Turbo Motorcycles and Turbo Lag Challenges

Back in the 1990s Yamaha produced a rather interesting motorcycle, it was turbo-charged, and while it was not the fastest off the line, once that turbo kicked in; whooyah! What a rush indeed, still there were things that initially bothered me a little bit with that motorcycle.

It had a little turbo-lag, and mind you, I was used to turbo-lag because I'd previously owned several vehicles with turbo power. Once I had an off-road Turbo Toyota Pick-up in fact, which was fun to listen to it whistle as I accelerated and it actually had some decent power. The Turbo Lag was about 3-seconds on that truck.

Yet, on the Yahama Motorcycle with a turbo, I didn't like it because you'd give it the throttle and then you'd get an extra boost 2-4 seconds later and it would race the RPM up to redline, while it was accelerating. Sometimes, in a straight line for instance it was totally cool, really felt awesome and when speed shifting with the hydraulic clutch, you could run through the gears extremely fast.

Unfortunately, and this happened a few times during some canyon runs (racing through the mountains with your knee scraping the corners) in the Santa Monica CA mountains, I set up for the corner fed in the throttle as always and the F-turbo started kicking in, so, if I up-shifted I'd be going too fast, if I hit the brakes, I'd drift out of the corner. Holy crap! Even when I got used to it, I never liked it, things happen too fast, turbo lag is not cool on a sport racing bike.

Of course, like anything that engineering challenge was solved, but I had sold the bike to friend, who eventually also sold it for about the same reason. Please consider all this