)

Millyard’s built so many bikes I’ll pick one more. He recently sold his Viper V10-engined runabout. Being a standard Dodge Viper road car engine, it’s just the eight litres. It had no room for a transmission, but neither was there a need – one gear did the lot. If anyone wants a riposte to those electropropulsion bores who grind on and on about combustion engines being pathetic because they need a transmission, this provides the evidence that they don’t. You just need a displacement big enough – in fact, the adoption of the multiple-ratio transmission is evidence of the amazing broad-range flexibility of IC engines. Anyway, with the Viper, Allen holds the world record for the fastest pillion ride at 183.50mph, with Henry Cole being the hapless cargo. Not sure who was the maddest there.

In terms of bespoke bike engines, on the unusual list we should include the Morbidelli and the Norton Nemesis V8s (the latter with the hand of Millyard on it as well), and the Harley

VR2, in which the transmission was in front of the crankshaft. There is also the Neander Turbo Diesel, which was standout interesting because of its use of two crankshafts, geared together, each throw with a con rod up to one piston above it. There are sound engineering reasons for such a ‘hexagon drive’, which were once very nicely described by John Robinson in this very magazine, but it’s still undoubtedly extremely odd.

Turbos to turbines

Finally, let’s get to The Biggie (as if X8 two-strokes aren’t big enough). Recently, we’ve seen a pronounced degree of ‘downsizing’ in car engines using turbos to increase specific power – and arguably it’s coming to bikes now, what with Honda’s e-compressor on their upcoming V3R roadster. The more you downsize an engine, the smaller it gets, while the boosting system gets concomitantly bigger. But if you really go for it, and use more and more turbochargers, then eventually the engine gets so small you might as well just replace it with a combustion chamber… and, hey presto, you’ve got yourself a gas turbine.

This infallible logic leads to turbine-powered bikes, of which the MTT 420RR is the standard-bearer. It’s powered by a Rolls-Royce Allison M250 turboshaft engine normally found in helicopters. Ben Miller rode its forebear, the Y2K, for Bike in 2005, reporting epic lag and absolutely corrupting power. As well as its 420bhp, the 420RR apparently has 500lb·ft at just 2000rpm output speed (on what we call the ‘free power turbine’ shaft). At maximum power, the ‘gas generator’ shaft is doing 52,000rpm. This has to be the maddest engine-bike synthesis I know of, and I love that it exists. Wouldn’t want the fuel consumption though – it even makes a two-stroke look good.

Let’s decompress by mentioning six-cylinder engines. To most (I guess) these are on the cusp of madness versus eccentricity, but I’d go with the latter. This is worthy of a column of its own – hmm, that gives me an idea for next month – if only because of the sheer variety of choice available to the engine designer when he or she has to dispose so many cylinders, and many of the feasible layouts have been tried in bikes. You can make cases for most of them, but to me one at least stands out. Anyway, more to come. Because, naturally, more is always better.

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Classics

Having dodged the crusher, is this the oldest and rarest Suzuki GSX-R750 in the world?

PHOTOGRAPHY JOHAN ROCHA

FRAME
The steering head is a totally different shape from the production bike. Frame castings lack any internal webbing. There’s no crossbeam in front of the airbox bracing the main frame, and a curved crossbeam is missing from the rear subframe. Wobbles, much?

HOLEY GRAIL
The first clue that led Johan to suspect this wasn’t a regular GSX-R750F were the five holes in the frame, near the rear engine mount – the production bike had only two. They’re cast, not drilled, which means they haven’t been added afterwards.

BODYWORK
The fairing on this prototype is narrower than the production bike’s panels, and made from a thicker material. The side vents are a different size and shape too, as is the front mudguard and the rear side covers.

ENGINE
Johan has documented dozens of engine differences including the clutch cover, alternator, oil lines, camchain adjuster housing, thickness of the cylinder head walls, con rods, pistons and plenty more besides.

Pre-production prototypes range from lash-ups made only for proof of concept, through tatty development mules sprouting datalogger wires, to production-ready show bikes. Most are destined for the crusher – pre-production bikes, however complete, tend not to survive to end up on the road. Let alone one built more than 40 years ago.

But this Suzuki GSX-R750F, it seems, has. It’s owned by Johan Rocha, a 64-year-old German bike collector and restorer living in Portugal. He bought the bike five years ago after spotting it in an online advert, from a Belgian who appeared to be only its second owner. It’d done just 34,000 miles. ‘I’m a GSX-R750 fan,’ Johan tells Bike. ‘For me it’s the race replica that started it all. I know them very well.’ Johan had noticed something odd. ‘In the original 1985 GSX-R brochures, the rear section of the frame has five holes; cast, not drilled, so you can’t fake it,’ he says. ‘But every production 1985 GSX-R has two holes; this was the only time I’d seen one for real with five, so I knew it was special. I bought it immediately.’

But even Johan didn’t realise quite how unique it was. ‘I already had over 60 bikes in my collection,’ he says. ‘And a dozen GSX-Rs of different colours and years, so I just parked it.’ But then Johan bought another 1985 GSX-R750F – and when he put it side-by-side with his original bike, nothing looked the same. ‘You have to look and look and look,’ he says, ‘It’s unbelievably close to the production bike. Yet it’s so different – almost nothing is interchangeable. It took me a year to list more than 135 parts that are different.

‘It’s unbelievably close to the production bike – yet almost nothing is interchangeable’

And although visually similar, they’re not all small changes: the older frame is missing cross-bracing, the headstock has no bracing and less material, frame spars have no internal webbing. For a bike with a notoriously flexible chassis, Johan’s early GSX-R must feel like it’s about to snap.

The engine’s different, too. ‘The cases are completely different,’ says Johan. ‘You can’t swap them. There’s even Japanese marker pen writing inside the clutch cover – it has lasted all this time!’ So, where does Johan think his GSX-R comes from? ‘It’s detective work,’ he laughs. ‘The VIN says this is GSX-R750 number 22 – so with the visual tie-up with brochure photos, I think this is a pre-production bike from 1984. The VIN is in Dutch and Suzuki’s European base was in Belgium, and it wasn’t registered as a road bike until 1993 – that’s when its Certificate of Conformity was issued.’

Which suggests Johan’s bike is one of the first batch into Europe before public release in 1984, then used for bike show and promotional work, or possibly journalist test rides – all of which praised the GSX-R’s revolutionary performance, but commented on twitchy handling and weaving under braking. If they were riding Johan’s bike, it’s hardly surprising. And hardly surprising Suzuki undertook a dramatic overhaul for the production bike in a short space of time.

‘It’s astonishing how many little – and big – things Suzuki changed between this and the actual production bike, in only a few months,’ says Johan. ‘They were so meticulous. You can only imagine the number of engineers and production staff working on the bike in the early 1980s to turn it around.’
And then it seems the GSX-R was put in a crate and stored, before being registered on the road and sold in the early 1990s.

At the time of writing, Johan is seeking information that confirms his GSX-R is indeed an early show bike, and whether it was assembled in Belgium or shipped complete from Japan, or somewhere in between – if anyone has inside knowledge of the Belgian vehicle registration service in the 1980s, get in touch.

In the meantime, the complete breakdown of Johan’s GSX-R750 can be found at 1984suzukigsxr750prototype.com.

‘I bought one of the first GSX-Rs… then raced it’

» Roland Brown, former Bike road test editor, owned one of the very first GSX-R750s back in 1985. ‘I was at the 1984 Cologne Show when the GSX-R was on display,’ he remembers. ‘You needed a special invite to get into the Suzuki press conference; even though I worked for Bike and had press credentials they still wouldn’t let me in. So I had to sneak in. I remember walking round the thing on a plinth and thinking “Jesus, it looks like a race bike”. And it was. I bought one of the first in the country, ran it in over three days on the A5 in the pissing rain, then raced it that weekend. It was brilliant – so sharp and light. I wrote about it being a bit twitchy; we put a crappy steering damper and a fork brace on it and turned all the damping adjusters to maximum. But my main memory is just how much better it was than anything else.’

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