[Video Transcript]
Hello! I’m RyanF9 and here are 5 ways to get more performance from your bike.
First up – ninja star – ‘cause nothing is faster than a ninja.
What this actually is is a front sprocket . If you want to make a huge difference to the way your motorcycle goes, for the least amount of time and money, change your gearing.
So, who remembers high school physics? Basically if we enlarge the radius of the rear sprocket we have more leverage, so it takes less force for the wheel to go round. The downside is that the chain now has to travel further to make my tire do a full revolution. We could get the exact same effect by decreasing the size of the front sprocket, since that changes the ratio by the same amount.
Dammit – still sounds complicated. So here’s what happens in the real world.
Going down one tooth in the front, which is the same as going up three teeth in the rear, equals more acceleration and a slower top speed. Going up one tooth in the front, or going down three teeth in the rear, equals less acceleration and a faster top speed.
The question is, should I make the changes to my front sprocket, or my rear one?
There are benefits to both. Changing your rear sprocket allows for more precision, since each tooth on the rear has less overall effect. On the other hand, swapping your front sprocket is nice because you’ll feel a big difference in the way your bike handles just from dropping or adding a single tooth, and you won’t even have to buy a different length chain because your axel adjustment can make up for the distance of a single link.
Some people say you should replace the chain when you change your sprockets anyway, since the two are married and therefore must grow old together. The danger is that your sprocket will wear away quicker if you mate it with a chain that’s already been around the block a few times.
Personally, I don’t think that’s such a big deal. Odds are your sprocket will wear quicker whether you replace the chain or not, since dropping a tooth makes the chain do a tighter U-turn and that always produces more friction.
Now you might be thinking that it’s stupid to screw with sprockets – I mean surely the brilliant engineers at BMW got it right the first time…
Wrong! Manufacturers often pass noise restrictions by purposely gearing their bikes low, so they don’t have to use high rpms to achieve high speeds and are therefore quieter. So you will often get faster lap times with an aftermarket gearing ratio and some builders (like Ducati) specifically design their bikes to go down a tooth from the factory setting. Crazy.
Now sprockets are a neat way to give your bike more acceleration or top speed but you can’t have it both ways because we’re not actually making power, just shifting it around.
Plus swapping sprockets often throws off your odometer and speedometer, which is annoying.
So instead let’s take a more purist pursuit of performance. More air, more gasoline, bigger explosions.
What you’re looking at here is a combustion sandwich – it’s the way our motorcycles like to eat. We have air intake, air exhaust, and fuel controllers in the middle. No sandwich is complete without all three parts and if you try to “improve” just one of them, your motorcycle will develop an eating disorder, running either too lean or too rich.
Now that I’ve totally milked my sandwich metaphor, let’s look at each component. Motorcyclists always install aftermarket exhausts first, so the hot babes know where to find them. There are also weight-saving benefits, especially if you install a full system that “forgets” to include heavy legal things like catalytic converters. But the real performance gain is airflow – even with a little slip-on like this – my motorcycle will be able to puff harder than Puff Daddy.
That’s all well and good, but if I can’t breathe air in at the same rate as my exhaust blows it out, I’ve achieved precisely dick. So get a high-flow air filter. K&N makes the best washable filters in the world – you’ll only ever have to buy one .
Now my bike is gulping air like an Olympic swimmer. But all that’s gonna do is make my engine run lean unless I can get more fuel in there. That’s where the middle of my sandwich comes in. If your bike is carbureted, you need a jet kit. Dynojet makes the best ones, they often come with three different options and for a bike with a high-flow air filter and exhaust, it’s usually the Stage 2 jet that you want, but be prepared to try another if your bike runs lean or rich.
For fuel-injected bikes, on the other hand, you need a fuel controller. Smarter people than me have said that Dynojet’s Power Commanders are best, so that’s what I chose. Now you’ll have to download a fuel map onto this for your bike to run. There are lots of options online, but of course any halfwit can throw his engine-destroying map online. So instead look to Power Commander’s website or the manufacturer of your exhaust – Two Brothers in my case – and see if they have a map that matches your particular exhaust and bike. One good hack is to actually find a map for your motorcycle and a particular exhaust before you buy the exhaust , that way you’ll make your purchase with a relevant fuel map already in hand.
Otherwise it’s off to the dyno to get a custom map made. But technicians charge by the hour and it’s common to pay upwards of 500 bucks for a good tune.
Now for our third mod, how can I get quicker handling?
Lighter wheels are always faster to turn-in. If you’ve ever seen a gyroscope, you know that a spinning wheel will resist a change to its axis. That force is related to angular momentum, which is related to mass, ergo, lighter wheels are quicker to turn-in.
The other benefit is grip. When a light wheel hits a bump in the road, it jumps upward with less force than a heavy wheel would. So your suspension has an easier time pushing your tire back into contact with the pavement, resulting in more grip. Entire books have been written on the subject of un-sprung mass but the gist of it is – lighter wheels, quicker suspension reactions, better handling.
The only downsides to lighter wheels are obvious. The metal is thinner and weaker… not such a big deal at the track, but if you spearhead a pothole they’ll get bent outta shape. Also featherweight metals and carbon fibres are inherently expensive.
Fourth performance mod – steel braided cables and better pads.
But hold on – does a mod for braking faster really count as a mod for going faster ?
Yes – watch MotoGP – the answer is yes.
I got my stainless steel lines from Galfer , because they’ve been stopping sportbikes since World War II. The Teflon-lined steel will not expand , so all the pressure I put onto my lever goes straight into pushing my pads, which results in a stronger, more direct braking feel.
Speaking of pads – I chose these EBC Double-H sintered ones because they feel similar to the pads that come stock on a lot of supersport bikes, and that’s what I’m used to. 50 bucks for a pair, big ventilation channel to prevent overheating, they’re stellar.
But if you’re in an intermediate or advanced group on track day, the double-H will still fade on you. Might want to jump up to the EPFA, which is EBC’s most race-worthy pad that you can still run on the street. Or you could go further into a track-only pad like the GPFAX .
And finally , my fifth mod is a set of high-performance tires.
This is a Metzeler Racetec RR – easily the fastest choice from my 2017 sport tires video. It mainly shines between here and here. Because the rayon carcass is so rigid, you’ll have ruthless surgical precision when lining up the next turn and then when you hit it – at the very limit – the Racetec is monumentally stable. Moreso than Supercorsas, Q3s, RS10s… especially moreso than the older Interacts.
If you have the balls to get to the limit, a proper supersport tire is the most effective performance mod on this list.
And yet , there are even better “mods” that money can’t buy. This piece of meat can be improved more than anything on your motorcycle. Read A Twist of the Wrist , learn to tune your suspension, book track time with better riders than you are and stay in good shape. I once heard a 300-lb man explain that his clutch lever shaved 30 grams. Think about that.
So we’ve now seen 5 mods that make your motorcycle faster. Thanks for watching.