Ricky 800: Imagining a Rickman BMW R80 desert racer

The world's first big-bore dual sport, the BMW R80G/S, broke cover forty years ago. Born from off-road competition, it soon dominated at the Paris-Dakar rally, before going on to become an icon of adventure motorcycling. But there's one arena it never really featured in: the Californian desert. The G/S missed the heyday of the Californian desert racing scene by a decade or two. So it wasn't even a concept when the Rickman Brothers' Triumph- and BSA-powered Metisse scramblers hit the scene. Had the timelines been synced, we may have been treated to a BMW Metisse … and it would probably...