Destry's setup is a little low in the rear and pretty stiff in the front. It isn't the best turning package, but we all know desert racers can't turn anyways (ha!). How he runs at the front of the WORCS pack...well, we'll just shut up now. In actuality, the bike can and will turn, you just have to mean it and the front end will stick. The larger tank doesn't help this but, then, Destry can go for over an hour on fuel, wide open. And once you get used to the bike's turning character it isn't bad, just different. But where the bike was pure magic was in the braking bumps. You could pretty much ignore them or hit them any way you wanted coming into turns while still in control. The rest of the time the bike acted very stable and sometimes a little heavy feeling; we place a lot of the blame on the larger-capacity tank and the power, both affect this. Overall impression, for the faster stuff, this bike is dialed. Get into true motocross and it acts like an off-road bike.
Getting to the nitty gritty, we put the bike through the EnduroCross test, which revealed some heaviness and bulk. Like the Precision Concepts Honda CRF450F, the tighter and more technical, especially with stop-and-go action, the more that 450cc race bikes become a handful. It has a lot to do with power and a little to do with the weight as stock versions of these bikes would have tackled EnduroCross better. Stock versions with this race suspension would've been even better. But a stock motor would get blown away everywhere else, especially at the level this bike is designed to run. Knowing how fast and open GP racecourses are only made it more obvious how pointed and focused this KLX is. It seemed to run the longest between the gears of any bike in the test and required the least amount of shifting. The binders made easy work of late braking, and then inside or outside through the turns the bike pulled with authority. In our GP test this bike was ever so close to the CRF450, it would've come down to personal preferences for any rider. And we know Destry likes it better than anyone. -Jimmy Lewis
The Victor!
KTM 300 XC-W(e)
In the end you can have only one winner. We could've picked several, easily, but then there wouldn't be a true winner, now would there? That's why we gave out some distinctive awards throughout the comparison. In the end it wasn't really hard for us to agree on one thing, that the KTM 300 XC-W(e) was an amazing bike that met every challenge we threw at it, finishing at the top of almost everyone's opinions in the subjective tests and near or on top of the charts on the timed tests. It has the amazing ability to hang with the four-strokes where they shined and stick it to them when weight and agility become an issue. It even starts just like them, thank you very much. This, at a time when most have banked that two-strokes are dead. This is also the least modified bike in the test, therefore costing less, in some cases thousands less, than the other bikes. It easily strikes a chord for those of us on a budget and at the same time offers a high performance platform that's ready to compete better than modified bikes since the rider has the ability to personalize it further yet. KTM was selling ready to race. And for this test, that was plenty to win.