40
APRIL 2021
By Tony Gray, Member #3905
T
he Motorcycle press and web forums have been bemused with the recent release of a big cruiser from BMW (R18) and the expected release of the Harley Davidson Pan America adventure bike. Has the world been turned on its head?
This is not the first time the two marques designs have crossed paths. Wind the clock back to the 1940s’ and the Second World War where Harley Davidson did very much ‘ape’ a BMW design. The German Wehrmacht adapted the pre-war flathead 750cc R71 into the overhead valve 750cc R75 for military use. The boxer engine with cylinders out in the breeze and shaft drive made it a very efficient vehicle for solo and sidecar Military use.
When we visited Uralla back in 2019 to test ride the Ural outfits we met Geoff Hodge’s cousin, Matthew, who is the lead spanner-man with Ural
BMW v HARLEY DAVIDSON Australia. Matthew is the proud owner of a very nicely restored R75 outfit. As a side note the Ural outfits that Matthew now fettles owe their design to the German R75. After the War the victorious Russians took some R75 outfits home and reverse engineered them to build their own Ural outfits. Until very recent years they hadn’t changed much since the 1940’s such is the pace of manufacturing advancement in Mother Russia. But I digress.
During our trip to the USA in 2015 Jane and I visited the ‘Wheels Through Time’ Motorcycle Museum in North Carolina. This Museum has an extraordinary collection of early American Motorcycles. In this collection I found these examples of the very rare XA model Harley Davidson. The XA is a horizontally opposed twin cylinder flathead 750cc engined, shaft drive motorcycle based on the pre-war R71 BMW. The story goes that the US Military saw the German BMW as a far more efficient motorcycle then their own V twin chain drive WLA Harley Davidson.
Harley-BMW R71 copy
