2021 KTM 300 XC-W TPI: First Impressions

[Music] [Music] [Music] adam booth upshift online check out this 2021 ktm 300 tpi tpi fuel injected two-stroke so probably three years ago i was able to go to ursberg and ride the first tpis they came out with i wrote a 250 and a 300 that day i was super impressed with how well if you want to call it jetting mapping whatever it is a fuel-injected two-stroke could run the 250s over there i wasn't that excited by them i love two strokes i've grown up on two strokes i raced motocross on two strokes i transition to off-road on two strokes and for me i if i had any bike ever would be a two-stroke whether it be carbureted whatever i love two-strokes california that is a hard choice to have if you want to ride anywhere that you need a license plate for because you're never going to get one on these california and just the government in general is trying to phase out two strokes but when i rode the 250 tpi over there i liked it but man it was it was flat the way they deliver power with the fuel injections very smooth i wrote a 300 over there and i liked that a little more had a little more snap and tons of grunt well they've kind of fine-tuned those over the last few years i haven't ridden one i've ridden a husky 300 tpi in idaho i love it but that had a recluse on it so it's a little different i mean in general husky ktm their tpi bikes for the most part are the same different chassis so it's hard for me to go back to a carburetor after riding tpi tpi idles it's like a four-stroke you start it at idles you go down a hill for a long time in idles you're not trying to clean it out keep it running so i spend a day riding this bike and holy cow i love this thing i wish i could put a license plate on the back and then that would be the only bike i would ever own there's no reason to own any other bike this thing is awesome so there's there's some strong points to this bike and there's some some stuff that some people won't be that into i mean if you're a fast desert guy who loves to just go 70 to 80 miles an hour and just rip around two strokes can be a little less stable than a four-stroke but if you like trail riding you like off-road in general you like super technical hard stuff the tpi bikes are ridiculous this thing lugs down to the point where i don't i love the recluse clutch i love auto clutches i think they're cool but i also ride a lot of four strokes so i wouldn't put one on this bike i was playing around going up hills with my hand off the clutch and almost what i thought should kill the motor and able to roll on the throttle and ride up like it had an auto clutch the counterbalancer on these engines is super smooth i think this might have less vibration than my personal 350 dual sport bike which is crazy so the beautiful thing about this 300 tpi is that it's not a motocross bike turned into an off-road bike this is born and bred off-road trail bike there's nothing moto about it so don't get excited and think you're going to the motocross track i mean some people can but that's not what it's designed for if you look ktm over the years i don't know how they do it but you look at the engine and you don't even think it has a transmission in it or there's enough room for a clutch because they've continually shrunk down the cases and shaved weight to the point where these are tiny in the frames it doesn't even look like a 250 in here this looks more like a 125 motor 300 whatever it's it's tiny along the same lines they've shaved down the weight of the frames they've just they've trimmed everything so that this bike kind of feels like an e-mountain bike it's so light and flickable and fun and i just i get super excited to ride a bike that i can throw around and feel like a mountain bike so the suspension on this what's what designates a w from like an xc or an sx on ktm's line is pds suspension no link in the back uh i kind of grew up riding with this suspension so i still like it a lot a lot of true off-road guys love it the linkage isn't in the way and it just has a little different feel off-road um when you're going slower and maneuvering more technical stuff the fork is the explorer fork it's open cartridge it's a little more flowy for off-road situations we picked up this bike brand new no hours on it broke it in in the morning rode it for a few hours and as the day went on the suspension like loosened up and the fork works really well if you kind of slap down off something and push the front end you'll feel the stops but i'm fine with that because this is a trail bike it's a technical bike and i want the fork moving and i can i can adjust for that a little bit with quicker settings and stuff but overall the plush feel of this bike i like a lot like i said i've always been a fan of pds in the rear for off-road riding all right so one of the coolest things about this bike is its low speed capability it's technical off-road riding it's power delivery the plush suspension i mean i love playing around at slow speed going through rock gardens and just even in second gear when you think you should be in first and the motor pulls down so low you barely have to feather the clutch and just roll it on and it it avoids that violent wheel spin that would kick you out crooked or sideways overall it's pretty stable i'm a guy who loves stabilizers on a two-stroke that would be one of the things i did to any two-stroke i own is i just put a stabilizer on the front kind of calm down the chassis two strokes are light this one is especially light so it just doesn't feel like a big four-stroke when you're going a little faster for guys who love snappy power and just brute power and wheel spin and all that this 300 isn't going to be as exciting as a carbureted 300 it's just the nature of the fuel injection i would much rather trade a little less snap for perfect quote jetting or mapping all the time and the ability just to idle down in the past when you're on a two-stroke and you kind of came down a downhill pull in the clutch start negotiating something you kind of had to clean it out or rev it or if you had a long downhill where the motor isn't running very high you had to kind of clean it out to get it to be perfect jetting again with the tpi you can literally pull in the clutch take a one or two minute downhill get to the bottom snap the throttle and it's going to be ready to go no more loading up no more burbling out the back like i said the quote jetting thing is it's weird to use on a fuel-injected motorcycle but that's the best way i can describe it so one of the coolest things about the introduction of fuel injection to two strokes and everything is ktm has designed this oil filler so it self-injects oil into the mixture based on the computer settings based on throttle position based on what the bike is computing it feeds in the oil ratio so literally you can get sometimes three tanks of gas before you have to refill your two-stroke oil in here and it's super efficient because it'll feel out the load feel out the rpms and adjust that lubrication if you're just putting along and cruising and there's not a lot of load on the motor it's not spitting a lot of oil into that fuel mixture again you don't get the burble out of the tailpipe you don't get the thick loaded up fuel mixture and that is a huge feature there's a lot of skepticism or there was when this first came out that how is this going to know how much oil to mix in with the gas and is it going to be too lean and mess up your motor or detonate or do anything bad i mean the last three years since the introduction of this bike has proven that this system works just fine there's no more issues with this than it would be somebody not mixing their own fuel right and blowing up a motor this system works really well that's not an issue it's awesome there's not a lot i would change on this motorcycle out of the box obviously it doesn't come with a skid plate if you're going to ride off-road you really need a skid plate so i'd find some probably like a plastic based skid plate on here that would slide easy when you land on stuff these tires aren't bad i would run these until i wore them out just because they work but i would switch to a kind of a stickier compound rear some sort of more enduro-y style hard enduro tire on the back full wrap hand guards just because i dropped it a few times today it's been dropped it is what it is radiator guards i would definitely use radiator guards because i don't like to pay for radiators radio guards are cheaper than a radiator but in general man there's if if i lived in a state that didn't care what motorcycle i rode down the street and i could put a plate on it this would be the only bike i had all right thanks for checking out this video stay tuned to upshift subscribe watch more videos there's always new videos coming out on cool products and don't forget there's a free monthly magazine digital magazine that comes out every month there's over 50 issues out now so check those things out i know you're bored at work so read through those watch the videos and stay tuned to up shift online [Music] you

Channel: UPSHIFT ONLINE

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Rating: 4.931232 out of 5

Keywords: upshift online, upshift, motorcycle, motorbike, motorsport, dual sport, dualsport, adventure, adventure bike, adventure rider, adventure motorcycle, dirtbike, dirt bike, enduro, hard enduro, offroad, motocross, rally raid, overland, explore, travel, road trip, world travel, travel video, photography, landscape, backcountry, back roads, wanderlust, adventure touring, touring, single track, trail ride, ktm, ktm enduro, endurocross, 300 XC-W, tpi, two stroke, 2 stroke, desert, 300 XC-W TPi, 300, adv

Id: AwsQYNr6RBo

Length: 9min 34sec (574 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021