So, you’ve bought a race pipe, you’ve bought a big bore kit, big carb, Malossi over range kit, K&N air filter, new crank, anything and everything to boost your scooters engine performance, yet someone rides around the outside of you on a simple derestricted moped?!

How can they do this?

Straight lines aren’t everything, if you even watch racing, they never say how they spent the entire race weekend doing further tuning to the engine performance, no, they always say how they’ve spent every session optimising the suspension settings, the brakes and the tyres! This is how the 125cc bikes in racing can lap only a few seconds off the highly tuned performance superbikes, they’re lighter and handle better, even though they make less than half the power!

The best part to this is, you can do two out of these three steps for very little money, it’s cheap as chips!

1. Tyres

So, you’ve spent thousands tuning your scooter, it has every modification possible done to the tiny little engine revving its nuts off, and you’re doing over 70mph on a tyre contact patch the size of two fingers? Doesn’t sound very safe does it? So why do most people skimp out when it comes to choosing the right tyre?

Well there is a trade off, as you invest in stickier tyres, they don’t last as long, but hey, nothing in life is free. The upside is, you can brake harder, lean further and get on the gas quicker! This equates to holding more speed around corners, with more safety as they grip the road more than cheap tyres.

The first thing I always do when getting a new bike or scooter is to see what tyres are on it, then swap them for a matching pair of my preferred ones if I don’t like what’s on it. Since tyre profiles (the shape of the curve) are matched, you should always buy the same type of tyre front and back for your scooter, as each particular tyre type is built to work together, and maximise your scooters handling.

Having a better handling scooter which sticks to the road more is not only just beneficial for obtaining maximum performance, but it also helps your confidence when riding, and having more confidence (and not having the old worn out tyres slipping and wiggling beneath you) helps you to ride safer and have more fun.

Even if your scooter has matching pair of tyres on it already, how old are they? How many miles have the tyres covered? They don’t last forever, either through extended riding which can wear flat spots in the middle (causing it to want to “stick” in the middle of the tyre when turning, then tip in very quickly as it moves onto the edge of the tyre profile) or not being used enough, tyres become hard with time, so a scooter that’s several years old and has hardly done any miles will benefit just as much from new tyres as scooter with worn out tyres that’s covered a lot more miles.

My favourite tyres I have used are:

Zip SP – Dunlop TT91GP (Now replaced at the TT92GP), Sava RACE compound tyres, and the new Duro DM1056 Race Tyres – These last a lot longer on the road, and grip just as good as anything else for road use, these are what I’ve fitted on my little brothers tuned Zip SP and they’re brilliant

Vespa PX – Sava MC22 RACE compound tyres – brilliant tyre with plenty of tread pattern for wet use, but don’t last very long (~1000km for a rear), and the Michelin S1 tyres, which, like the Sava’s, provide a round profile tyre compared to the square traditional type and improve the Vespa’s handling ten fold. I could quite easily go round corners scraping the engine casings with both these tyres.

2. Brakes

So you’ve fitted a nice shiny new set of sticky tyres, done a few miles to scrub them in, and realised you can brake a lot harder.

Great, now you can brake harder and harder, you’ll start to realise just how bad the standard brakes are, after all, they’re designed for 50cc scooters that do 30mph on stock tyres, if you tend to brake later and harder, or are a bit larger than average and have to stop a bit more weight, you’ll benefit from fitting a new performance set of brake pads.

I recommend fitting some decent sintered brake pads, these contain metal shavings in them to help grip the disc harder without suffering from brake fad, which is when the pads get so hot they’re being forced to work past their optimal operating temperature and produce less performance than originally. Sintered pads are just as good when cold as stock, and just keep getting better and better as they get hotter!

The EBC HH range is one of the best ranges of performance brakes available, as well as the Malossi range of brake pads. As again, with all performance products, they’re not going to last as long as the originals would under normal riding conditions, but that’s the price you pay for performance unfortunately.

3. Suspension

Here’s where it gets expensive, you’re riding faster, braking harder, leaning further, you’re suspension has to cope with these extra pressure, and still contend with the normal bumps and potholes that the road every so kindly supplies us.

This is usually the last thing people change, since you have to push the standard equipment extremely hard to show up suspension flaws, and by this time you’re usually riding too fast for the road. However, aftermarket suspension is fully adjustable, so you can bolt it on to a standard scooter and set it up to give you an immediately better ride, but it isn’t a necessity.

Without a doubt, Paioli make the best suspension units for mopeds, which are sold under the Malossi RS24 brand.

With Malossi suspension having almost every adjustment known to man, they also require a bit of setting up, since different people have different preferences about how their bike rides, so someone who brakes really late will prefer stiffening up the front, and the 172cc mopeds which are quicker on the gas than the 50’s, will benefit more from stiffening up the back to stop it squatting as much under acceleration. The important thing to remember when setting up suspension is to take very careful notes of every setting as standard, and every change you make, so if you go in the wrong direction, you can simply reset everything back to how it was.

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