The owner of this Adventure regularly rides off-road in Salisbury Plain and loves the bike and tearing up the dirt on it. He’s tried the new model KTM Adventure but prefers the handling of the old one off-road, so wants to stick with it; “You can drift it, slide it, do what you like with it but you can do f**k all with it if you can’t control it, and that’s why I’m here…!” he said.
We’ve turned out a few off-road specific remaps for big KTMs in the past, so got working in that direction (and it is different to how we’d remap for road use, so the owner has to mean it). The bottom end received a dramatic change in setup through the ECU.
We rode it and it was lovely – like riding your best friend you’ve known for years – with a pillowy soft delivery. We also tried some loose surfaces and grass stood on the pegs at 10mph, rolling on and off the throttle. And a problem surfaced; between zero and 2,500rpm there was still a hint of snatchiness. So we brought it back in, plugged back into the ECU and made some serious changes to the ignition map. We also explained to the owner that this would result in a small loss of that sweet V-twin character.
He then went and rode it up and down the dykes and came back and said one word; “MINT!”
An off-road spec ECU remap is possible, and transforms the Adventure’s power delivery down low,
