Munich. The GS Trophy is heading to Mongolia in June
2018 for what will be its biggest challenge yet. With three new teams
joining the competition (Australia, India and a second International
Female Team) and now with eight days of competition, to allow for the
huge distances, the sixth BMW Motorrad International GS Trophy, the
Central Asia 2018 edition, is set to break all records.
Encountering… everything!
Each of the previous
GS Trophies has found its own theme as the competition has hopped from
continent to continent. Some have been about mountains or vast
volcanic plateaux, others about desert, and the last (in 2016) took
the GS riders into the steamy South East Asian rain forests. For 2018,
Mongolia will offer much more in just the one experience as the riders
will venture from mountains to the desert via the vast Mongolian
Steppe (high-altitude grasslands). The scale, for this edition, is
truly epic. Unquestionably this is the kind of experience that
adventure riders dream about.
About Mongolia.
Mongolia is both vast (at 1.5
million square kilometres it’s about three times the size of Germany)
and sparsely populated – with a population of just 3 million you’d
have to travel to Antarctica to find a lesser populated region!
The country is of course best known for having been the seat of power
for the Mongolian Empire when in the 13th century Genghis Khan created
the biggest contiguous empire ever known to history. Today, some 30%
are still said to be following the centuries-old nomadic horse
culture, crossing the steppe each season to graze their livestock,
principally yaks and camels.
Where is Mongolia? From Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, to Munich
(home of BMW Motorrad) is about 8250km by road and track, a journey
that typically takes around three weeks. It’s still13 hours by plane.
It shares its southern border with China while Russia (essentially
Siberia) lies to the north. The plateau sits at an altitude of around
1000-1500m above sea level and this will keep the temperatures cooler,
the participants should expect anything between frost-nipped 0ºC
nights through to about 25ºC during the day. Conditions can
nonetheless get pretty extreme – high winds and dust storms are not
uncommon. And while Mongolia is a surprisingly sunny country
(averaging around 250 sunny days a year) summer is the rainy season!
All this means the GS riders will need to be ready to deal with a
whole range of terrain types as they’ll travel across mountains,
through canyons, across the steppe and into desert. So that’s rock,
gravel, grasses, probably mud and finally sand, with all kinds of
elevations and gradients to contend with.
About the GS Trophy.
The GS Trophy is a
celebration of the spirit of the BMW GS motorcycle, bringing together
those elements of leisure, adventure and challenge that this bike
engenders. The Central Asia 2018 event is the sixth edition of the GS
Trophy, the previous editions took place in South East Asia (Thailand)
in 2016, North America (Canada) in 2014, South America (Chile,
Argentina) in 2012, South Africa (SA, Swaziland, Mozambique) in 2010
and North Africa) (Tunisia) in 2008. This edition will see 18 teams
competing, comprising 54 riders.
The event is not a race but a team competition, pitching the
GS-riding international contingent against each other in a series of
challenges – and not all involve riding. With the competitors camped
nightly in a bivouac, the event also fosters a sense of brotherhood,
sisterhood – and camaraderie. The successful team will be respectful
of their environment, sympathetic to their machinery and understanding
of team-mates.
The event begins on June 1, 2018 when the competitors will arrive at
the event HQ in Ulaanbataar for a programme of rider briefings, bike
allocations and media meetings.
The competition itself will
start on June 3 and ends on June 10.
Follow the event.
BMW Motorrad will provide a
multi-channel media experience during the event, details of which will
be released closer to the time. For now you can find out more about
the event and the teams at the dedicated website: www.gstrophy.com
.
You will find press material on BMW motorcycles and BMW Motorrad
rider equipment in the BMW Group PressClub at www.press.bmwgroup.com.
The BMW Group
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financial year 2016 was approximately € 9.67 billion on revenues
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