The engine is good – very good – but because it’s manageable it doesn’t slap you in the face with its brilliance. The handling is neither sharp, nor slow, it’s just right – but again that doesn’t call out for your immediate appreciation.

And that suspension – it does its job so well, with so little fuss, that yet again, you might miss its significance. Anybody who knows Yamaha will understand that this is so Yamaha.

It makes bikes that don’t so much stand out for any one key attribute, but are instead so well-rounded that the resultant bike is greater than the sum of its parts. A KTM might turn tighter, a Husaberg might hit with harder bottom-end punch, a Suzuki might rev on to a more powerful top-end, but around a complete course the Yamaha can come away with the fastest time overall.

The handling is decidedly good. It doesn’t do the ‘nip and tuck’ of a tight turn that an EXC does so well, but everywhere else it just feels so accurate. In this test we were at times running over a rock-strewn riverbed in the meat of fourth-gear, going from sand to pebbles, to hard-pack and dust, then to a stream crossing and loose sand again, and it was uncanny just how accurately it tracked through the lot.

It took nothing short of a big boulder to deflect the WR from its path. Make that your path – the WR likes to please; it goes where you ask it to go, not where it thinks you should go. Similarly, racing up a zig-zag path through a wooded hillside the WR would stick so dependably to a line it almost felt like a road racer. Yamaha said it wanted the handling to be confidence inspiring – and it got that bang on.

That handling is certainly aided by what felt like well-chosen suspension settings. Seriously fast types might want to go firmer, depending on where they ride, but the feeling of plushness from the Kayabas will make KTM’s WP team blush.

The WR’s set-up was incredibly well matched to the job, helping the Metzeler Six-Day Extreme knobbies deliver great feel over every surface. So often on this test we were able to ignore what was going on under the tyres and simply concentrate on the corner at the end of the next section.

The pet joy was simply launching the WR, in third-gear, out of all manner of corners – either sitting and letting the front wheel paw the air, or standing and letting the 120-section rear slide and spray gravel and rock all over the hillside.

The engine takes some appreciating. It won’t necessarily blow your doors off, but ride the WR for long enough and it starts making more and more sense.

The bottom-end is average, the mid-range is strong and long (but not that strong and not that long), while the top-end isn’t that special at all – although that’s a guarded comment as hauling high revs for any significant time really wasn’t going to happen at this venue. Curiously, it’s the engine’s lack of bite you’ll like the most.

In enduro it’s often the engine with the flattest power characteristics that can be exploited the best. Crack the throttle of the 450 EXC or FE 450 with anything near aggression and you’ve a fair chance of finding an imprint of the ’bar clamps in your chinguard.

They’ve got poke alright, but crack the throttle on the WR and you get a much more measured reaction. The front will come up and the back might spin, but it’s all controllable.

So instead of fighting the power, you surf on it instead, shifting your weight back for more traction or maybe leaning forward so the back spins to help finish off a turn.

BREATHE EASY

We should then call out the one significant change to the engine, the fuel injection, for praise. All the testers said it was a step up on the old carb set-up (and you don’t always hear that) for offering a great deal of sensitivity; it would understand fine increments as equally as it would great handfuls.

Occasionally, if you stopped or stalled the bike it would struggle to fire up again, but we noticed that this might be something to do with the ECU. Leave your thumb on the button waiting for it to catch and it plain would not fire. But take your thumb off for a second and try again and the WR would fire up right away.

First feedback is then very positive. Ridden in Europe, this bike impressed. This is no token effort at a refresh, it’s no facelift model. This is a comprehensively re-designed and developed new bike.

KTM might hold the high ground in enduro right now, but Yamaha has flexed some serious muscle here. And while KTM might have a formidable R&D team, we must equally applaud Yamaha for taking a global approach to the WR, taking feedback from top riders on three continents. How well the bike works in Australian conditions remains to be seen. There are minor differences in spec for the WR for different markets, reflecting emission and homologation requirements from country to country, so we’ll wait to see how strangled or otherwise the WR is when it arrives in Australia… and how well the suspension adapts, too.

We’re still a fair way from shouting "Sell orange and buy blue", but all the indicators are looking positive.

SPEX