MISSION IMPROBABLE
IGOR Akrapovič is a remarkable man, who’s earned his eponymous exhaust company’s runaway success and its A-1 Dun & Bradstreet business rating through a combination of hard work, commercial honesty, clever development and an insistence on quality. His company celebrates its 30th birthday in 2021, with well over 100 World Championship-winning bikes having worn Akrapovič exhausts over the past three decades.
Still, you wouldn’t really expect the Slovenian sultan of sound’s products to equip Harley-Davidson and Indian custom cruisers alongside the Yamaha YZR-M1 racers of Valentino Rossi, Maverick Viñales and Fabio Quartararo, or Jonathan Rea’s Kawasaki ZX-10R. But that’s indeed the case, for this serial success has been achieved without Akrapovič becoming distracted from serving its everyday retail customers, or from driving expansion in new market sectors where looks and above all sound are what attract customers to the sign of the scorpion — Akrapovič means ‘scorpion’ in Slovene — stamped on more than 100,000 complete exhaust systems and over three times as many slip-on silencers produced each year.
In order to promote his
