Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/209493
FIRST RIDE P66 2014 MV AGUSTA RIVALE 800 ter a turn one or even two gears higher than you really wanted to, yet by rolling the throttle on hard will deliver a smooth, syrupy drive out of the bend. It means you can spend many miles of twisting, turning highway holding the MV motor in fourth gear, just rolling back the throttle to slow for a corner, then winding it on hard for the exit. You can accelerate wide open from as low as 2000 rpm without any trace of transmission snatch - though there isn't a lot of grunt till the tach hits the 6000 mark, and that meaty midrange comes on song. Then you can flirt with the 12,000 rpm rev-limiter all in the same gear, noticing as you do so that there's an extra kick in power between 10,000 and 12,000 rpm. It really pays to rev this motor if you want to go places in a hurry. But it has such an improbably well-rounded character for a high-revving triple that you can short-shift at 8500 rpm where peak torque is delivered, and just ride the torque curve from 6000 rpm upwards. And all the while enjoying the crisp action of the wide-open EAS powershifter that now comes stock. That shifter has also been improved and it's far less jerky than before. This is a bike for all seasons, a chameleon of a street supermotard that is incredibly easy to wheelie in the bottom two gears although you'll want to make sure you have your foot covering the rear brake pedal, since the lack The author was happy to report that the glitches from MV's ride by wire system are gone and the entire character of the engine is much more rounded and friendly. of crank inertia means the front wheel doesn't always come back to planet earth as quickly as you might want it to. But for once it's not so much the outright performance that the Rivale version of the motor delivers, it's more about the way that it does so. That's where MV's engineers and Eldor have taken a big step forward in producing a quite different character to the ride-bywire riding modes. The Rain map I started out with on drenched roads does its job, though with TC on setting 8 (you can change it via the rather fiddly rubber switches on the handlebar, but it's hard to do while riding the bike). But in the Normal mode I used for most of my ride, as well as in the heaps more aggressive Sport mode, the pickup from a closed throttle is much more fluid and less jerky, and somewhat ironically on such an aggressively styled motorcycle, the whole character of the engine is much more rounded and friendly. "We realized we had a problem with the ride-by-wire system that we had to address," admits Brian Gillen. "So we sat down with Eldor and went back to basics, establishing a completely new set of algorithms to change the way the ECU thinks and interprets the information coming in. We're really proud of where we are today, and we feel we made a big step forward in delivering a new ride-by-wire strategy that the customer will like." That they have, and the good news is that the new map can be retrofitted by MV dealers to existing bikes of whatever model. Indeed, MV is working on allow-