[after]

Originally Posted by JSaarinen

a car pulled out in front of me without warning or indicating. I had a head on collision with the car and it drove off without stopping.

Really sorry to hear that, hope you aren't too badly injured. Bike can always be repaired, that's secondary. Drivers who drive off after causing an accident are the worst. Hope there's some way for you to track the car down.

Wish you a speedy recovery.

[VijayAnand1]

Originally Posted by JSaarinen

Hi all,
Had ridden from Bangalore to Trivandrum via Munnar during the past Christmas holidays. I've penned down my experience
But before the vacations got over, I met with an accident while riding from Kochi to Trivandrum at night, a car pulled out in front of me without warning or indicating. I had a head on collision with the car and it drove off without stopping. That's the reason why I hadn't been active since then. I'll put down my experience of dealing with the Aprilia service for my accident repair in a separate thread.
Thanks,
JS.

Unfortunate to say the last. Glad that you're okay and that's all that matters. Would be interesting to read into the events that led to and hope your bike is getting the TLC it deserved after a head on crash which are always nasty to say the least. Take care!

Cheers!
VJ

[JSaarinen]

Originally Posted by JSaarinen

Hi all,
Had ridden from Bangalore to Trivandrum via Munnar during the past Christmas holidays. I've penned down my experience here (Bangalore to Trivandrum via Munnar on the Aprilia RS 457)
But before the vacations got over, I met with an accident while riding from Kochi to Trivandrum at night, a car pulled out in front of me without warning or indicating. I had a head on collision with the car and it drove off without stopping. That's the reason why I hadn't been active since then. I'll put down my experience of dealing with the Aprilia service for my accident repair in a separate thread.
Thanks,
JS.

As promised, the accident repair experience faced by me is documented in this post: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/motor...lia-rs457.html (Accident repair experience of my Aprilia RS457)

[JSaarinen]

After getting the my RS 457 post accident repair, one improvement I've seen is the bike doesn't veer left if I take my hands off the bars. It now tracks absolutely straight. Since it is corrected after the front wheel, t-stem, bottom yoke and fork got changed, I believe there might be some alignment issue earlier that would've caused this. What are your thoughts on this?
Post repair, I've ridden to few places near Trivandrum. Attaching some pictures of the same.





Neyyar dam

Shankumugham beach





Kulathupuzha

[srinivasaiims]

Originally Posted by JSaarinen

After getting the my RS 457 post accident repair, one improvement I've seen is the bike doesn't veer left if I take my hands off the bars. It now tracks absolutely straight. Since it is corrected after the front wheel, t-stem, bottom yoke and fork got changed, I believe there might be some alignment issue earlier that would've caused this. What are your thoughts on this?
Post repair, I've ridden to few places near Trivandrum. Attaching some pictures of the same.

Lovely photos. Looks like left pulling can be fixed by reworking. Does Tuono 457 have left pulling issue ? New batches of RS457 ?

[JSaarinen]

Originally Posted by srinivasaiims

Lovely photos. Looks like left pulling can be fixed by reworking. Does Tuono 457 have left pulling issue ? New batches of RS457 ?

Thank you. Looks like it can be fixed and is likely an alignment issue of the wheel or the forks. Not sure if the new batches have it. Even in the first batch, it was very random, few people like me had that issue and few didn't.

Thanks,
JS

[SR1602]

Going to start off with my customary apology for being MIA for so long

First things first, the Goa ride was absolutely amazing. I had to battle multiple layers of procrastination to finally complete the travelogue about 6 months after the ride was done. You can check it out here (We're not going to Gokarna: A 2200 km excursion on an Aprilia RS457).

The next major update is that I finally took this bike to the environment it deserves, which is the Madras International Circuit. Although I was planning on getting a lot fitter before I made my return to the racetrack after a 4-year hiatus, a close friend managed to convince me that that's a pretty stupid decision. After actually doing the track day, I had to concur with him because this bike blazes through corners without even trying too hard.

Here are some pictures from the first track day-

















Where do I even start? I knew that it's going to be sublime at handling, but it was sublime at everything pretty much. What really surprised me is how good the brakes are once you turn off the ABS. The system actually doesn't entirely turn off the front ABS but rather keeps in some low-intrusion race mode. But it worked like a peach nonetheless. I was confidently braking between the 100m and 50m markers towards the end once I was in some rhythm.





I didn't hire the photographer for my second track day, and I just got a couple of vanity shots clicked by my RS-group friend on his iPhone, which were then "surreal-ised" by another friend who does photo editing and all.

The reason I didn't get photos clicked on this track day was because this took place right after I returned from Bengaluru after some rough off-road escapades and I was in the impression that I was going to suck this time around due to fatigue. But surprise, surprise, I managed to shave almost 4 seconds from my previous session's best time of 2:17:8XX. For reference, the best lap I did on my R15, 4 years ago, was a 2:31:XX. Not bad, I'd say, considering I am packing close to 100kg now, and I was easily 15 kilos lighter back then.



On the second track day, I was pushing quite a bit, and I discovered one caveat, which is that the rear started to dance a lot during corner exit. I can attribute this to a combination of my weight, the suspension preload and limitations from the stock Eurogrip Protorqs.

A month after that, in April, the same close friend I spoke about initially was in Chennai for the RACR Open Track Day and took my bike. He's way more skilled than me and was dishing out consistent 2:06s with a 2:05 best. He fell in love with this bike despite owning an RSV4 back in Delhi







On the second day of his track outing, my front pads had completely given way. So I ran to the showroom to get a set and hand it over to him since they'd have a 2-hour break in between. I reached the showroom, only to find out that they didn't have them in stock, but they did have the accessory racing pads. This bike is an absolute braking demon now. He got on the bike and punched out his 2:05 best right after we changed the pads.



And last bit of update is that I got the 3rd service done a little early at 10.8k kilometres since I had already done the 2nd one 1000km earlier than it was supposed to, and the bike had been through 4 track days and a ~2000km Goa ride. Cost was the same 4070 as before. Surprisingly, the service manager said that the air filter was good for another service interval, but will have to be changed in the next service, along with the chainset as well.


Gave her a minor 1st-year anniversary makeover inspired by Rossi's '99 RS250 and the latest RS-GP.

[man_of_steel]

Those are some killer pics there. Can very well see that you had a blast! Aprilia sure knows how to make a bike that can dance. Wishing you many more miles of unadulterated fun.

[100Kmphormore]

SR, did you get the organic brake pads at stock, or got the sintered ones? did you find any difference between those organic/sintered ones and these fancy racing pads that cost 3000 rupees at KTM, but goes to 9000 at Aprilia?

[SR1602]

Originally Posted by 100Kmphormore

SR, did you get the organic brake pads at stock, or got the sintered ones? did you find any difference between those organic/sintered ones and these fancy racing pads that cost 3000 rupees at KTM, but goes to 9000 at Aprilia?

What you get for 3000 from KTM is the same black faded one that you can see in the above image on the left. Aprilia's stock brake pads are exactly the same as the ones on the 390, with the exception that Aprilia charges 4600 instead of 3000.

The racing pads that you see on the right are from Brembo's premium high-performance BRM range. The same BRM10BHH series was the OEM pad on the previous-gen RSV4. From the research that I had done before, I found out that this pad has been discontinued from aftermarket spaces. So what Brembo has done is recycled the TT2910HH manufacturing mould and used the BRM series' higher quality material, hence the "TT" code and corresponding serial number below have been struck out. And obviously Aprilia would have commissioned them specifically for this bike.