This Aprilia Tuono is raced by a customer of ours who is a very fast and competent road rider, who decided that maybe he was going a little too quick for the road and took up track days; a familiar story. Once he’d got bored with trackdays he decided to go racing in the Streetfighter series, where he’s done well and really enjoys himself.
Water in the fuel filter and a dodgy vacuum pipe where hurting this race Tuono's fuelling.
The bike itself was nearly new when he bought it, and he just stuck some tyres on it and went racing. At a recent round at Snetterton, however, he had a huge problem with the fuelling – the engine started to cut out and stop, and generally not perform as expected. Now this model has a plastic fuel tank, which set the alarm bells ringing because they tend to ‘sweat’ and absorb water; we stripped the fuel filter out and replaced it with a Mahle filter (which is an aluminum canister design, much cheaper and better than the stock Aprilia item) but then also found that one of the vacuum pipes to the air pressure pipe had a fault. Once it was all back together and struck up it ran like it should.
