Tune To The Ride: High Altitude Adjustment For Motorcycles

You’re cruising along a Colorado road, heading into the Rockies. First incline, your bike sputters, the throttle lags but recovers. You hit your first switchback, slow it down, drop the revs; the bike hesitates, jolts and lurches forward.  You take the corner, but as you come out, your bike stutters, loses power mid rev and struggles forward. You open the throttle. Nothing happens. You open it to the max and the bike lurches. It chugs its way up the mountain. 

That’s how your mountain motorbiking trip of a lifetime goes – the whole way.  

Your bike performs at peak on the highway and on the dyno, but when you need it at its best, it turns into a piece of trash.  

Why? It’s been programmed that way.  

As you gear up to take on some of America’s best scenic motorcycle roads, it’s time to take out the trash. Here’s how to override manufacturer settings that cripple your bike’s performance on inclines and at high altitudes. Want the ultimate ride? It’s time to prep your bike for mountain motorbiking.

• Sluggish throttle response – you’ll likely notice a significant decrease in acceleration, especially on hills and if you’re carrying any kind of load. You may experience lag time in throttle response and “stuttering” while accelerating. 
• Poor engine response and loss of top end power – your engine may struggle to build revs, and you may struggle to reach and maintain peak speeds on straights.
• Uneven idling – your bike may be unstable or even stall at low RPMs.
• Overheating or running hot – your bike may overheat, as poor combustion means extra fuel in the combustion chamber. This can heat up your bike.

• Poor fuel efficiency/lower milage/higher emissions – rich air-fuel mixes burn inefficiently, so you’ll burn more fuel to create the same level of output.
• Potential engine issues – if your engine is running hot and rich, you could see further performance problems from spark plug, filter and injector clogging. 
• In carburetted engines, you may find yourself in a world of pain –  you could see black smoke from your exhaust and experience severe performance issues.  You’ll need to re-jet your carburettor to correct it.

Altitude Compensation Kits:  Some bikes have a barometric sensor built in, feeding back to the ECU – some bikes need an additional kit installed. These measure altitude so the ECU can compensate using a pre-programmed map. This means that changes in real-time can be sluggish, and the bike may need to be flashed to run efficiently with the new kit.

Piggybacked Fuel Management:  These add pre-set instructions on top of your bike’s existing pre-set instructions. Chances are your dyno tuner has suggested one of these “plug-and-play” bike optimization systems.  They add an extra layer of information to the instructions coming from your ECU to your fuel management system. They help a little –  but they work to pre-sets. That’s a problem when the way you ride, the road you’re riding and the real-time experience isn’t pre-set.  

Woolich Racing with Autotune:  There’s a reason so many champion riders choose Woolich Racing, especially when racing at altitude. Woolich Racing Autotune doesn’t simply add a layer of generic instructions. It gives you the ultimate control over every element of your bike’s performance.  It hacks into your motorcycle’s brain and changes the way it thinks in real-time. Woolich is about tuning your bike to its limit of performance. The bike’s performance – and yours.  

• AFR management that accounts for altitude and weather conditions.
• Full control of every element of bike performance – make your own maps and run your bike the way you want, not the way the manufacturer or some plug-and-play engineer tells you.
• Precision tuning to prevent performance issues in real-time.
• In-depth fine-tuning. Tune more of your engine’s components with engineered precision.  
• Optimal throttle response and smooth downshifting for those switchback turns.
• Altitude changes fast. Woolich Autotune takes your instructions and applies them in real-time, which is vital when the altitude is increasing by the second.

What’s happening when you have a piggyback system?

Your piggyback tuner system tells your bike to stop that – taking the edge off the engine stutters.  The engine still limits your throttle response, and it still switches to eco-mode. It still does all the stuff that ruins your ride, but a second later, your plug-and-play system kicks in with a set of generic instructions. By the end of the ride, your bike is HOT. It’s running so dang hot that even after stopping for an hour to grab a bite to eat, it’s still hot.  But at least you can keep up with the convoy now.

What’s happening when you have Woolich Racing with Autotune?

None of that nonsense. Woolich Racing overrides the manufacturer’s instructions to switch to eco mode. It removes speed limiters, and lets you decide how many revs you need in real-time. With Woolich, you have total control of the bike’s AFR. It uses your instructions around how and where you ride to give you precision control over every element of your bike’s performance.  And the kicker – it costs about the same as the piggyback system.