The KTM Barracuda Hydrofoil

Austria’s KTM diversified from its competition off-road motorcycle core product with first it's razor-sharp road bike range, and more recently the X-Bow road-registerable racecar. There’s no doubt new markets are on the horizon and a recent design study has unearthed an interesting potential next stop for the company that prides itself on its machinery being “Ready to Race.” The KTM Barracuda Hydrofoil has been conceived as a circuit racing machine for the water. Extremely agile, yet designed to be self-stabilizing, the Barracuda takes the philosophy of the RC8 superbike and X-BOW sportscar to the water.

Sebastien Stassin, the project co-ordinator and a senior designer at KTM’s design consultancy KISKA, set design students at Graz’s Fachhochschule Joanneum the task of envisioning future forms and interpretations of the KTM design theme.

Not surprisingly (student design challenges are always rich sources of free-thinking), a number of extraordinary futuristic styling concepts have emerged from the competition with the barracuda hydrofoil the most left-field, and two superb reinterpretations of the four wheeled variety being the “AX offroad buggy”, and the “SR 85 deuce” electric racecar.

“Free thinking was the main objective,” Stassin explains. “The results are both spectacular and fascinating.

“All of us at KISKA and our colleagues at KTM are delighted with the innovation and breadth of open-mindedness. These students exhibit a genuinely thrilling vision of what might be in the KTM product portfolio in future decades. At this stage these concepts are simply design studies, and bear no real indication of future production models. But at KTM, we never say never!”

The AX offroad buggy

The AX is a radically styled off-road vehicle with technology to matchwhich draws on KTM’s success with both its off-road motorcycles and the road-going, minimalist X-BOW. With hybrid propulsion, four individually-steerable electric motors, huge ground clearance and reinforced tyres AX offers fantastic traction and agility.

The SR 85 Deuce

The SR 85 was envisioned as a street racer a decade into the future - as the project ran during 2008, the SR 85 Deuce is a street racer for the year 2018.

The designer theorised that race cars would be electric by then and hence make no noise. Accordingly, the opportunity exists for motorsport to be taken back to the population with small inner city racetracks similar to the way speedway once thrived in England due to its proximity to the masses.

The SR 85 Deuce is powered by four in-wheel high-torque electric motors and designed to dominate such short-course events.