CLOSE TO THE MARK

Knowing how to pitch a new bike is a nightmare for a manufacturer as they are forced to look so far into the future. If you build a brand new machine you don’t want it to become obsolete within a few years, as that’s a hell of a lot of R&D cash pissed up the wall. But, by the same token, you don’t want it to be behind the game on its launch either. So what’s the answer? To be honest the only ploy is to study your competition and react to what they have, ideally upping the stakes very slightly, while building in room for development as the years pass. Sadly for KTM, when they released their RC8 in 2008 the competition consisted of Ducati – and they had just