Good news for Supersport enthusiasts: six months after the launch of the ‘track-only’ RC 8C, there seems to be a street version of KTM’s midsize Supersport. Test driver Jeremy McWilliams has been spotted out in the wild with what our British colleagues at MCN believe will be a 990 version of that RC 8C.
If there is one bike that is high on the list of many Supersport enthusiasts, it is undoubtedly the KTM RC8R, which was put on the market by the Austrians in 2009 as the successor to the RC8 launched a year earlier. was plagued by quite a few teething problems in the first year.
However, the timing of the RC8R’s launch could not have been worse, 2009 was the year that the financial world was in the grip of the credit crunch and the motorcycle market collapsed – especially the Supersport segment. The RC8R remained on the market until 2015, but never became a sales success.
In 2015, the curtain fell for the RC8R, which also seemed to be the end of KTM’s one-litre Supersport adventure. KTM’s CEO Stefan Pierer said he believes that these types of bikes were far too fast for road use and that the RC8 project was canceled for that reason.
Since then, however, KTM has invested very successfully in road racing motorsport, with victories in Moto3, Moto2 and MotoGP, definitively boosting KTM’s image towards the street and track.
For six years, KTM only had two models in its range: the RC 125 and RC 390, for which an international cup was even set up, but there was no more than that. Until the summer of this year the RC 8C was presented, a track-only bike derived from the Moto2 racing bike, powered by the LC8c parallel twin of the 890 Duke.
Where the RC 8C was presented by KTM as a one-off project, it turns out that a street-legal version was already being worked on in the utmost secrecy in Austria. The now-spotted bike is very similar in design to the RC 8R – albeit without winglets – but will be powered by the next-generation LC8c, according to MCN.
MCN suspects that with the next generation the displacement will be increased to 990cc, assuming the just under 120 hp that the 890 Duke squeezes out would give the 990 parallel twin a top power of 130+ hp. The frame bears a lot of resemblance to that of the 890 Duke, the WP APEX suspension and Brembo brakes, on the other hand, seem to be closer to the RC 8C.
It will probably be a few more years before the RC is released by KTM, but the bike could certainly bring life to the Supersport segment.
– Thanks for information from Motorfreaks.