Apologies for the mixed metaphor, but bear with me. The small-capacity adventure / trail market segment is insanely popular at the moment. Adventure riders tend to be older and greyer than most, and the bigger machines are, frankly, all getting a bit much. Some riders are even using competition Enduro race bikes as Adventure bikes because they’ re highly capable for extreme terrain and therefore make easy work of what huge machines make almost impossible. But, for getting between the adventure bits? Not so great. The‘ goldilocks’ or‘ unicorn’ adventure bike is getting closer, but I don’ t think we are quite there yet. So, with all that in mind, we wanted to compare two bikes vying for that crown. These are small-ish capacity models that are broadly the same, yet very different in feel and looks and to ride. Firstly, apart from greying hair, why are the smaller machines becoming so popular? It all seems a little contradictory to what the manufacturers have been doing for the last couple of decades or so. As a youngster, Yamaha’ s TT500 seemed an awesome machine, then Honda’ s XR500 took my fancy. Later, hopefully some of you will remember when the KTM Super Enduro was the ultimate beast( almost 20 years ago now!), with around 100hp and under 200kg wet. Yes, it was fun and capable, in fact it was very hard to fault bar a small fuel tank limiting range. Now we have almost 1400cc bikes bouncing around at over 250kg with more than 150hp. Perhaps things have gone a little too far? Certainly, for tyre life anyway.