Rudy Banny’s '86 BMW R80RS - “Brafé Racer”

Rudy Banny's college career began with Petroleum Engineering. That's the art of getting crude oil out of the ground and in to pipes. But that was only for about ½ a semester, after which he found out that several calculus classes were involved, and promptly dropped out. Amen to that. Afterwards, you could say he did complete u-turn and got into a little Petroleum Deconstruction. “I've always been a huge fan of Brat Style. After landing a job in advertising, I fell in love with BMW's when a buddy of mine let me ride his 1965 r60/2 and 1972 r75/5 for a week when I was shooting in LA. That was it. I fell in love with airheads. I wanted one, but just couldn't get into the purist mentality that seems so prevalent with Bimmer owners. I’m more of a custom guy. So, I started looking for the cleanest, most pristine airhead I could find, so I could deconstruct it.”

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'92 R80 BMW Brat Tracker

Tasmania. Home of the Tasmanian Devil, some damn spectacular scenery, and the butt of some pretty unsubtle jokes from the rest of Australia. Americans have quips about “Southerners,” the English make the funnies about the ”Northerners,” and down here we mostly make jokes about Tasmanians. There's no need to go into detail - you probably get the jist already. But here's a bike that proves beyond any shadow of a doubt just what these islanders can do. See, they've taken a machine that was just about the best the mighty Deutschland could muster and then pushed it a whole lot further than most of us could ever manage. And when I say “they” I really mean the rather talented Nicholas Damen and his rather amazing Bee Emm brat.

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1985 BMW R80 Café Racer

As a hobby you've got admit that motorbikes are, all things considered, relatively cheap. It's heartening that in this day and age you can still rock on up to your local Ducati store and buy an Italian two-wheeled Ferrari for a lot less than US$20,000. In fact the advertised price for Ducati's top-of-the-line 1198 SP racer in North America is only a smidge under US$22,000. In the scheme of things, that's a silly small price. A 2011 Ferrari 458 Italia would cost you ten times that amount, and I doubt that any of us would be willing to choose a single car over 10 new bikes - let alone 40+ second hand or vintage bikes.

Which brings us rather neatly to this little gem, aka Mark Byfield's cafe'd 1985 BMW R80. With nothing but a bunch of hard work and a cash outlay of less than five Aussie grand, he's managed to create a bike that looks like a million bucks and which rocks our boat a lot more vigorously than any four-wheeled Italian poseur-mobile ever could.

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