Silencer

I had originally fitted a Micron race silencer to the car, which was just too loud really.

In my quest for a quiet replacement silencer I was very tempted to order a custom made Raceco titanium silencer with a 7.25" body. These silencers seem to be uniquely quiet and very lightweight and ideal for a bike-engined-car. Unfortunately due to the length of the collectors on my manifold there is very little space between the end of the manifold and the front of the rear wing. This would mean getting a Raceco silencer with a body length of around 500mm, or 2/3 of its normal length. Now losing 1/3 of the volumne is going to limit its silencing ability quite a bit, although it would have probably been about as quiet as you can get.

One thing that had caught my attention was just how quiet bikes are on the road. Part of this is due to the use of an airbox, but probably half is down to them having effective silencers, which are able to keep the noise down and yet still allow them to make decent amounts of power. There is an old adage that I tend to believe in, "stock is best", which basically means that Yamaha spent probably a fair few Yen developing a silencer for the R1 that would allow it to make plenty of power and yet still pass very stringent noise tests. I am sure that a straight through race can would make the best use of my manifold and probably make a couple of extra horsepower, but I am willing to sacrifice them for a more useable car.

I obtained nearly new silencer from a colleague at work who had managed to drop his R1 after 45miles and had the can replaced by the insurance because it had a scratch on the front sleeve. I cut the link pipe off this and had an adapter made by Competition Fabrications to adapt the 65mm inlet down to my 2" manifold. This was very neat as it fits into the silencer and allows it to sit as far forward on the manifold as possible. The outlet still needs to be replaced with a 90 degree outlet fitting to it as it burned the wing quite a bit at Brooklands.

Anyway the standard R1 silencer seems a very effective silencer and certainly a lot quieter than the Micron race can. Fellow bec-er Ed Cane has also stuck a stock R1 can on his Megablade and seems to be quite chuffed with how quiet it is on that too. No noise tests yet for definitive figures, but certainly quiet enough for some trackdays.

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