BMW celebrates the spirit of the GS in Central Asia

Bruno Gomes

March 1, 2018

Photo credit: BMW Motorrad

The 2018 BMW Motorrad International GS Trophy will be held in Mongolia. It will be bigger and better than ever!

BMW Motorrad is set to organize in June what will be one of the greatest events for those riders that love off road and adventure riding. The 2018 GS Trophy will be held on the steppes of Mongolia, with the event moving from the steamy rain forests of South East Asia to Central Asia.

BMW Motorrad has prepared quite a few modifications to the GS Trophy, where Malaysia already has had a rider before, Faizal Sukree.

This year, the South East Asia team will also enter the GS Trophy having a Malaysian onboard: Mohd Apis Bin Sagimin, 35 years old, is a diver and a GS rider, from Kota Tinggi Johor, and together with Aris Cuevas (Philipines) and Jakit Thawongpeay (Thailand), they hope they can achieve a great result in Mongolia while exploring the true potential of the BMW GS motorcycles.

For this year’s event, the participants will need to endure the harshness of the Mongolian Steppes for eight days, as they will face new challenges that come with the arrival of this new country. Bigger distances to cover, higher altitudes that will test them both physically and mentally, all this while riding through the Mongolian deserts and mountains populated by people that still live by the rules of nomadic horse culture. The kind of experience that adventure riders dream about.

Photo credit: BMW Motorrad

With an altitude of well above 1000 meters above sea level, the participants will need to prepare themselves for temperatures that can be from 0ºC at night, to 25ºC during the day. And even though the GS Trophy is held during Summer time, in Mongolia that’s when the rain falls!

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.

The BMW Motorrad International GS Trophy isn’t a race, but a team competition. Every team will face many challenges, some of which won’t involve riding at all, and only with a high degree of team work they’ll be able to be successful.

The sixth edition of the GS Trophy starts on the 1st of June with the arrival of the riders to the event headquarters in Ulaanbataar, but the competition itself will only start on June 3 and ends on June 10.

You can follow all the action on the dedicated website www.gstrophy.com and hopefully we’ll see the South East Asia team reach the end of the GS Trophy and bring the victory!