Whining & Gushing about the new KTM 790 Adventure

Reviewing a bike you have already purchased is like deciding whether you like kids after they are already waking you up at 3am for food or something: that ship has sailed. After swooning over it for a year as the perfect bike for my needs, I slapped down the £10,000 proceeds from an unused engagement ring and rode it home. Contrary to the proposal of marriage, there was zero question that this was the right decision. 100%. It is lighter and more off-road capable than the BMW GS I rode around the world, more street legal than my KTM 450 EXC enduro, and has more all-round usability than my Royal Enfield Himalayan. The perceptive among you may be bracing for some bitching.

Yeah, a bit.

The first thing I realized after a couple hundred miles on this bike was, if I was ever going to appreciate it, I needed to blow up everything I know about motorcycles .. and I’ve owned 16 .. because I have never ridden anything like it. The BMW R1250 GS is heavy and soft, the Triumph Tiger is cool but squishy and the Honda Africa Twin is pretty but fat. Not that they aren’t all beautiful machines because they are. This rethinking was necessary because the Adventure has more in common with my 450 EXC than my GS. Let me explain.

If a radical left-wing political party were scrappy enduro riders and the ultra-conservative wing were Fat Boy riders, the Adventure would be a dreadlocked, peace-loving supporter of Greenpeace. My EXC is tall and narrow, like the Adventure. My EXC has a 21” front wheel, like the Adventure. My EXC has WP shocks with lots of travel. Ditto the Adventure. The message is this: the 790 Adventure is more off-road orientated than any street-legal bike I have ridden and, depending on your intentions / expectations, you will either be super stoked and desperately disappointed. Let’s start with the disappointments, shall we?

The motor below 4,000 rpm annoys me. Even though it has two counter-balance shafts, below that threshold it feels crankily unbalanced with each powerstroke seeming to want to shake the engine from its moorings. Ok, I am exaggerating but you get the point.  I have ridden lots of parallel twins but none felt as unsettled as this one. The obvious solution is to keep it above 4,000 where everything just seems to fall into place and it begins to snarl. With about the same horsepower as the Africa Twin but 43kg less lard, it’s here you’ll appreciate the glory of power to weigh ratios.

The transmission has pissed me off from day one. If I ignore the fact that it ‘feels’ like the factory loaded it up with way too much sand before sending it out the door, getting it into neutral is an ordeal like no bike I have ever ridden, with the exception of some very old BMW airheads. The sales guy rolled his eyes about this complaint saying “it’s a new bike” at which point I grabbed his Canadian head and mashed it into the ground (in my mind). Having rebuilt a transmission or two I knew what was going on in there. Tolerance of the gears on the shaft and/or shifter forks too tight, perhaps? Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on it during the warranty period. Speaking of which, I have already had the front discs replaced under it due to warp. Shit happens.

Some additional, less mortally-wounding wind-ups:

-It doesn’t have a centre stand (WTFuck?) and the order I placed for one 5 months ago has yet to be delivered.
– The switch gear, especially coming from beauty of the GS world, is Dollar General / Pound Land quality. In other words, shit. Or at least looks that way.
– The design is particularly adept in funnelling furiously hot air from the exhaust manifold to your inner thighs and manbits necessitating periodic, unbecoming splaying of the legs, outrigger style, to cool off.
– The fuel gauge goes from “we’re good man” to “feed me now!” in the blink of an eye.
– The barkbusters are decorative only (crap) and should be upgraded if you are going anywhere near dirt.
– Obviously, if your grandparents cursed you with the short gene, that’s your (my) problem. But if you ever ride dirt or adventure bikes as a shorty, that is the reality of the geometry of ground clearance.

 

Ok, I’m done. After all that whinging you probably think I want to drive it back to the factory in Austria and ask for my money back. Nope. Wanna know why? Surprise!..it’s awesome off-road. Fit for purpose, as they say in the design world. It actually took a few hours of riding tractor paths through the chardonnay vineyards of Champagne for this epiphany to shake my buyer’s remorse. When I opened the throttle wide and let the orange madman tear through kilometres of rough gravel and dirt paths, terrain similar to what I have encountered in India, Pakistan, Laos, Cambodia, South Africa, Nepal and elsewhere on our planet, it…felt…perfect. Just like when when flying through the Nevada desert on my 450 EXC, nothing unsettled it. The dirt-oriented big front wheel smoothed out the ruts, the WP suspension polished off the rocks and holes, the ground clearance assured everything hard remained at an arm’s length. It possesses some of the most battle-hardened off-road characteristics of the EXC but it also swallows hundreds of kilometres of autobahn like an Audi A8..or at least an A4. But, and this is a big but, if your true intentions are to never roam far from the tarmac, the GS, Tiger, AT or a bunch of other adventure bikes will likely be a better fit.

I bought this bike for one thing: To use it as a platform to explore new terrain and create new expeditions for our company. And I am not aware of any other bike on the planet more up to the task.

 

 

Note: Expensive stuff I purchased to make the bike better, as follows:

– Offroad mudguard, bark busters and centre stand from KTM

– Offroad bashplate and crashbars from Outback Motortech

– Luggage frames and side panniers (Zega Evo X) from Touratech

– Enduro tires (Karoo) from Metzler.

Click for more on the KTM 790 Adventure 

 

Did you ever watch a MotoGP or World Superbikes race and notice how racers slide the rear tire out as they enter a turn so they can target the front wheel toward the exit and get on the gas earlier? Well, there is a 99.9% chance that you will never do that. But if you have a few hours under your belt on a dirt bike, there is a 99.9% chance that you will. That is because while riding a street bike is about all traction, pretty much all the time, dirt biking isn’t.

But every once in a while as you’re just settling in for a nice ride on your <<insert your bike here>>, almost always unintentionally, the tires WILL lose some traction, or the brakes WILL lock up, or the bike WILL go all squirrely over the metal grates of a bridge. The first time this happens, you will likely have one of those adrenalin shot moments as your biochemistry’s self-preservation function kicks in. There is a way to mitigate that millisecond or two of fear: get on a dirt bike and condition your mind and body for what a lack of control feels like.

If you are reading this, chances are you’re already a rider – maybe even a very experienced one. But whether a nube on a Rebel or a crusty on a Road King, spending some time on the dirt will almost certainly raise the level of your street game. Here are some reasons why.

1. Learning to Crash– It will come as no surprise that crashing on a street bike almost inevitably hurts. Even if your skin and bones are in tact, a small spill adds up to a big bill. One simple departure from pavement to gravel on some mountain twisties converted my pristine Ducati into a ragged trackbike rebuild in the blink of an eye. A dirt bike on the other hand is designed to crash and being clad in the armor of a gladiator from head to toe tends to make you a bit more resilient as well. The point is that no one WANTS to crash. But in any risky activity, it helps to be prepared for the worst and the best way to accomplish this is to experience it. After you’ve fallen off a few times and brushed yourself off, you’ll be mumbling ‘I got this’ inside your helmet in no time.
2. Learning to Feel– Riding a motorcycle is not a linear experience between inputs and outputs – there are a number of unpredictable variables in play all the time that will catch you off guard. As Mike Tyson once said, ‘everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ When you think about the myriad inputs involved in riding – clutching, braking, traction, engine revs, gear selection, throttle, lean angle, etc – it’s amazing we can keep the thing upright at all. Riding in the dirt allows you the ability to exaggerate these actions and their reactions so you can begin to ‘feel’ that relationship. This harmony between human and machine translates directly to your street riding relationship until, with enough hours, you and your bike become one.
3. Learning to Read– Riding a twisty mountain road is a beautiful thing and unless you’re in the business of getting your knee down, chances are each successive corner will be quite similar to the last: there likely won’t be a mug bog, a gully, some low branches, a jump or a stream in your path so you can usually relax a bit. When you begin to gain confidence on a dirt bike and start to pick up your pace, you’ll begin to notice that relaxation is not part of the deal. Information is coming at you hot and heavy and only the brakes will stem the flow. This skill of reading the terrain, managing inputs to the bike and handling its reaction to them is an enormously valuable asset on the street.
4. Learning your Limits– GP racers must be at 99.9% of their own and their bikes limits all the time if they want to win. I would suggest that most people operate at under 75% of their street bikes’ full performance capabilities and that’s a good thing since modern sport bikes possess much more power than race bikes of 20 years ago. We like to know we are riding a street-legal race bike even though we have zero intention of getting our knee down on the Nürburgring. When you ride a dirtbike on some open terrain, you are free to get closer to 90% + of your bike’s potential. With practice and the confidence that comes with it, sliding on maximum braking, climbing hills at full throttle or using every inch of fork travel as you launch your bike over the next jump will become second nature. Once you have experienced 95% on a dirt bike, hitting 80% on your street bike won’t seem quite as unnerving.
5. Learning to Ride – As mentioned at the outset, most of those who read this are already accomplished riders. But if you are not, or are mentoring someone just getting into this crazy world we live in, the dirt is quite simply the best place to learn how to ride a motorcycle. In addition to the skill-building points mentioned in the last 4 bullets, learning to ride on the dirt is not only insanely fun, but it is inherently much, much safer than taking straight to the street. Dirt is softer, you are much better armored up, the speeds are a fraction of street speeds and going off line and hitting some bushes is a lot less painful than hitting a car, a tree or some other object that will win the impact war.

Of course, the best-case scenario is that you live in the best of both worlds and, like me, have street bikes AND dirt bikes in the garage. But if hard choices come with hard constraints, find some way – beg, borrow or steal – to get some dirt bike hours under your belt. In addition to looking totally awesome in the gear, you will quickly discover that there was a much better rider inside of you just fighting to get out.