RS660 – Initial Race Review – It’s still damn good.

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The 7 sessions at trackdays we did on our Aprilia RS660 were good, promising, and enjoyable. It seemed like the little RS was already really good and not much to improve on. There’s only one way to find out how good your motorcycle is and that is through competition. We tossed the RS660 right into the deep end of the twins racing world in form of the MotoAmerica Twins Cup class and it handled it gracefully. Was the Italian parallel twin perfect? No. It still did almost everything I needed it to do well for what we had to work with.

The cool thing about racing is that it allows most riders to push much harder than they would at a track day. Racing exposes imperfections in set up and that’s exactly what happened at Virginia International Raceway. Quickly found out that the rear end was far too soft for the faster pace. You pair that up with the stock rearsets and you get a lot of boot/peg dragging. The bike became a bit harder to hold a line than it originally could. That’s what pace does, exposes imperfections.

With no stiffer spring to use and no aftermarket rearsets to throw on, our only option was to raise the shock and crank in some preload. I was loving how the bike handled and the stability it provided so our changes to the shock made me weary. 5mm+ and 2 turns of preload were all I was willing to do at the moment. This helped a bit and allowed us to go slightly faster. I’m not upset by this in anyway. It’s great we got to learn from this and can take a big jump forward in set up for the next round. Woodcraft Rearsets and some different rear shock springs were ordered the minute we got home.

In our initial track review of the RS660, we talked about the lack of power or better put, the lack of grunt to come out of the corner. I thought the stock gearing was too tall and causing this issue, this was not the case. This race weekend we were still using the stock 17/43 gearing that comes from the factory. The exhaust on order still had not shown up but the racing world provides some amazing people. Rob @ N2 TrackDays was kind enough to loan me his SC Project exhaust and Matt @ Robem Engineering loaded up the SC map to the JetPrime tuner. All I can say is wow, what a difference. Bike had better mid range and way better top end. Still not the grunt out of the corners like the built Yamaha and Suzuki’s have, but a massive improvement over the stock set up. The stock gearing worked very well at Virginia International Raceway. Our top speed was right up there with the leading pack… too bad our lap times weren’t.

Speaking of lap times; the best time that’s ever come from my right wrist at VIR on the beloved Suzuki SV650 was a 1:35.361 in the 2018 MotoAmerica Twins Cup race. To clearly show how easy this Aprilia is to ride with out much time on the bike, we managed a 1:34.168. I feel at home on this RS660 even with out getting any time to test the chassis. It’s that good even when not set up perfectly. With knowing what we know now, this bike is only going to get easier to ride at a decent pace.

Even in it’s current form, the Aprilia RS660 is still damn good in a race setting. Some springs and other parts will have us looking to vastly improve the setup leading to better lap times, and results. In summary, the power is awesome and it still handles amazing. Our tire wear was perfect.

This post has already been read 2270 times!