Conclusion
The fact that there are no competitors to these two dinosaurs is telling. Long gone are the days of the Honda Blackbird. Triumph canned its plans to make a ’Busa rival over a decade ago. BMW quietly stopped making the K 1300 S a year or two ago. And it’s not as if we’re expecting a fresh raft of rivals in the next few years. Big bikes belching out massive power while offering sporting aspirations have found themselves out of favour, and if it wasn’t for the fact that urban America has turned to this pair to tune, slam and ruin in a multitude of other ways there’s a chance that you wouldn’t be reading this as a assessment of two new bikes, but rather this would be a cracking used test.