is a broad question and in recent years BMW has attempted to answer it with its own Germanic take on the genre. Dominated by the Big Four from Japan, the sportbike marketplace is glutted with high-performance racing platforms snatched up by 20-somethings in search of the latest thrill. BMW has entered the sportbike fray with an older customer base and its stolid reputation for luxury and comfort. Yet the German firm leaves no doubt of the sporting capabilities from its latest Inline-Four, having stuck the Sport moniker in the new design's name - the BMW K1200R Sport.
The Sport is a tweener model in BMW's K-series family, a hybrid of its fully-faired K1200S and the naked K1200R siblings. In the sportbike market as a whole, the K1200R Sport is even harder to define, with its engine placing it somewhere between a superbike and hyper-sportbikes like the Hayabusa or ZX-14. It is neither one of these extremes, however, and is miscast as the aggressive machine most motorcycle folk conjure up when they hear the term "sportbike." It's like putting Arnold Schwarzeneger in a martial arts flick, he can deliver the muscles and bad dialogue, but Jet Li would slice up the Governator like an order of Hibachi chicken at Benihana.
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