KTM Product Boss Talks Camshafts, Company Health and The Future
We caught up with KTM’s global product manager for street bikes at EICMA to discuss where the brand is now and what’s to come
For better and worse, it’s been a chunky year for KTM. There have been big changes to parent company Pierer Mobility’s executive board amid slow sales and significant noise in the media about camshaft issues. But on the other hand, KTM returned to EICMA with a bang, presenting a more positive outlook for the future.
In the lead-up to the Milan bike show, a week didn’t go by without at least one new KTM machine getting revealed, and sure enough, its stand at Fiera Milano was massive, and absolutely chock full of new models. With all this in mind, EICMA seemed a good time and place to catch up with Stefano Branca, KTM’s global product manager for street bikes, while overlooking the KTM stand and all the shiny, new orange-ness.
In terms of how the company and the wider Pierer Mobility Group has been doing, Branca candidly addresses the issues. “In terms of company health….we are a listed company, so we have to publish our data,” he said, adding, “We are, let's say, recovering from a post-Covid situation, having a higher dealer stock than expected.”
“But it's something that we have in our body…how to handle it. There's nothing that is absolutely not under our control.”
In terms of the future, he’s upbeat, pointing to the array of bikes below us as evidence.
“You can already see what we are bringing here, how many new models we have in our line-up. We are Pierer Mobily Group and we are not giving up at all”
One of those new bikes is the road-bike-reviewing 990 RCR Track prototype, which marks itself out as a very different product to the 2025 Ducati Panigale V2 revealed a few halls over. That is a bike that has landed with a lower power figure and a more relaxed riding position than the outgoing V2.
“When we start development of the 990 RCR, we didn’t want to take any compromise to go softer,” Branca explains, adding,” We are KTM, we are “Ready To Race’, we want to show off a really competitive product. The bike is not a ‘soft supersport’ in any sense.” Shots fired…
More 990 models are on the way, too. “The motorcycle industry - it’s moving in a direction to develop a platform, and then after that…you can develop different bikes on it,” Branca says, but don’t expect to see bikes like a 990 Adventure just yet. “We have [a] plan on the 990 platform but nothing in for next year or that will be presented soon,” he confirms.
Certainly in the UK, it’s difficult to bring up the subject of KTM without someone mentioning camshaft failures, but Branca is keen to put the issue into perspective, and draw a line under it. “The camshaft topic, honestly, it's quite a big one in the UK [but] in the rest of the world it's almost not known,” he says, adding, “Because the camshaft topic just affects the 790 Adventure from 2018. 2019 and 2020."
The issue, as confirmed by a KTM PR representative, concerned "a combination of inconsistent coating of the finger followers and tolerances relating to finger-follower width, leading to increased pressure on the cam lobe causing accelerated wear". The design was subsequently changed.
For the future, it’s all about responding to customer demands, while also increasing quality across the board. Referring to the newly revealed 390 Adventure R, plus the aforementioned 990 RCR, Branca says: “People were asking to have like a small adventure, more off-road capable [bike] and we brought it. People were asking to add a supersport bike…and we brought it. We are really listening [to] what the customer is demanding.”
“Now, for us as a premium brand, as we are positioning, we have to increase even more our quality and be sure that we can deliver the expected levels.”
Matt has a background in motoring journalism of the four-wheeled variety but has long had a passion for motorbikes, taking his first steps into riding in 2010.
