OUR BIKES
round-eyed Speed Triples . It ’ s essentially a 2010 model but it does have some parts from the 2011 model including clocks and suspension . And it didn ’ t take too long to discover that the Triple ’ s Achilles heel was the front suspension . Basically , it ’ s bloody awful out of the box . Fantastic on smooth roads , but it was truly horrible on rough surfaces , especially ripples , as the front simply couldn ’ t deal with rapid changes and would get stiffer and stiffer until it was so harsh , I could pretty much tell the difference between a 5mm bump in the road and a 7mm one . A bit of research confirmed that the real problem was that the front damping stack is very poor in compression and rebound , not able to flow enough oil to deal with rapid changes of road surface and was prone to roll over and play dead until the bumps in the road smoothed out . Now , I would say here that I am in to a little bit of spirited riding and if I hadn ’ t been pushing the bike so hard , or the roads and backroads in Australia were less like MX tracks ,
I may not have had these problems . The fixes to this dilemma took a while to roll out as it wasn ’ t a cheap exercise . I could see that I was using an awful lot of fork travel even in normal use , so the first move was to ditch the standard 0.7kg fork springs and replace them with RaceTech 1kg units . This made a noticeable difference to fork performance although the poor damping was still there . Even a switch to slightly thinner fork oil , when the fork seals blew at around 25,000km , didn ’ t help . Getting the correct weight springs on the front then highlighted how weak the spring on the rear was and , whilst getting the stock rear shock upgraded was an option , the smart money was replacement with an aftermarket unit . A few brands were tagged as good options and in the end I went with a custombuilt Nitron unit . This is a seriously excellent bit of kit , easy to adjust , looks great and works better . It wasn ’ t cheap but the improvement over stock made it well worth the cost .
46 KIWI RIDER