STATE OF TUNE(ING)
No matter how great an engine is, you can always get more out of it. That might mean putting a £50 loud pipe on your learner 125 to get another 5mph on the downhill stretch of your commute to college. Or, it might mean paying a top tuner £15k to add an extra 10bhp to your 205bhp Kawasaki ZX-10R trackday bike. The means are very different, but the end is the same: getting more of what you want out of your motor. So what’s changed in tuning over the past 20 or 30 years? Well, some of the basic principles have remained largely the same – increasing the power from an engine, by adding torque, raising the engine revs, or both at once. Horsepower, remember, is a function of torque (turning force at the crankshaft) and speed (the revs where it makes this force). Make more torque at the same engine speed, maintain the same torque at a higher rpm, or some mix of the two, and you’ll go faster, roughly speaking.
Those principles might be the same, but the way tuners achieve them has changed, massively in some ways. That’s down to a few things – firstly, bikes have got a lot better to start with. A lot of the work which tuners would have to carry out 30 years ago is now done at the factory, or is already optimised, so the gains are very marginal. Secondly, manufacturing and materials science has improved the strength and reliability of engine internals, so,
