After owning my 07 R6 for 3 months and 1K miles so far, I felt it was time to do some upgrades besides the slip-on it came with. That is where it all went downhill, or did it? Let the games begin. I drove 4 hours round trip to pick up an MJS race header that was super cheap on CL, then found a power commander on the forums, and ordered a K&N air filter and smog block off plates. This weekend was perfect for this project as it was rainy and dreary all weekend.
I started by removing the stock header. I cut the header in two between the muffler box and collector just to see what it looked like. Seriously, how does this even flow?
Back to business, the race header was super easy to install, I'm glad I went that route versus drilling all the material out of my stock header and clamping a mid-pipe on it. Next, I had some fun with flat black high-heat paint on my slip-on:
While the paint dried, I propped the tank up and removed the air injection pump and blocked the holes with MJS performance smog delete plates. I also installed the K&N air filter. While in here, I also disconnected and removed the O2 sensor as it isn't needed with a power commander. Which speaking of, that was next. Got it hooked up in about 5 mins:
After this, I reinstalled my now black slip-on then hooked the computer up to my power commander. Upon initial startup, the bike seemed to run ok, but idled very high (2K), and was a bit jumpy. A quick push of a button flashed the full exhaust & air filter map to the PC. The bike idled right down where it was supposed to be and ran super smooth. That was easy:
And the finished product:
It was finally decent at best weather wise this evening. I took the bike on the road for the first time. What an improvement! The exhaust note is much louder but sounds fantastic. The bike is so much smoother and even more of a joy to ride. The one thing I notice the most is a considerably less erratic power band. Before it would have a decent pull, but then at 10K it woke up and pulled hard to red line. Now it pulls even all the way to red line. No more erratic power! Feels quite a bit faster, too.
I need to tweak the map a bit around idle but other than that it seems fine. I might let a shop dyno tune it in the future, but we'll see how my diy tweaks go. All in all, very straight forward install on everything and I must say it was WELL worth the effort. Heres a picture of the bike:
