Worried that KTM’s financial woes might endanger its fun side projects? We are indeed seeing an impact on its race teams’ long-term prognostics, and even some short-term effects on racing. The FIM’s 2025 Hard Enduro championship was canceled after the title sponsor, KTM, pulled out. But other stuff is going ahead still—including this year’s team-up with Brabus.
Brabus is usually known for their supercars, but in the past few years, they’ve also built high-performance motorcycles with help from KTM. Basically, their bikes are very similar to KTM’s Duke-series V-twins mechanically speaking, with similar electronics packages as well, but they look a lot different. Their first machine was the Brabus 1300 R, which came out in 2022, based off the 1290 V-twin from KTM. This bike’s production run sold out in minutes of its introduction for pre-orders, and the Brabus 1300 R Masterpiece followed that machine in 2023, also with no trouble selling. And about this time in 2024, we saw that Brabus was working on three new machines: the Brabus 1400 R Rocket, Brabus 1400 R Tailor Made, and Brabus 1400 R Signature.
And then, we had KTM’s Autumn Of Discontent. After sounding the alarm for a few months with increasing urgency, by fall of 2024, management in Austria said they needed to restructure or go bust. With leadership changing, and no money for nice things, would the Brabus project go ahead? Things went very quiet; a deal seemed unlikely. But then Motorcycle.com’s web sleuths once again found details indicating the deal is going ahead.
There isn’t much to go on, but we do know this: Brabus is building a 1400 with help from KTM, and that bike has approval by the American EPA. Expect it in the States in the next few months.
It should have around 190 hp on-tap, and about 107 lb-ft on tap, same as the 1390, as it went into the US under the same EPA certification. Lots of hairy-chested fun, if you can afford it.
Will it come to Canada? Hard to say, but with the hyper-limited production of this series, we won’t be first, second or third on the list.
