THE LEAP FORWARD

can clearly remember when in 2008 Husqvarna brought out the first TE450 with fuel injection. People flipped out. Some jumped on it and some swore they wouldn’t touch it until the technology was proven, even though EFI had been around since the fifties and, to be honest, it was never going to be the worst component on that bike. At that point EFI for a two-stroke dirtbike was a small story, very much in the background, but it was stirring nonetheless. It was in fact being developed by an Australian company called Orbital, which was in contact with another company called Kronreif and Trunkenpolz Mattighofen. The Orbital system was quite different and more complicated than what we have now, so eventually KTM went off and looked at a direct injection system which very nearly made production. But then the company hit what it believed was the perfect recipe in the Transfer Port Injection system that we now have