2020 KTM 300 XC-W Full Test

I'm Jimmy Lewis with dirtbike test and today we're doing the full bike test of the 2020 KTM 300 xcw this is the TPI two-stroke it's basically KTMs next evolution of fuel injection and here's where two strokes are going developments not stopping on these bikes a few years ago KTM had the counterbalance motor which is all-new then they added the fuel injection to it this year this bike gets an all-new chassis and other manufacturers are playing a little bit of catch-up but we took this bike KTM invited us up to the Pacific Northwest to race it and then we took the bike away from the intro we wrote it up in Washington we wrote it out in Oregon and we wrote it back down here in Nevada so we've got a wide range of experience in this bike and we're gonna tell you all about it so for 2020 KTM is calling this an all-new bike and that's because it has an all-new chassis this chassis is basically from the SX and XC previously they've adapted it to work with the WP Explorer suspension and the PDS rear shock so it is kind of a unique chassis on a to itself so what is returning is the suspension components that have been dialed in a little bit for this setup and more so the engine has the second itinerate of KTMs TPI fuel injection and what that means is they've added a sensor for ambient air pressure changes and they've tried to get the setting to be a little bit more snappy and a little bit more aggressive especially to suit the American market the ECU still has a dual map inside of there unless you have a switch you have to switch it manually but there's two maps inside of it and we wrote it for the most part in the more aggressive or standard mode in the power department it's a 302 stroke and it has plenty and it's smooth and there's lots of power so once we kind of just get over the fact that you're not going to be complaining about power on this thing one of the things KTM really started working on was trying to make this bike a little bit more snappy a little bit more aggressive and it's essentially the same motor that's gonna serve duty in the XC as well so we rode this bike 90 percent of the time in the standard map if you disconnect the plug or you get the ignition switch you can go to a smoother map and the funny thing is I'm not gonna actually say that it's smoother it just kind of changes where the power builds and sometime if you like riding a gear high the smoother map actually acts a little bit snappier so it's a personal preference thing in my world and I wish they were a little bit farther apart but I'll talk most of the time about the standard map and what you want to know about this bike is it it doesn't it doesn't like Snap or Rev like you would expect a motocross bike to it has it builds rpm with what I'll call a medium quickness it doesn't want to break the tire loose it wants to grab traction and pull and that's the kind of you know thing that that KTM they're they're engineers and their development guys are all trying to make a bike for quote the hobby rider where 300 might actually be too much so they're trying to tame it but in reality they've done a really good job and if you turn the throttle aggressively it responds aggressively just not out of control like you would expect you know some older of 300s I remember you know back in 2000 mid 2000 some of the 300s we're very very snappy especially when the power valve started opening up so some of the things that we did to this bike against K Tim's recommendation was we added a JD jetting tuner mostly to play with it and to see what the different fueling maps would do and the other thing we did was we played around with the power valve now in my experience any time you start modulating around that power valve you find that the bike kind of wants to have a slightly different jetting you might need to adjust the fuel screw if it was a carburetor you might need to change the needle position sometimes depending on what you're doing it's the same as if you change a pipe or a muffler generally there's a fueling you know a fuelling change that's gonna need to be made so the JD Chet jetting tuner the power surge allowed us to do that so I was able to do it but I also did it just completely stock and I was kind of prai's and just like in the old days that power valve is a very valuable adjustment and it can make the bike quite a bit more aggressive so the stock setting on our bike and they evidently they set all these on the dyno when they're building these motors they run them on the dyno quickly and they set them to where they work they feel they work the best so ours was about 3.4 turns from being all the way unscrewed so that would be unscrewed all the way out and then ours was 3.4 turns in was standard and we found actually our happy place was about one turn farther out from that so in other words 2.4 turns in and it really allowed the bike to pick up get even more aggressive and more snappy and at that point with stock jetting it would detonate and ping just a little bit more and so we played around with the fueling and didn't the JD jetting tuner actually in its stock form the way that it comes had the bike running a little bit better right here so these are all real personal preferences and this is the kind of stuff that you can do on your bike so and kind of back to the the thing if you have not ridden a fuel-injected two-stroke and most people haven't you're gonna get on this thing and you know it's way too lean it sounds lean it acts lean and in fact it probably is a lot leaner than you ever rode your carburetor and I tried to figure out why they would do that in the I think the reason we had to have our carbs did a little bit rich all the time is because have you ever got on it really hard and you shut that carb off all of a sudden there's nothing really forcing the fuel into the motor this thing when you shut it off the computer is still sending the right amount of fuel into the motor so you can get away with that kind of very lean condition that happens when you chop the throttle this is one of the advantages of the fuel injection and if you think it's lean I thought it was lean so I went out and held it wide open on a dry lakebed I got the bike going 90 miles an hour and held it on for a long time and then just chopped the throttle and said ok we're gonna see what happens and you'll see that I pulled the cylinder head off and we shot in picture of the piston and everything and it looks really nice and clean inside of there so and then all the time when you're riding especially when you're doing kind of these steady throttle maybe on a road or something like that or you get into a slight trailing throttle you're gonna hear like slight bits of detonation it's never on acceleration it's no you don't really hear it detonate when you kind of roll it on but there's times when you hear this detonation and that's the other reason I pulled the cylinder head off was to look and see if there was any damage being done and after roughly 15 hours it looked brand-new inside of there so I'm not really concerned about it and just to be dirtbikes test we also threw a load of 87 octane gas in here they recommend the 91 because I wanted to see if that increased the detonation and it did a little bit so it'll it'll handle it I ran a Hyundai 87 I ran a whole tank through it and it started pinging a little bit earlier it actually seemed like it pinged and longer it didn't cool off as quick when I was running the the less quality fuel but it didn't run away and onto the oil injection system that everybody's so scared of it's pretty good I mean to think that you're being able to the computer is able to alter the ratio of oil that goes into the motor when you're riding it so you're not getting a constant let's just say for a reference you know forty to one or sixty to one when you're wide open it might be dumping more like forty to one in there and then when you're really on low rpms it could be closer to somewhere around a hundred to one overall we think it was we think it's averaging about eighty to one I have over well we have close to 300 miles on this bike right now and I still have not had to yet add oil to the system the light hasn't even come on and I need to go ride it a little bit more to see exactly how many tanks KTM says about five tanks I filled this thing up about six or seven times at least now but they weren't complete drains and it still looks to me like it has about two more tanks of fuel before I'm gonna get to a situation where it's gonna run out so those are kind of some of the different things when we started playing around with this bike we also noticed that and this was a known issue from before if you do a big altitude change let's say you're at like 2,000 feet and you're ride up to 4,000 feet if you ride there and you do not shut the bike off when you get up to 4,000 feet the bike isn't gonna be running properly it's gonna be very lean which is strange because usually when you go up in altitude it gets richer but here we found when you go up an altitude and it takes about I could feel it at about 1,500 feet maybe a thousand feet it can feel some changes but after 2,000 feet you actually noticed the bike is running kind of funny not so much when you're up in the upper rpms but when you like try to let it idle back down it starts really when you go up it gets really lean zing-zing and does that kind of stuff or when you ride down about 2,000 feet the bike becomes rich which is strange I inquired with KTM if they knew about this they knew on the old system but that's what that new ambient air pressure sensor was supposed to be doing I think it only does it's sensing when the bike has started so if and it's really rare and that's why I probably never experienced on the old bike that I don't that I ride over 2,000 feet in elevation gain without stopping you know waiting for your friend in a turn whatever so I never experienced this in the past on this bike I did it on purpose because I knew about it and I did it very quickly and I did it over a long period of time and it didn't matter it's the elevation change that makes this happen so all you have to do is literally shut the bike off and start it up and then it's perfect again and it's it's enough of a change where you would actually have to change on the JD jetting tuner you would actually have to change it like one whole number position either rich or lean or depending on what you were doing to get it you know because you can do it on the fly with the JD jetting tuner so it is definitely you know there's some compensation that needs to go on I think it's not doing it while you're riding so if you notice this just shut your bike off start it back up and it works again is it that big of a problem maybe if I was racing and I didn't have a chance to you know I was gonna go over that you know elevation change and I didn't have a chance to just stall it for a second and restart it that might be an issue but with an electric start it's not too big of a deal so that's that was one of the very few issues we had with the bike I kind of think that that for the most part the jetting standard is perfect when I started playing with stuff the power valve and the thing that was just personalization I was never able to really get that much more power in any shape or form the changes that you'll notice from the previous generation is there's a little more throttle response on the bottom and it seems like there's more over rev up on top and then compared to non fuel-injected bike the throttle response is very very instantaneous which means it feels smoother and let me explain that so if you're on an older bike in a car bike the minute you grab it it goes for a second and then bang and comes on and that's what people perceive as snap when you turn this one it responds instantly and exactly to the amount you've turned the throttle there's no kind of hesitation and lunge so coming from a carbureted bike to the fuel-injected bike some people say it doesn't have snap because it doesn't have that moment of hesitation before it pulls and then and then other riders say well it's too responsive and it might actually kind of be a little bit sudden but I don't that's more on the that's a little lesser of a concern in all honesty so the other things about the engine it's a wide ratio gearbox first gear is excellent excellent for like extreme trail riding when you just want to drop it in first gear let the clutch out and let the bike chug right along and that's where fuel injection is even more brilliant because you can do big big throttle openings at very very low rpm and the jetting per se is almost always perfect and then you can let that gear pull if you're doing any sort of racing you'll probably never really use first gear unless it is some sort of an extreme enduro or a really really technical section I found when I raced up in Grays Harbor at the WORX race that if I put it in first gear on accident it was a big mistake I mean it was just way too way too slow and way too much power and that gear was a lot better in second gear so the clutch the hydraulic clutch is actually magical on this bike it it if you can abuse it's quite a bit and all it does is get the engine hot we did get it hot enough to boil coolant out of on a few occasions mostly from clutch abuse essentially but I would probably personally put a cooling fan on this bike because that's the kind of riding I like to do but it never got to the point where it was like boiling its water out it was just doing a little bit of steaming and when we start talking about other things the on the on the bike you know we looked at we look at this cylinder head it looked brand-new we know people that run these things for 150 hours and they don't have to worry about replacing parts and I expect that this bike is going to be exactly the same so other than a little bit of interesting stuff with the elevation I think KTM is nailed it with this motor onto the suspension and frankly this is one of the best off-road suspension settings and packages I've ever ridden and that's saying a lot and for a stock bike to be able to go from something that I raced in a Grand Prix you know off-road setting all the way to making me exceedingly happy and every time every type of trail riding I did that's a tall order and so when KTM starts talking about ready to race for sure they've done it with this suspension so what it is it's the Explorer fork it's an open cartridge fork it's something that they've been running for a long time the latest I generation has compression adjustment on one side rebound on the other it's easy you can just reach up and turn while you're riding although you don't have to do that very much what I found especially on the compression side is the the compression clicker acts more like a mid speed compression adjust then it does a low-speed compression adjust and that's something that I've noticed before on a lot of WP components so what it really does as you're adding more compression making it stiffer it actually gets the fork to ride up a little bit higher in the stroke most the time and that can make it a little bit more supple on sometimes on the bumps or it can make it a little bit stiffer but it's something that's worth playing with and you'll start noticing you can if you soften it sometimes to make it softer it actually gets a little bit stiffer because it rides lower in the stroke and starts packing but overall I was pretty happy with it completely stock when I raced it up at Grace Harbor at the WORX race it was totally stock and I know on the 150th at a race they cranked the compression way in but I was way over the springs at 200 pounds these Springs on this bike are really good for me they they would work I feel they work from a guy that's about 170 all the way up to about you know 210 215 and the way you can tell and especially with the rear shock is if you can get the right amount of ride height and still have your free sag you know so you have your sag when you're on the bike and then the bike still has the proper amount of free sag that's the bike by itself we're running roughly a hundred and ten millimeters of sag when I was on the bike and then it had about thirty when it was by itself and for me that was perfect and we start talking about the pds rear shock I think that since they've gone back to that progressive spring things have gotten a lot better and there was a time in the old days when everybody was having problems with the PDS and we started running progressive Springs and it was like magic in and it's kind of like either love it or hate it and I loved it for two reasons one it's very simple simple to get the shock on and off simple to adjust there's kind of there's not a lot of funny stuff going on with the linkage and the chassis z' to me are very telling of how your suspension is working when I start playing around with the shock it it makes changes very easy you know you can feel the changes working so on this bike the same thing with the low-speed it adjusts a little bit the ride height not so much the forks but you can use the high speed adjustment for that and most the time I was running a completely stock in in most of our trail riding but when I came out here in Nevada we started riding on some faster stuff I basically went in four clicks on the compression and left the rest of it alone and then I was able to kind of tune the chassis a little bit using the high-speed and it was like 1/8 of a turn and high-speed compression and get the backend to come up or the backend to go down because that's what I use a high-speed compression adjuster for is you know kind of in theory moving ride-height seems to change it more than quote what you would feel in a high-speed compression bump so overall the suspension is really really good I've been playing around a whole bunch on some force folks lately and you know playing with settings and trying to get the Honda to work like the Yamaha and I have a 2019 KTM that has essentially the same components as this bike and now I want to go back and start playing around with that one after getting this one working so good so suspension no complaints here I think they've hit it out of the ballpark in the handling Department this bike does something that's very strange it's really light but it feels planted and I didn't expect much from the new chassis in all honesty a lot of the KTM chassis look the same but this is how technical this stuff has gotten these subtle changes are actually making some pretty big differences and they're doing stuff like just altering you know some of the geometry slightly they're changing the material of the head stays the position of the head stays they're starting to find out how important that integration of all these parts are and again they've done a really really good job so this bike is light but planted and that's kind of a hard thing to accomplish because usually when you get a two-stroke that's this light and this bike is like 220 pounds plus or minus depending on the fuel level I think KTM is saying 224 without gas so it's a very light bike you know 20 to 30 pounds lighter than most four-strokes yet it doesn't dance around on a two-stroke typically you get this a little bit of deflection or this kind of chassis that feels really active and this one feels like it's sticking the tires to the ground which is kind of that good feeling you get from the four strokes where we'll call it planet so an odd combination but I'm not going to complain one bit and the funny thing is is that with the light feeling you get a very active and quick handling bike that's in no way unstable but then you have this connected to the ground feeling that gets traction and it's not dancing around a lot of that goes back to the suspension and even on the Dunlop the 8081 tires that typically amplify that lighter dancey feeling on lighter bikes this bike was working really good I had no complaints about the tires in this bike and especially when I was able to run 12 psi which I like to run on these tires no problems whatsoever if you start running the tire pressure up the bike can get Dancy so it is a little bit of a sensitive chassis as well as if it gets low in the stroke or starts riding too high then you're gonna start feeling some of those handling characteristics that may not be what you're looking for so the big change is the chassis this year and it's definitely noticeable from the last xcw that I rode and if you're coming from one that's three or four years old you know the pre counterbalance motor this bike will literally blow you away I'm frankly I'm still kind of surprised that it works as good as it does and that starts starting to sound like you know Oh Jimmy you just all you say is really good things about these bikes but I like want to buy this thing now and I had that problem last year when I rode the 350 exc that I now own and now I'm having the same problem with this and we're just talking about one year's difference so I think they've kind of hit a homerun with the chassis you know they've integrated things like the fuel the oil filter oil injection tube that goes drops down in the center of the frame you know so it has the ability to kind of house that tank inside there the changes they make going from the linkage equipped XC to the PDS bike seem to have not affected adversely and then you start looking at all the things that are kind of things we really praised KTMs for its super easy to work on there's no tools access to get to the air filter it's kind of almost dummy proof because it has pins that lock it into place that kind of stuff is just that's the way air filters are meant to be changed they wised up and they made it so it's only one bolt to get the seat off but I don't know why you would have to take the seat off on this bike maybe to get to the battery or to take the gas tank off to work on stuff but it only took me about ten minutes to get the cylinder head off on this bike and I was actually taking my time so it's a very easy to bike to work on same thing in maintenance world you're gonna be changing air filters maybe every once in a while having to change the transmission fluid and that's one bolt and drain and fill so quite an easy bike to work on from that respect and there's a lot of stuff that you know the the handlebar position is adjustable the chassis has kind of a roomy feeling and this is kind of strange it actually has it has a nice seat and I know what a problem that is for KTM to put a nice seat in the bike because they want to give us something to complain about but hey all you Italians that hate this seat because it actually cushions yeah we like this in America so some other things that that you know the time we were talking about how often you have to fill the oil injection I've ridden 300 miles and I haven't had to fill it yet so that's something that's kind of like not really a worry and there's a light that's going to come on to tell me when I need to do it I kind of want to see how long that light stays on that's one of the things I need to do it but it takes a little while to ride a bike more than 15 hours we're averaging about 20 miles an hour on this bike over our time on it if it gives you any idea of the speeds were racing or riding this bike on and then when you when you start you know kind of calculating all that stuff out there do they you know they've they've got enough oil in there to almost don't have to think about it hopefully you don't forget about it but that's why there's a nice light to get on the front here so some of the other thing that's really nice the wheels on this bike we haven't had to touch or just a spoke the chain for some reason we've had to adjust it a couple times and that's kind of a new thing for us but maybe it's because the bike has so much power the brakes are you know probably some of the best brakes that I've ridden on any motorcycle they're the lever effort or the foot pedal effort is pretty minut and it's it still has a lot of feel and plenty of braking power and then little things like the foot pegs the shifter you see the attention to detail they've gone to to take some weight off these things while still making them work properly the foot pegs are some of the best in the business they have plenty of grip and stuff like that some of the other design things if you look at the exhaust pipe they put these ripples into the exhaust pipe to give it more stability and more strength they actually spend a lot of time over lysing the pipe so it's not just round sections they're actually kind of oval to tuck it up closer into the frame and you know make it so it doesn't hit on stuff and I've dropped the bike a couple times it's definitely strong enough so it hasn't dented and I've also dropped the bike on to the sides of the radiators and even inside the the radiator shroud that's in the front KTM has built some plastic reinforcements there so the radiators don't get dinged so it's these little things that are attention to detail that actually make quite a bit of difference and then we talked about quickly but the bars can be adjusted for your riding position and it is a very very roomy chassis easy to move around on and combining with the light handling feeling the planet feeling the good suspension there's not a whole lot to complain about here other than maybe the chains stretching a little bit and it hasn't we haven't had it adjusted in the last hundred miles so maybe it's kind of have found its happy place and we're all good there oh and the headlight usually the thing sends light beams up to this outer space and is very unusable I've got over 100 miles riding this bike in the dark and the headlight when you adjust it properly actually works so not nearly as good as some of the aftermarket solutions but it's the job done hand guards are a nice touch to the you know instant adjusts through levers you know through on the levers is a nice feeling KTM hits a home run in this department [Music] so in conclusion you're saying Jimmy is this the best bike in the whole world well no not exactly it's pretty darn good and here's the thing it's a ten thousand dollar dirt bike that's a big commitment but for ten thousand bucks you're getting a really good bike KTM their slogan is ready to race for me and for a lot of other journalists and stuff they absolutely proved it because they took us out their box stock bikes and sent us out and we raced it I did really well I actually managed to win for da in a fifty a class on a couple different of the X CW's which probably weren't the ideal bikes for that race I probably if I wanted to go faster I might have been on an XC but knowing that dirt bike test is all about the trail riding - they had a thread the xcw and so what I do I went out and took a trail riding I've ridden this bike up to 9,000 feet I've written it down here in the desert I've gone 90 miles an hour on it I've spent 30 minutes crawling up extreme enduro trails and it does everything pretty much as good as any other bike when you start thinking what are the two strokes for you know the more technical extreme enduros this is the bike that probably the bike of choice I have not spent a lot of time on the 250 but I know that I like the 3/5 the 300 characteristics which is just a lot more robust torque and then when it comes on and it get makes power it really has a lot of power and it's it is noticeable between a 250 and a 300 and I've always preferred either small bikes like 125 and 150 s or bigger bikes like 300 and 500 for strokes so I would never have a problem recommending a 300 if that's kind of what you are looking for especially in a vet class environment where displacement doesn't make a big difference a big difference for you so and the other thing is is how much has it changed from the 2019 or the the previous versions of the TPI bike probably enough to where you're gonna want to ride it you're gonna want to buy a new one if you ride one so they've made just enough changes and the big change is just the way the chassis is working so if you have a 2019 don't ride the new one it might cost you a lot of money and they seem to do that about every two years if you're on one that's older than 2017 that's a big big difference and you can't go wrong and you'll be impressed every second you ride the bike so best bike of the year well pretty close for me so far I'm just gonna have to keep my wallet in my pocket so that's it for dirt bike test go ahead and if you have a chance have questions comment down below we'll answer those follow us every Tuesday at 7 p.m. for Tech Talk Taco Tuesday where we talk about dirt bikes and dirt bike related products and by all means tell a friend about dirt bike tests and we can keep doing this to keep you informed so we'll see you out on the trail Cheers

Channel: Dirt Bike Test

Views: 152,406

Rating: 4.8937826 out of 5

Keywords: Dirt Bike Test, KTM, 300XC-W, Jimmy Lewis, dirt bike, off-road, enduro

Id: 0d5M-UUSgeg

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 11 2019