2021 KTM 1290 Super Adventure R, Full Off Road Test With Chris & Neil Hawker (4K)

The KTM Super Adventure S is a supermoto doing a great impression of an adventure bike. But now we're off-road and this is the realm of the KTM Super Adventure R! That thing is this flipping nonsense. You shouldn't be able to ride to the south of Portugal and then send it off massive jumps and down rocky gullies. It just shouldn't be possible. But what I want more than anything else, I want to see someone really send it on this bike. I want someone who's gone balls out across the deserts of Saudi Arabia. I want a Dakar racer. Luckily I know a guy and that guy is Neil Hawker. You might recognise him from previous videos on the channel and he is here to put this thing through some proper testing. Told you! Just wow! I don't know really where to start with this absolute beast. It's, I mean just stepping off the rally bike to get on this, it's like a supercharged rally bike. I've not ridden anything like it. It just wants to go. The power, just incredible. I'm finding myself spinning everywhere. I have actually put it into rally mode. Straight away traction control is on like a minimum. ABS on the front only. Turned off the back. It's unbelievable. It just wants to drive. Feels really planted still. Really smooth. But when you want to give it a handful and go, it goes. It certainly does. And relax. Honestly after spending any time in the company of that thing, you will need to find yourself somewhere with a nice babbling brook, pack it away in the transit van, ready to go home and just relax because it is intense. It is an absolute fruitcake of a bike and I'm genuinely sad that it's going back to KTM. I'm a spoiled brat when it comes to motorcycles. I get to ride loads and loads of new and wonderful exotic bikes and every now and then I ride one and I don't want to give it back. That's ticked that box for me. Everything I loved about the 1290 Adventure S carries over into the R version but this thing has off-road capability that really means you can ride like a hooligan whatever the terrain is. It took some properly technical descents and awkward boulder-filled hill climbs to really start to test this thing and find situations where it simply stopped being fun to ride and that's a hell of a hell of an accolade for a 230 kilo, 160 horsepower adventure bike. This thing is a sports bike for adventure bike riders. This thing is like sticking dynamite in your trousers and running as fast as you can with your eyes shut. It is just bonkers. You don't need 160 horsepower on the dirt but you kind of want it and when you've got it you kind of want to use it. When I've calmed down, it might take a while, I'll be able to say some useful things about the 1290 Adventure R. Now first and foremost it is an easier bike to ride than previous generations especially if you look back to bikes like the 1190 Adventure R. This thing bumbles along in first gear, does full lock u-turns, pops over little logs, rides a technical trail smoothly and slowly. I did a fair bit of green lane and byway riding, just more chilled off-road riding and it's nice, it's calm, it's serene. You can even dial the power down using the adjustable rally mode and you can make a bike that's pretty tameable. Always knowing that any minute if you get carried away or just open the throttle a bit harder you've got this kind of menace lurking beneath you that wants to destroy tyres and disappear you into the landscape. That I think is where KTM has made a big improvement though. That low speed, smooth clutch control, nice throttle response, it makes it an easy bike to ride which then invites you to do the crazier stuff. Regardless of your ability level, you'll be able to jump on this bike and start to feel confident straight away and then as your ability rises you're very rarely going to outride this thing. It is very capable. A couple of interesting points I've noted about it, I think I've mentioned it already but the non-electronic adjustable suspension, so high quality forks and shock but no electronic adjustment. For me on the R model on the more off-road focused bike that's a big tick. I've ridden a lot of big adventure bikes and abused them way more than I should have done and the electronic suspension always seems to be the thing that eventually fails. Get rid of it, simplify it and make good quality suspension that works well. That ticks the box for me on the R and it works great. The fact that you don't have electric suspension but you have to pay more for the R, I'm not quite sure on the logic of that one and I'll be honest that confused me but I'm happy that it hasn't got it. Other things around the bike that they've done nicely. Absolute number one most important thing with any off-road bike is the ability to get into a good riding position. If you're in a strong riding position suddenly you can do a lot more on the bike. If you're on a bike that's awkward with the bars or the pegs are in the wrong place, everything you do becomes stressed and harder and that applies to everyone from weaker riders, new off-road riders through to the pros. KTM should know a thing or two about off-road riding position and this bike shows it and one thing they've done really well is kept it narrow across the seat so between the foot pegs there's plenty of room for your legs, you're not having your knees splayed apart by a bulky tank or seat. That is gold in off-road bike world. And then the rest of the bike, big wide handlebar, decent foot pegs, adjustable brake and gear levers, that ability to then tailor the bike to suit your foot size, to suit your riding style, those are tiny touches that don't feature on a spec sheet but they make a difference. They make the bike feel more yours, they make it more comfortable to ride and it's nice tinkering away with bits in your garage. And finally the screen, it's a much smaller screen than the S has got so there's less wind protection but again that little adjustable screen that scoots up and down, didn't have to take the screen off to get it in the transit, that made me happy. So at five foot eight the little screen is actually enough to kick most of the wind above my head when I'm sat down and then you can wind it down and it's clear, nice, good vision for when you're riding off-road. One nice thing I did see is that having ridden the S very recently and then jumping onto the R, the dash felt very familiar, the instruments, the display, it all felt very very usable. And I've ridden a couple of other bikes recently that highlights actually how well set up the KTM's, I'll call it user interface, it's not a computer but it kind of is, like all that functionality, the menus, the scrolling through the buttons, yeah I've jumped around all of them and I'm actually beginning to really like the way the KTM does it. It's logical, it's clear and you've got a big screen so you can see what's going on. Other things I really really liked about this bike, horsepower, lots of it, very good and that and the way it makes the power, it is aggressive. When you put it in rally mode, when you put it in the sharpest throttle mode, it's just wild, look look what it's done, that is one of Bridgestone's finest adventure tyres and there's nothing left of it, nothing left and that's just from the fact that it turns you into a child. On road, off road, tarmac, gravel, dirt, mud, it will spin the wheel. First gear, second gear, third gear, fourth gear, fifth gear if it's wet, it just, if you turn everything off and unleash the full monster, it's bonkers and that delivers for me a level of excitement that adventure bikes sometimes miss out on. I came from road bikes, sports bikes, I love a 200 plus horsepower superbike, I think that's the greatest thing on earth and for me you always jump into an adventure bike, you always kind of go, oh it's really good and it is really fast and more than fast enough for the road but that kind of slight bit of fear and trepidation about opening the throttle isn't very often there. On this, especially with the knobbly tyres fitted back, you're thinking about opening the gas, you're not just willy-nilly blasting between turns, you're, oh, oh this is a bit, this is a bit wild and I think you'll either love or hate that. When you look at this bike from off-road rider's perspective, from a person who likes to ride fast or hard off-road, you look at the 200 plus kilo weight, so you have 230 odd kilos, you look at 220 mil of suspension travel and you sort of go, how off-road focused is it then? Because in off-road world that's not actually that much travel. In adventure bike world it's pretty good but you know it's not right up with full-on rally bikes at 300 odd mil of travel and the weight's there so it's not a super lightweight bike. So what's it actually like off-road? I think the biggest justification of its off-road performance I saw was riding it with Neil. Neil is a legit off-road racer, he's ridden Trials Enduro Motocross since he was a babby, obviously he did the Dakar last year, he's a phenomenal off-road rider and I put him on the KTM and I rode his rally bike and that's a proper Dakar bike, that's a legit rally desert racer and it was amazing how hard you had to ride the rally bike to keep up with this. Now Neil's a phenomenal rider but this is an adventure bike, this is something that you can ride to the other end of the continent on and the rally bike was having to work hard and the hits, you were feeling the hits on the rally bike and this was absorbing them. It's obviously not as capable as a rally bike in full hard off-road terrain but it's surprising how quick you can go on it. I definitely found myself riding it in isolation, eventually coming to the end of the suspension travel a couple of times and thinking oh oh there's a limit there and it's only when you put it next to a proper off-road bike you go there is a limit there but you're going bloody fast by the time you reach it. So for an adventure bike in that category it's off-road performance and capability is way in excess of what most adventure bike riders would want or need and that means that you're never worrying about overriding the bike and getting into a crash because you've blown through the suspension travel and gone over the handlebars. Now that's a pretty dramatic way to talk about it but you will end up riding this off-road, I promise you. The telling point at the end of the day, we kind of got a bit loose on it. We both probably pushed harder than we should have done especially considering this isn't our bike, this is a KTM press bike. We both not got close to crashing but definitely had moments where we were doing that special laugh you do when you've done something a little bit dodgy where you go both of us had that at some point in the day. So this thing got ridden hard and we washed it off at the end of the day's riding and no dents in the rim, no lumps out of anything, no cracks, nothing seemed phased by what we did. It didn't miss a beat all day and it took it all. The only damage we actually managed to do to it was me and Neil had a jump competition and one of us landed on a rock and hit the sump guard hard like a big rock on the sump guard. I felt sick when I saw the bike hit that but sump guard deformed slightly, no damage other than that and for my money that's a real statement of intent from KTM. This bike has been designed to be abused, to be hit, to be ridden in a stupid manner and it takes it and if you're buying an adventure bike to do off-road riding on, that's important. You want to know that the first time you drop it, the first time you overstep your or the bike's limits, you're not going to be walking home with a thousand pound bill for bodywork or a snapped lever or a broken crankcase and that is confidence inspiring and will make you want to take this bike off-road more and more and more which, let's face it, that's what it's for. So the final point is probably for me the price of this bike. It's a thousand pound more than the S which I find a little bit hard to swallow. For sure it's got longer travel suspension, the bigger tougher wheels but I can't see a thousand pounds more componentry on this bike than there is on the S. Okay, I'll be honest, I went on the bike configurator to look at pricing one for myself because I got that excited about it and it comes in for me about 17 grand with a few of the options you'd want to tick. Not a stupid amount of money for a top-end, top of the range adventure bike. It still feels a little bit expensive to those of us who can remember bikes being under 10 grand. For what you're getting and for what the other manufacturers make in this range, it's about the right price. I think the tricky bit is if you're a dedicated off-road adventure bike rider you're naturally going to compare this to things like its smaller brother the 890 and the Yamaha Tenere and then you're kind of going it is it is a chunk more money. So you've got to want the power, you've got to want the horsepower to spend the extra money. Is it worth it? Obviously I'm going to say yes because I've just got off it and I'm still buzzing with excitement but I think it's down to what you want out of the bike. If you want a bike that excites you every time you ride it, that's always got reserves of power on tap and even when you're not on an exciting bit of road or trail you know you've got the excitey twisty handle in your right hand. 17 grand, 20 grand doesn't matter. It's awesome for that money. I think my only gripe with the price is that it's more than the S and maybe that's because I feel like as an off-road lover I'm getting a bum deal having to pay more. I think the new 1290s have made a big step forward in usability, rideability and refinement and everything about them is a bit easier to use than the old bike and that means you're more confident and can do jupiter things on them which is why we ride bikes. If you're into big adventure bikes on the road the S is kind of the ultimate supermoto. It is a big hooligan road bike that can take on gravel roads, works really well on rough uphold roads and is a silly, silly motorcycle that happens to be able to go touring. The R is all of that stuff and more so. It's not quite as planted on a fast A road especially once you put knobbly tyres on it but stick it in the dirt and it is a brilliant machine. It is fun, fast, flighty. I think the only thing I picked a hole in is changing from fifth gear to sixth gear it's a bit clunky. All the other gear shifts are super smooth but fifth to sixth on this particular bike was a bit of a slow shift. That was the only thing that I really went oh I don't like that. Everything else on it, for me someone who loves riding fast bikes on the road as much as I love riding off-road this hits that mark sweetly, straight down the middle. So if you're as much of an off-road hooligan as you are an on-road hooligan Super Adventure R will get a massive tick from me.