Modding the Navi - Part 2

Now before I get to carried away with performance modifications, I need to figure out what difference the mods make to the Navi.  This means I need to baseline its performance.   

Baseline the performance

So what is baselining the performance?  This is where we figure out the basic performance parameters of the bike.  Manufacturers spend a lot of time and R&D effort on this sort of thing.  We don't have that sort of budget so we need to take a simple approach.

So how do we do this?

First we need to define what we are going to measure and how we are going to measure those parameters.  Now this is tricky because there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here, but in essence I need to measure speed and acceleration.  But how?

Well there are now a number of apps that can measure speed based on GPS and I have a GPS enabled iPhone so I think we are in business.  The app I went with in the end was one called Car Test.  As you will see in the screen grabs from my phone it gives me all the basic information that I need for my baseline.

The next thing we need is a repeatable surface to run the bike on so that we are using the same road surface and road length each time.  I am lucky here in that the major road next to my subdivision is long, straight and flat and is not normally busy.

What results did we get?

So I played a little with the software to figure it out and then did a couple of runs.  These are the screen grabs from those runs.

Run 1

The top speed is a bit of a surprise at how low it is.  The Navi is supposed to get to 50 mph but then I weigh a little over 200lbs so I guess it's hauling a bit of weight, not to mention the drag. 

Run 2

Summary

The parameters that I am going to look at are the zero to 10, 20 30 and 40 along with top speed and quarter mile. As it stands right now a top speed of 45mph with a quarter mine of 26-27 seconds is our benchmark.