Words: Séan Hendley
Pics: Motomedia
WHY? We hear you all howl in anguished.
Two reasons, firstly we all know how good it is in the dirt, and if you need reminding, Glenn has done a dirt and trail review of it on our sister site Dirt & Trail. And secondly, honestly – on the tar is where most 890 R’s are going to be doing most of their mileage, just doing life as well as commuting to their favourite trails.
And KTM knows this, as does every other serious Adventure Bike, Dual Purpose bike manufacturer and truth be told this is what the average Joe/Joan Soap rider is going to judge the bike on, its road manners.
We borrowed the press 890 Adventure R from KTM for a couple of weeks and used it to commute between the office and home as well as run our daily chores on it. The unit we borrowed had a Remus exhaust on it which popped, crackled and growled magnificently and contributed in large chunks to the levels of my enthusiastic riding – Yeah, I was that guy, roaring loudly through the neighbourhoods and traffic that you just want to throw a brick at, but I couldn’t help myself.
KTM’s tagline, “Ready to Race” is built into the DNA of every single one of their motorcycles, from the aggressive seating position, the light and nimble handling, its surefootedness, the all absorbing and stabilising suspension to the crisply responsive parallel twin mill and the bright orange and white colour scheme. This is not a subtle or conservative machine! I always thought that KTM riders on the road were just a bunch of showoffs. Trading the seat from my usual GS I, began to understand. Understand that they cannot not help themselves, that is just the way KTM’s are designed to be ridden.
And in their infancy in the bigger bike market, it really did take a special kind of rider talent to be able to tame and ride the early KTM adventure offerings because they are absolutely feral in their power and handling. It kept them very niche in their appeal and limited in their sales potential. To survive and even thrive in the market, KTM had to make their bikes appealing to a wider market, but still keep the KTM faithful happy and that is just what they have done…. And as a result, they have become a market leader with a lot of their models.
Said KTM faithful may consider that, with all the new electronics, the latest KTM 890 Adventure R has gone soft, but I would assertively contend that all the rider aids have only served to make the 890 R more exciting as well as more rideable. It’s just so much fun. I caught myself on more than one occasion, sitting on my couch in front of my TV completely oblivious to what was happening around me or on the TV and just mulling over where I would be riding the 890 next or how much fun I had had that day on the Adventure R – much to my wife’s annoyance when her weekend plans discussions were falling on deaf ears.
Here’s why you ride an ADV on the road:
In one instance, on my way home from the office, there had been a pile up on the freeway, so all the traffic was taking the off ramp just before our office trying to detour past the hold up along my route home. Vehicles were hooting, swearing and doing their best to stitch one and one another up. The shoulder on said route is wide but made of dirt, thick sand, horrible water erosion trenches, rocks and loose shale – not even the trucks hazarded using it as an extra lane. But it is the spiritual home of the 890 Adventure R, and as soon as I wiggled through the stationary traffic, I was running past them it in the dirt with that Remus pipe belligerently mocking the foolish four wheeled behemoths for about 3 km’s before I took the slipway into my neighbourhood. The fun didn’t stop there, my adrenal glands had activated and I was accelerating like a Binder off the start line at the MotoGP and fighting for the hole-shot, before clamping on the hooks, sliding the back wheel through the 90 degree left hander, hard on the gas again kicking hard on the quick-shifter, launching over the 2 speed bumps past my frustrated neighbours, before clamping down on the hooks and tilting into my gate. An irate neighbour came storming out of his yard, realised it was me and shouted, “Dit was seker jy wat nou net verby my vrou gery het op die grond langs die pad…..”, apparently she took almost 50 minutes to cover the same 3 km section in her car, now they are talking to me about getting a bike.
I set the MTC, ABS and rider modes up into Rally mode with easily switchable slip control on the fly, with the throttle in its most responsive mode and the highways and byways of Gauteng became my Supermotard track, and each traffic circle had to be circumnavigated three or four times just to see how low I could go.
Red Traffic lights were all MotoGP starting grids in my mind and other road users were just rolling chicanes and braking test opportunities. In all the time I spent aboard the KTM 890 Adventure R my pathological road rage subsided completely, the “Ready to Race” persona took over and everything became a fun challenge to conquer – Geez, this bike is just so much fun…. The perfect anger management counsellor.
On the odd occasion when I had a long chilled out bit of empty straight tar, I clicked on the cruise control, sat up and bemused my transition from an antagonist against KTM riders to feeling a kind of kindred oneness with them. These days I really look forward to riding KTM’s. Then as the traffic got a bit more manic or the road got more interesting, I perked up and yelled, “Sausage Time” in my lid, (Black Adder fans will understand), as I started the in and out flick flacks between the traffic and around traffic circles.
