They say idle mind is a devil's workshop. As the year ended, I saw a few online stores running sales and I wanted to add a few more bits to the bike. It was parked at IndiMotard's Greasehouse, waiting for the fairings to be painted and the trackday at MMRT is still a few weeks away. Placed orders via the online stores I frequently use, and I got the following items:
Thermal Technology "Pro" tyre warmers
Thermal tech is a relatively behind the scenes manufacturer when it comes to tyre warmers. They've been supplying tyre warmers to a whole bunch of professional racing teams including the Aprilia Gresini team and the Ducati Corse teams. They have a nice
catalogue of offerings catering to novice as well as professional usage. I went through them and found the sweet spot to be between the "Pro" and "Performance" variants. I've used CarpiMoto.it in the past to source products from Europe and I used them this time as well to source the tyre warmers. They are very professional, helpful and responsive. I wrote to them when my credit card payments were declined and they helped with an alternative means of doing a wire transfer. They shipped the warmers as soon as I sent a confirmation and it reached my hands in just about a few days time. The shipment was sent via DHL, so customs clearance was taken care by DHL.
I was also going through HSBKracing to see if there were some unique and useful stuff for the bike. Ended up getting these.
Spider captive spacers for the front and rear wheels
These are very useful if you end up changing tires often, which is mostly in my case as the tires last for about 3-4 days of track riding.
Spider brake lever guard - this is more of a whimsical purchase than a necessity
Spider adjustable billet folding brake and clutch levers
Why the levers and not some Brembo RCS / Accossato stuff like people usually do. The stock master cylinder is more than adequate for my needs, and has also been tested by PerformanceBikes magazine to stand itself against Brembo's RCS 17 & 19 units. The AF1 forum also had good literature on how the stock PRS16 master cylinder is quite capable and has that good balance of feel vs. power. But why these billet levers. The stock brake lever is cast aluminium and does flex a bit when holding close to max brake pressure. The billet ones offer more stiffness and therefore transmit that feel a lot better. The folding lever is more of icing on the cake.
I'm not dissing on the Brembo RCS products in anyway, just that they aren't needed unless your stock bike came with a really mismatched master cylinder (or) a non-radial master cylinder. Most of the newer generation bikes come well equipped so it is better to spend the money elsewhere. The RCS units are more for street application and if you really look at professional usage, they would be using the billet ones which are quite a lot expensive.
Saving the best for the last - finally decided to take the plunge and got the UpMap T800 with Gabro's map. I've read so much about Gabro's work via the forums and consider him to be one of the best aftermarket tuners when it comes to the Aprilia V4 platform. In the past, if you wanted Gabro's tune on your bike, you had to either purchase a pre-flashed ECU from him (or) send your ECU to him to get it flashed. Neither of those options works out well for us as shipping a sensitive unit like ECU back and forth did no go well with me.
The approach is simple enough. UpMap sells their T800 unit which is capable of flashing a tune to your ECU. They then sell a bike specific adaptor cable that plugs into the T800 unit. You download their app from the App Store and then it pairs with the T800 device. You can then proceed to flash Gabro's off the shelf map (refined over the official Aprilia Race map) or purchase his specific map (air filter / exhaust combination) which is a lot more refined as fine tunes them over a dyno using individual lambda probes for each cylinder and refines the aTC logic to make better use of grippy slick tyres on the race track. He basically takes the stock TC levels (8 in number), discards the levels from 4-8 and expands the levels 1-4 into 8 levels to give you a lot more fine grained calibration. This also takes into account greater levels of lean angle that one would achieve on the track. The bonus is this map also transmits a few more parameters over the diagnostic, so the AIM unit will see a few more channels now. Obviously, I went with the bespoke map - he had a specific map for the combination of stock motor, sprint filter and Akrapovic full system exhaust. This also means that warranty is now in my head. But this is a price I'm willing to pay for the refinement and track only usage.
Without the skin, fairings are sent for painting/stickering/wrapping work.
Flashing the map is a 20min affair. The UpMap device itself gets updated with a new firmware upon the first time connect. And then, you purchase a map as per your needs which can then be flashed. The flashing also takes care of resetting your throttle learning (ride by wire). All you need to do post flashing is run the aPRC calibration once and then enjoy the ride.
I hope to ride at MMRT towards the end of the month if things go well (omicron, lockdowns etc). Will post up my feedback post that.