Yellow-Rimmed BMW Button Sign

Munich, 1948.

The hand finds the throttle before the mind catches up. A quarter turn of the wrist, and the flat-twin answers, not with a roar but with something closer to authority, a sound with edges and a pitch the rider has already learned to read. The R24 moves forward, and within two hundred meters, the city reorganizes itself around the physics of motion.

The body leans left into the curve. The machine follows without lag, without negotiation. Counterweight, lean angle, traction, the rider is a physical component in the turning equation, not a passenger to it. Both hands occupied. Both feet working. Throttle, clutch, brake, lean - four conversations happening simultaneously, none of them optional.

On the straightaway, the engine settles into its rhythm. The boxer's exposed cylinders push heat against the rider's legs in the cold morning air. Ahead, the street opens. In peripheral vision, the city is unfinished, façades ending mid-air where upper floors used to begin, staircases ascending to nothing, a section of brick wall standing alone against a pale sky like a sentence someone started and abandoned. The rider's eyes stay on the road. The engine fills the space where thought usually spirals.

Another rider passes in the opposite direction. A brief nod. Motion continues.

Outside a dealership near Schwabing, a circular sign catches the low winter light, black ground, blue and white roundel, yellow letters spelling BMW above the emblem, the same yellow rimming the outermost edge. Titan-Email. Münchener Emaillierwerk. Made in Munich, for Munich machines.¹ The man who designed that engine had once declared it fit for the nearest lake.² Twenty-five years later, it was still answering.

The rider continues north.

The Reluctant Engineer

In 1922, BMW's management handed Max Friz a motorcycle he hadn't asked for.

Friz was an aircraft engine designer. His assessment of the existing Helios was brief: the machine needed replacing. He was directed to design the replacement himself.

He completed it in four weeks.

What emerged, shown publicly on September 28, 1923, was the R32.³ With it, an engineering template that has remained at the core of BMW motorcycle design for over a century.

Shaft drive instead of chain eliminated chain stretch, chain grease, chain failure, and chain adjustment. Opposed cylinders positioned horizontally, wide and low, a boxer configuration that dropped the center of gravity close to the road. Steering geometry calculated for stability through corners rather than maneuverability at low speed. Every choice made from the physics outward. Nothing decorative. Nothing announcing itself. Each element present because removing it would cost something the machine needed.

The Versailles Treaty had already ended BMW's aircraft engine production.⁴ The R32 was the pivot that kept the company alive. Bayerische Motoren Werke, Bavarian Motor Works, survived its first existential crisis on two wheels.

Max Friz returned to designing airplane engines. The R32 didn't need him anymore.

That restraint in the design, each element earning its place through function rather than ambition, would characterize every BMW motorcycle that followed. Distinguished in sound, not loud. The machine suited the man it attracted: someone who arrived having already thought the thing through. Comfortable at a dinner table or a mountain pass, prepared for whatever the road or the occasion required. Not dressed for the part. Simply ready for it.

The Second Time

Twenty-five years later, two wheels saved BMW again.

Allied bombing had reduced the Munich factory to ruin. The car plants required years to rebuild; production lines were destroyed, tooling stripped, and foundations that needed to be relaid from the beginning. While that reconstruction proceeded, BMW had one product to offer.

On September 17, 1948, the R24 went into production.⁵

A single-cylinder, 247cc engine. Twelve horsepower. A top speed of 59 mph (95 km/h). Not remarkable on paper. But it ran, it sold, and it kept a company working while everything else was being rebuilt from rubble.

This sign belongs to those years. The late 1940s and early 1950s, the period when BMW's entire identity and BMW's actual product line were, briefly, the same thing: a motorcycle. The yellow rim is a date stamp as much as a design choice. By the time the rim turned silver, the automobile division had arrived, and the company's center of gravity had shifted permanently toward four wheels.

The motorcycle wasn't what BMW was before. It was what BMW was - the soul of the company. The cars were what happened after the soul found a way to make more money.

What Is Not There

On the R24, both hands are on the handlebars.

The throttle requires the right wrist. The clutch lever requires the left hand. The front brake lever requires the right hand. The gear shift requires the left foot. The rear brake requires the right foot. Every limb involved in keeping the machine moving, upright, and pointed correctly.

"The frame is gone." - Robert Pirsig, who took fourteen years to find the words.⁶ In a car, you watch the world through glass. The frame is between you and everything you see. On a motorcycle, you are in the scene, not observing it: subject to its temperature, its texture, its smell, the wind pressure against your chest at 50 mph (80 km/h), the particular vibration that comes through the handlebars on different road surfaces.

There is no frame. There is no notification. There is no algorithm deciding what you should notice next.

The BMW boxer on a cold morning radiates heat from its exposed cylinders onto the rider's legs. The valve train ticks distinctly above the exhaust note, a sound precise enough to read by ear, the rider learning its variations, what each shift in pitch indicates about temperature or load or mechanical condition. At idle, torque reaction rocks the engine gently side to side, a characteristic BMW declined to engineer away until 2004.⁷ That rocking is the machine announcing itself. Not a flaw. A signature.

This physical conversation, throttle input answered immediately, lean angle punished without hesitation, attention wandered and paid for, has no pause feature. No buffering. What you give, you receive back at once.

Munich, 1948, surrounded by walls ending at nothing and staircases ascending to nowhere, this enforced presence, both hands occupied, full attention on the road and lean and throttle response, was not incidental. The machine demanded it. No hand free. No frame between rider and world. Only road, only curve, only the sound with edges that the flat-twin made. The solo ride was not recreation. It was the gentleman's version of the confessional, the road where a man found out what he actually thought, before he had to act on it. No passengers. No audience. Only throttle input and lean angle and the next curve arriving on its own schedule.

Every machine that came after this era would learn to decide what you needed before you asked.

The R24 waited to be told.

Distinguished, Not Loud

In 1962, Cycle World posed an informal question to motorcyclists: What do you consider the two-wheeled equivalent of a Rolls-Royce?⁸

The answer, from riders across the country, was nearly universal.

BMW machines cost more, weighed more, and were generally slower in a straight line than the British or Japanese alternatives of the same era. The R69S of 1960 sold for $1,288 (around €1,200 at the time) - equivalent to roughly $13,000 (€12,000) today.⁹ Its buyers used the premium differently.

The Triumph rider had something to prove at the Ace Cafe. The Harley rider announced himself half a mile before he arrived. The BMW rider simply went somewhere, alone, and returned having thought something through. The machine suited the man: self-possessed, self-sufficient, finding out what he actually believed somewhere past the city limits, where no one was watching or in his ear. John Penton rode a standard R69 3,051 miles (4,910 km) from New York to Los Angeles in 52 hours and 11 minutes in June 1959, a new coast-to-coast record.¹⁰ Danny Liska took an R60 from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the first motorcycle to travel by road from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of South America.¹¹

Not rebels. Explorers. Individuals who used the machine to go somewhere specific, alone, and find out what was there.

BMW motorcycles were the touring machine. The thinking person's motorcycle. An engine note that carried rather than announced. A machine that rewarded attention, returned it in kind, and required nothing from you beyond your complete presence. Self-sufficient machines built for self-sufficient riders, perfectly suited for the task, whatever the task turned out to be.

There are riders who say: I sometimes go out to the garage and start the bike just to hear the motor running.

The Yellow Rim

The sign's yellow rim dates it precisely.

BMW's roundel moved from gold to silver in the early 1950s as the automobile division reestablished itself - not toward a different machine, but toward a different market.¹² The motorcycle division, older and scrappier, held onto gold longer. It had twice kept the company alive. The cars would make it rich.

In 1969, BMW physically separated the two operations. Motorcycles to Berlin-Spandau. Cars in Munich.¹³ The nicknames hardened into different words: Beemer for the bikes, Bimmer for the cars. Even the language split into two people who no longer shared a house.

Gold to silver. The motorcycle division was BMW's conscience. The cars were BMW's wallet.

But the man who pulled on the leather gloves and settled his weight into the saddle didn't need a color to tell him which was which. The chin strap fastened. Both hands found the bars. Somewhere past the city limits, where no one was watching or in his ear, the engine answered.

He already knew.