2019 bikesales Bike of the Year Awards: in summary
The whole story, from start to finishIn 2016, bikesales launched its first Bike of the Year Award, won by Honda's excellent Africa Twin adventure bike.
In 2017, we took the excellent platform provided by the inaugural awards to make it a bigger, better and bolder affair, culminating with a ride through the Snowy Mountains.
Last year, we again set out to find the best motorcycle on Aussie soil, but this time in the riding Mecca that is Tasmania.
Back on the mainland in 2019, rather than a travelling roadshow we took a different tack and based ourselves in Bright, which is close to three major peaks in north-east Victoria's High Country: Hotham, Buffalo and Falls Creek. You can guess where most of our 'study' time was spent…
While we had no limits on price, performance or capacity to be included in this year's bikesales Bike of the Year Awards, to be eligible each bike must be a volume production machine that had been on sale in Australia as of September 1, 2019.
Massive road test
After selecting 11 category winners across all the key two-wheel segments in the Aussie market, we hit the road with nine of them – the Motocross (Kawasaki KX450) and Enduro (Yamaha WR450F) winners were left at home, for obvious reasons – on our biggest Bike of the Year undertaking to date.
After 1500km of riding, our reports cards – including official scoring for the first time – were as follows:
The winner
After returning from the ride, we crunched the numbers. There are five separate ratings categories, each marked out of 20 to give an overall total out of 100.
The honour in 2019 goes to the KTM 790 Adventure R. An adventure bike that doesn't let you down, on the road or dirt.
Congratulations to KTM, as well as to the finalists, category winners, honorable mentions and best LAMS bikes (a learner-friendly LAMS model is also named for each category, where appropriate).
We'll do it all again next year, and from what we've just seen at the 2019 EICMA motorcycle show in Milan there are going to be a number of new contenders for the 2020 bikesales Bike of the Year Awards. Watch this space...
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