The owner of this stock 2007 KTM Adventure travelled all the way from Derbyshire, and his first words to us when he took his helmet off were; “If you can’t cure it put it in the skip…!”
The earlier fuel-injected Adventures differ from the later models in the way the ECU manages the engine, and require a slightly different approach when it comes to remapping. Later models, including bikes like the SMT (while they can individually be slightly different) the trimming of the various maps follows a particular set pattern. But with the early bikes, forget it – they need a totally custom map, built from the ground up.
This bike was truly horrible – a snatchy, awkward-to-ride mess. By the time we’d finished on the Dyno, built the custom map, it was a big pussycat. The owner, a switched on bloke, wanted to understand what exactly we’d done to the ECU, so he came into the Dyno room and had a good look at all the parameters changed – secondary butterfly valves, lambda, ignition and fuelling – on the computer screen, while we explained what we’d done, and why.
He left a happy man; he not only understood a little more about how his bike worked, he fired an email over to Gill to back up what we’d found on the test ride – his bike had been transformed, for the better.
Early Adventures are much harder work to remap – but the end result is worth the effort.
