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 

 

I will divulge my bias from the get go. I am not, nor have I ever been, a fan of Japanese motorcycles. Ok, I said it. Let loose the torrent of blaters (blogging haters), trolls and aficionados. I don’t care. Maybe it’s my semi-European upbringing or the perhaps unjustified ‘soul’ of European bikes but the last Japanese bike I owned was a Yamaha YZF600 in LA back in 1997. When it was stolen in 1998, a Triumph Daytona filled its place and that was that. So glad we got that behind us.

My primary baseline for comparison are the 1050 and 1200 GS’s I’ve been riding as my daily rides/adventure steeds for the last 15 years. Both are big & reliable (the latter got me around the world) but nimble is not a word that would find its way into the GS lexicon. I’ve seen lots of videos of two wheeled titans thrashing the monster 1250 GS Adventure through swamps and over dunes. Nice little marketing snippets, perhaps, but for all of us who have not competed in Paris – Dakar, I call bullshit. I got my Husky motorcrosser stuck in a mud bog in the middle of the California wilderness once and it took me an hour and several heart attacks to set it free. If I was on my GS (weighing more than double the Husky), I would have been, how do you say?…Oh yes, fucked.

To the Honda!

Let’s start where we all do, looks. If it were a Tinder girl, you’d swipe right. If it were a Hinge guy, you’d definitely give it a like. And if you were on Match, a wink would be in order. (yes, I’m single and available). Even if I had never hit the start button, I would have been satisfied just to have the image of her in my mind’s eye forever and ever. The dripping lusciousness of the blue/red/white sparking paint scheme, the sparkle of the gold-finished spoke wheels, the clean lines of the water-cooled parallel twin engine, the freshly bronzed crankcase, the sharp edges of the body work. Get excited. It is truly the most beautiful dualsport I have even laid my lovely blue irises upon. (god, I hope some women are reading this article.)

Now with every action there must be an equal and opposing reaction so here’s my ding and believe me, it’s me, not you. It’s bloody tall! Yes, I am short – maybe 5’7” after an hour on an inverter – but I have always had a thing for the tall ones. My Triumph Tiger, my two GS’s and my KTM 450 EXC all had towering seat heights but I got used to them. If you suffer vertigo, you may want to rethink. Or lower the suspension. Or opt for the lower seat. Or wear stilettos, if that’s your thing. The only time I found it…troubling, was trying to back it up with two tiptoes on the ground, ballerina style. Not a great look but it worked.

Hit the starter and holy crap, what a snarl! And that’s with the stock can. The juices now flowing, the big iPad on the handlebar lights up. Apparently the computer does a lot of things. I ignore it and set off for the Surrey Hills south of London. After 60 seconds I am obsessed. The bike is so tall but as lithe as a supermodel and feels as light as a feather. The narrow geometry gives immediate confidence and just screams ‘take me to the dirt!’ Sat on the new GS Adventure recently? Where the Africa Twin is like being on the back of a young camel (I have), the GSA is like sitting on a male rhino (I have not). Ever try picking a rhino up out of a mud bog? Didn’t think so.

The engine is grunt galore and the snorting exhaust note completely dominates the whirly whine coming out of the engine case. Torque comes by the bucket full and power-wheelies and a mere quarter twist of Mr. Righty away. There were no trails offering their dirt and mud to us so I made due with an urban motocross track. Tearing down narrow residential roads (not advised) mowing over speed bumps did not unsettle the suspension one little bit although, being only 167 lbs/76kg, I maybe should have dialed down rear shock rebound a bit to offset that bucking bronco effect. Likewise jumping over and off curbs presented no gripes at all. It may weigh twice as much but it handles a lot like my KTM 450 with suspension travel to match. Obviously, my spate of hooliganism does not vet the bike’s off-road credentials but I can vouch for its unparalleled ability to raise hell in any city of your choosing.

I spent 6 hours on my sexy gazelle crisscrossing the urban / suburban environment of South London and, with the exception of the seat height and the utterly crap hand guards (I mean like plastic plates from an office picnic crap), this bike is totally hype-worthy. Will I buy one? Probably not. My next purchase is already in the chamber…the KTM 790 Adventure. Euro bias? Maybe. But mainly because of the type of riding I tend to do, Two Wheeled Expeditions style. But I am a profoundly and irrevocably changed human. This Honda, this sexy beast of a bike is without peer. It slots beautifully between the GSA 1250 panzer and the crossy KTM 790 and for many people I am sure, the perfect match.