El Solitario Imposter BMW R nineT Custom Motorcycle

BMW has sought many collaborations with famous customizers in recent times, but the one it might regret, this deconstruction of the new R nineT, is with El Solitario Motorcycle Club of Galicia, Spain. Savvy factories collaborate with hip builders to take their bikes to places in-house design teams just can't go—even when those designers include Ola Stenegärd, who builds choppers in a humble garage he shares with his boss, Edgar Heinrich, the top moto man at BMW. Ola and Edgar are hip to the custom scene's red-hotness and tapped Roland Sands to sex up a prototype R nineT last year, to much acclaim. Sands' work is so clean it's plausible as production, encouraging BMW to hand out R nineTs to underground shops and await the glory.

When Impostor debuted on Bike EXIF, 147 comments blew up in 24 hours. It was praised for its originality, but, as with Mary Shelley's monster, the little village called Custom was shouting to kill the beast, torches and pitchforks in hand. The mob's consensus: Impostor is a gruesome high-speed collision of motorcycle and overpass-thrown shopping cart, with the blood still showing. Tom Wolfe's 1965 essay 'The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" noted the rigid, unspoken rules in the Custom scene and the irony of this "free expression" having already hardened into a narrow genre. Some 50 years later the rules still apply, and El Solitario clearly broke them.

Of course, controversy means people are paying attention, and Impostor can’t be ignored. It’s raw, weird, and there’s nothing else like it. Which is exactly the point David Borras was hoping to make. Borras is the brujo-in-chief of El Solitario, whose video supporting the Impostor notoriously includes the beheading of a chicken with a dull axe. “That’s our welder Frank’s mother,” Borras says. “She’s 76 and works slowly so she doesn’t chop off her fingers. Our video was about everyday life in Galicia, which might explain why our bikes are so raw.” The rest of the world strained to understand what a chicken’s sacrifice meant to a new BMW (even if the resulting stew looked tasty), but then they haven’t heard Borras’ mad, infectious laugh in person.

Build process? Borras won’t lift a hammer until he conjures a name: “I need the name to decide the project’s character; then it’s easy to start. I chose ‘Impostor’ because the bodywork isn’t ‘real.’ It’s inspired by those wire models for wind tunnels. The finished bike is a ghost, totally transparent, and really difficult to photograph, to get a sense of the masses. Shopping carts never occurred to me! Claiming Impostor also stops anyone from calling me one: I said it first.”

Borras thought scaling up the wire heat shield from his previous build, the Ducati-based Petardo, would be easy, but "that was a miscalculation. That heat shield took two hours to make and works great. But we needed thicker rod for bodywork, which took a lot more time, and in the end was a nightmare." The result brings to mind Bauhaus architect Arthur Korn's Da und nicht da principle: "there and not there." It's like a ghost ship, which explains the viscous, tattoo-gunned goo of a paint job, a mash-up of nods to 17th century pirate John Every (including a poem) with Russian prison insignia. Literally dark stuff, but, as with everything Solitario, a fox-crazy sense of humor lurks behind it all.

“I’m surprised at how much people can hate a motorcycle,” Borras says. “It’s just a toy! BMW gave me a toy to play with. I ruined it. Whatever. I think we’re the most hated custom shop in the world, but we’re doing fine! Better and better, actually. We have our supporters; one commenter said Impostor was a useless POS, but another piped up to give 30 things to use the bike for: drying laundry, holding CDs, cooking meat, et cetera. I loved that.”