What Fuel Injection Offers For Performance
WHAT FUEL INJECTION OFFERS FOR PERFORMANCE
"Who cares what happens when it doesn't work," said Larry Acedo, staring at the Kawasaki Classic’s fuel injection system. “All I care about is how it works."
Acedo’s words stopped everything in a conversation covering the problems a Classic owner might face if the system quit working along some rural road.
Acedo is a hard-core high-performance freak, and helps tune Roger McPhail’s 11.45-sec. stock-class KZ1000 for Dragbike! national drag races. A born-again Christian, Acedo is deadly serious about his motorcycles, his Kawasaki motorcycles. The Classic had just converted him to fuel injection, and all he hadn’t figured out yet was what drag racing class the bike would have to run in.
McPhail had started it, calling with a report that someone in the Midwest had bolted a header system onto a Classic and the electronic fuel injection system had automatically compensated for the increased air flow, fattening up the mixture without any tampering.
Curious, we took our test Classic back to the dragstrip, where it had already turned 12.06 sec. at 110.42 mph. Acedo
met us at the track, bringing an R.C. Engineering exhaust system off his personal LTD 1000.
Because this was a new day at the track, I made several baseline passes with the bike stock. The best was 12.10 at 108.17.
We bolted on the R.C. exhaust system, complete with R.C.’s smallest, quietest street baffle.
The Classic, which bogged off the line in stock form, suddenly was wheelstandand-wheelspin prone. E.T. dropped immediately to 11.70 with a terminal of 112.50. The bike didn’t feel lean at all, so we tried pulling the air filter element. E.T. stayed about the same, but the bike still didn’t feel lean.
With the baffle removed from the megaphone, the Kawasaki turned 11.57 sec. at 114.5 mph, with no flat spots, no lean symptoms. A plug check revealed perfect color—the system was compensating.
There has to be a limit, a point at which the injection system can’t keep up with the modifications. But as it comes off the dealer’s floor, the Classic is the only motorcycle made that will respond to a bolton pipe by improving its E.T. half a second—without re-jetting.John Ulrich
