The BMW R NineT Racer S is a café racer for connoisseurs

The café racer renaissance owes a lot to custom bike companies such as Untitled Motorcycles. They took every appealing element of the original racers – tall tyres, a clipped rear seat, the aggressive riding position – and dramatised them. It elevated what used to be a relatively niche British aesthetic and allowed brands such as Ducati and Triumph to capitalise on it by selling their own retro versions of modern bikes.

But the custom shops are owed a particular debt of gratitude by BMW, because they often use the marque’s R series bikes from the Seventies and Eighties as the basis of their one-offs. Case in point, Untitled Motorcycles’ UMC028 Bol d’Or, which started life as a 1986 BMW R80.

Ludovic Robert

And now the brand has acknowledged its impact and created a collection of five bikes built on a common platform – the R NineT (pronounced R ninety). There’s a scrambler and an urban bike, but also a café racer – the BMW R NineT Racer S. And this is what we’ve spent the last week riding.

BMW GROUP