350 goes back to the future
By TMX Archives on 3rd Jun 10
THIS week editor JD thinks aloud as MX pace-setter KTM , never a factory to follow the rules, unleashes its 350 revolution
THIS week the main feature in T+MX – and quite rightly – is the first test of the all-new, ground-breaking KTM 350XS-F. Genuine all-new bikes are rarer animals than you might think. Most new-season models are usually cleverly tarted-up last season's models which in turn are re-jigs of – blah, blah. You know how it goes, slick new graphics, more powerful, lighter, yadda, yadda, yadda. If all the collective PR blurb of the past 25-years was true we would all be riding 500bhp bikes that had to be weighted with lead shot to stop them floating away.
That's not to say that bikes are not considerably different (and better) to 25-years ago. Of course they are, but evolution is a relatively slow process and indeed it is in the factories' interests to keep it so. Update the brakes one year, suspension the next, new chassis later-on, snazzy plastics package the next year, fuel-inject the motor and so on and so on. A single model can be eked-out over a considerable number of years which is obviously more cost effective than banging-out all-new models each season. And even these ‘new' models aren't always what they seem.
But every so often a model is launched that is genuinely new. And rarer still a model is launched that actually moves the goalposts. The KTM 350 is just that animal. Interestingly, it has all been done before and not all that long ago, by Yamaha with their 400F which was introduced during the final years of the last century.
The 400F was the solution to exactly the same problem, a revvy, light, four-stroke to replace the old-style ‘long-strokes' – that could actually compete with the popular two-strokes.
That the rules were then bent to ensure they beat the two-strokes is a political point that is still very pertinent today but that's an argument for another day.
By and large the major manufacturers all sing from the same songsheet, especially the Japanese. One sneezes and they all catch a cold.
Which is why all the bikes out of Japan are basically mirror images of all the other bikes coming from Japan.
They are all excellent bikes but show them in silhouette and even their designers would struggle to tell them apart – until Yamaha (again) brought out the reverse cylinder 450!
Not so KTM. Team Orange doesn't just fly in the face of convention for the sake of it. But by the same token it doesn't just blindly follow what everyone else is doing. If its designers think that another way is best then that is what they do. A typical case is the chassis construction. The Japanese all went the ally beam frame route, mainly, I suspect, because that is the way they have taken their road and road-racing bikes.
But KTM has never trod this path, its engineers seeing nothing wrong with a well-designed and constructed steel tube chassis. In much the same way that fellow Euro factory Ducati has defied the ally-chassis odds with its awesome road-racers. Some specialist publications actually show their ignorance by deriding steel tube chassis as ‘old-fashioned.' They should check-out a 2010 Gas Gas Raga trials bike if they want to see what's old-fashioned about steel tube. Or a 2011 KTM for that matter!
How easy it is to digress. Back to the 350. Yamaha's 400 rapidly grew into a 450, along with everyone else's but ten-years of year-on-year ‘progress' had seen the 450s ‘develop' into hard-hitting beasts that only top riders could extract the best from.
KTM had a solution, lower the capacity, take the sting out of the power delivery but keep the engine spinning for a more linear delivery. A big 250 in fact, rather than a small 450. More power to their Austrian elbows for actually declaring independence and having the courage of their convictions to go full-tilt at the new vision.
So far so good but does the theory actually work in practise? Well, we all know it's been winning at Grand Prix level, but then again it has been ridden by one of the fastest riders in the world in Toni Cairoli. You can read what Jonty Edmunds, who gave it a real solid test, thinks about it later in this paper. But the acid test is whether real-world riders can get-on with the model. Many are already convinced they will and KTM dealers have taken good advance orders. This is great news – and we could certainly do with some in these cash-strapped times.
Older readers will no doubt smile as they contemplate the saying, ‘what goes around comes around'. Back in the day of the British motorcycle industry the 350cc class was one of the mainstays, sandwiched in between 250 and 500 classes.
The class disappeared when the Japanese (again) brought-in strange new 400 and 600 capacities. Whether the Japanese Big Four join in with KTM's return to a dedicated 350cc model remains to be seen. If it proves as popular as KTM clearly think it will, they might just have to...
Wonder what other bright ideas are currently being kicked around in Mattighoven... a revolutionary two-stroke would be nice...