“IF YOU WANT A SUPER DUKE RR IN YOUR GARAGE, YOU'VE BASICALLY GOT TO WAIT FOR SOMEONE TO GIVE THEIRS UP.”
Forty-five minutes is all it took for KTM to sell all 500 machines of one-off special version of the otherwise brilliant 1290 Super Duke R. No fanfare, no press launch, not even a press bike available for those of us lucky to have the golden ticket that usually gets access to pretty much any bike we want. Just an announcement that it's been built, what the specification and price is, and a date and time – 9am on April 8, 2021 – when you can order one online. Just 60 people in the UK were fast enough to snap one up for the £21,499 asking price, which at the time was a massive £5750 more than the asking price of the base Super Duke R. If you want a Super Duke RR in your garage today, you've basically got to wait for someone to give theirs up or, like me, be lucky enough to come across someone who's happy to lend theirs. In that scenario, grab the chance with both hands and also buy a lottery ticket. The odds of winning the lottery are about the same as not only finding an RR, but also getting the keys to it for a few weeks… therefore a lottery win is a dead cert. The other reason to buy a ticket is that now, having ridden it on the road and track, I need a lottery win so I can buy one for myself.
In a break from the usual format of introducing the bike to you, explaining its place in the world, telling you what it's like to ride,
