to floor sweepings from a long disused coal mine, mixed with recycled chip fat, some left over acetone from out the back of a nail polish factory and a little bit of black market diesel with some‘ aromatics’ to drag its sorry arse up to somewhere where it can see 91 octane. In others, our pilots would love to use it as avgas or vodka, so it is difficult to make it work well everywhere. I get it. Still, I was riding what I had where I was riding it. The short story is the fuelling needs some work. It is a bit clunky at low revs and more-so coming off a closed throttle, where it is a tad unpredictable and does weird rpm hikes. The knockon effect is it makes the quick-shifter unpredictable as well. The easy fix was to go all old school and simply use the clutch lever- remember them? It smoothed it out and the gearbox is actually pretty darned good. A map fix will be just around the next corner, as it has been on a few previous models but I’ d spend the cash and get it tuned by a good dyno operator and marvel at the change that I suspect lurks within.
TRIPLE TREAT I do like a good triple – not a typo about a good tipple, although … The engine is raucous, the exhaust sounds great but I’ m not sure how they did that with the arm-flappers in Euro5 + but there you go. The induction sound that joins in the noise at just under 7000rpm just adds to it. It is a 675cc, so don’ t expect to roll on at 80km / h to pass that truck, it will
32 KIWI RIDER