It’s the first time we’ve had one of these bikes through our doors, and in our view this 250 Ninja would suit an awful lot of people; the physical size of the bike, plus good (but not massive or intimidating) power and decent fuel efficiency. The new model is a 300, so a bit more of everything; the owner of this one brought it to us for a Power Commander set-up.
Which we would have done straight away, except its chain and sprockets were hanging off (and this is after some work by his local dealer…) so we weren’t getting good readings on the Dyno. The customer had a fair ride home, so couldn’t leave it for us to sort – so he took it away, got the chain and sprockets sorted, and came back.
The Power Commander went on fine. We blanked off the secondary air valve and got rid of the lambdas with an 02 Eliminator; one thing you have to be aware of with Kwaks is that the heater element for the lambda will come on in 5th gear. Generally once you’re travelling in 5th or 6th speeds are around the 70mph mark and the airflow will cool the engine down, rendering the catalyzer inefficient. The heater element comes on, activates the lambda which leans out the mixture to get the cat working again. Generally, when we remap an ECU directly we can sort anything like this out and while the 02 Eliminator deals with most problems some issues can arise.
The bike came in with 25bhp, and after the Power Commander was properly mapped left us with 28.5bhp – a good percentage increase relative to the total output, and a nice throttle delivery with it.
A lovely little tool – and after a Power Commander fit and some Dyno time, now making a good dollop of extra go…
