Yeah, talk about a weird combination for a race!

I pull up to a light and to my surprise I see a Black Dodge Ram SRT10 revving it's engine. I'm not sure of the year, but it had an extended cab? The one with the small backseat, but not full backseats.

Streets are clear, and I've never seen a SRT10 in real life before, so I take my chances and race him.

Sounds like he's revving pretty high on the launch, I see his truck lurching back and forth with a good amount of smoke coming out the exhaust pipe. I rev my bike to about 4000 RPM on the launch and pop the clutch. Nearly did a wheelie, but I was leaning forward to keep the weight down

He gets a quick lead off the start, I was just behind his passenger side door. In first gear I rev to about 10k and shift, the bike revs to 12k so it was far from a perfect shift. As soon as I hit second gear the bike lunges ahead and my rear tire is about 4 feet infront of his bumper....Third gear I'm a car length ahead, and by fourth gear I'm about 4 car lengths ahead.

Shut down at that point and pulled off to the side of the road to see if he'd stop and chat.....Nope, he pulled the ricer flyby.

The bike is a 2009, stock. And it's a lot like a Suzuki SV650, just with a tweaked engine, frame, and suspension.

 

Good kill! First time you've raced the bike?

 

Sure it wasn't a four door SRT-10? They came in quad cab (4-door) and regular cab only. Pretty sure the reg cab ones are manual and the quads are automatic. Good run though, and nice bike!

 

Yes sir it was! Pretty happy with the results

It must have been the quad cab then. Wish I got a better look at it...

 

raced from a dig on your bike? i thought nobody did that

 

rev it to about 8000 and DRAG the clutch out slowly, dont ever pop the clutch on a bike.

even on my SV1000 with twice the power your bike makes (also -1 tooth sproket in the front) I would rev it up to 8k and drag the clutch out. and that bike was a beast in first gear.

I also shifted at 10k-11k as power drops off at 11500, just because it can rev to 12,500 doesn't mean you should shift there, thats just "over rev" so you can stay in the gear if you need to while leaning over in a corner. how are you shifting? with the clutch? power shift? clutchless upshifting? (my fav)

good kill but when you say smoke out of the exhaust do you mean because it was cold out, or like black smoke/could have been a diesel?

 

Are you on the stock clutch baskets?

 

Hmmm good tips! I was shifting with the clutch, and from what I could tell I was doing "Ok" with the shifts but could do better. I heard the tire give a chirp during the 3-4 shift. Any other shifting kind of scares me, especially since the bike only has 1000 miles on it

Fully stock

 

Army, I know we've had bike conversation disagreements before.. but you're telling him to launch a twin at 8k? I know it's not a powerful bike but seriously? You either beat the living shi!t out of your clutch (which means you weren't putting down full power anyways) or you weren't launching at 8k, haha. There are no two ways around it.

I'd launch my racebike (F4i) at 6k and that had about 60% the torque that your bike had and that was on DOT race tires! It was everything I could do to keep it down in first gear at WOT. I do agree that you'll want to feather the throttle a little, but you should be WOT within 3 seconds or so on a bike of that power level.

If you have less than 1000 revs to work with mid-corner then you're in the wrong gear. :-) You need to be able to accelerate smoothly out of corner and at such a high rpm you'll need to upshift while accelerating and still heavily leaned over. That's a very likely situation to experience a high-side. You want to be high enough in your rpm range that you're in the meat of your powerband, but not so high that you're wringing its neck! That's for the straights. If I entered a corner under 9k I made a mistake, but I didn't want to be going in at 12k or so.

What's the difference between power shifting and clutchless upshifting? Aren't they one in the same? I've never heard of them listed as separate types of shifting.

MustangCat... if you're going to try clutchless shifting, do it in a 4th to 5th shift the first few times. It's a much easier gear change. You need to be very fast, but reduce load on the throttle (just a shade) and bang hard upwards on the gear at the the same time then very quickly get back on the throttle. Just a blip and a flick.

It's quite a bit easier to do with race pattern shifters (press down to upshift) but can be done on standard patterns. Do it right, and it's much faster and is very smooth.

Good kill and good luck with the riding. The Gladius is a cool looking little commuter, I'd love to have one!

 

Just stating what worked best for me. I got rid of the bike due to financial issues. So ill just dip out how about that?