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Fabrizio Meoni's KTM
Lea 950 Rally
(Left) Meoni pushes his prized machine through staging at the last Dakar Rally.
(Above) Fortunately for the author (a street-riding specialist), the bike had been
crashed before. In fairness, how many people can handle a 125-mph motorcycle in
the sand?
(Below) The 950 Rally is definitely on the tall side, to provide ground clearance and
a higher vantage point from which the rider can scope his surroundings.
have to baby it a little - but it has
smooth, progressive pickup, and is
very controllable when slipping it to
get good traction on the loose stuff.
The gearbox action is really sweet,
even if I could only persuade myself
to use the bottom four ratios even on
faster desert tracks. (Holweg once
worked concocting gearboxes for
BMW Boxers.)
125, BABY!
The 75-degree motor delivers
absolutely no undue vibration, in
spite of being rigidly mounted in the
open-loop frame - no rubber mountings - so the twin weights on the single balance shaft do their stuff perfectly. Though I didn't reach Sala's
maximum telemetry-confirmed top
speed of 125 mph on the 17 -mile
straight leading back toward civilization in the form of the Ali Baba Cafe
(the world's most remote truckstop), I
did get it motoring along pretty well,
and there's no doubt this will make
an absolutely fantastic streetbike
motor.
Roll-on is excellent even in top
gear at relatively low engine speeds,
denoting the motor's ultra-flexibility,
and it's evident there's not very much
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JULY 24,2002'
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transmission snatch at low speeds,
again making it easy to hold a gear in
the rough stuff and worry about survival rather than getting the right
ratio.
The LCa engine has an extremely
distinctive exhaust note compared to
other V-twins, robust and muscular
sounding, but also higher-pitched not only compared to all the 90degree brigade (whether Japanese or
of the desmodromic persuasion), but
also to the 50-degree Aprilia. And
that's at all revs, not only higher up.
The quartet of open-exhaust KTM Vtwins at full noise sounded like nothing so much as the turn-one traffic
jam in an AMA National half-mile
dirt-track, peopled by a herd of
XR750 Harleys. Yup - Saharan
swine ...
Yet the responsiveness of the KTM
engine lower down,is a key factor in
overcoming the only significant
downside of the V-twin architecture,
which is that even with the lower center of gravity compared to a taller
single, it inherently places more
weight on the front wheel.
That's just what you want for tarlJ1ac territory, but even with the ultralong 24.7-inch swingarm fitted to the
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