Varg Down on power? (Ride Modes/Power Maps)

[Magoo69]

Has anyone noticed their Varg down on power especially in the 80hp setting?

My Alpha 80hp Varg seems to be limited to “only” 60 hp. It seems to have lost its ”LUDICROUS Mode”

I rode in an open field a couple of times that allowed me to go full throttle in the 80Hp mode. It didn’t feel crazy like it used to AND the ride telemetry showed the HP usage at 60 Hp…it never went above 60-62Hp. Previously, it was nearly impossible to go full throttle in the 80hp mode especially on where the traction is good like a grass field. I was able to do it relatively easily while standing.

In the past, I was occasionally able to have the ride telemetry show near 70Hp and that wasn’t in an open grass field. The last few times it’s been right around 60Hp even at wide open throttle in an open field while in 80 hp mode.

I emailed Stark…

 

[rayivers]

I can't remember where I heard this - might have been the NY Stark dealer I was talking to - but apparently an Alpha SM rider was encountering similar power limiting after repeated 80hp non-track use, and had been told it was due to 'inappropriate use of the 80hp feature' or some such (no idea if this is true). With various countries around the globe planning or currently restricting MC power, this seems like something a future Stark enduro/street bike would have to have to be ridden or sold in those countries, no?

 

[Magoo69]

Thanks for the reply/info. I wasn’t doing prolonged full throttle runs for the fun of it but rather I was doing them to see what was going on because I could feel power has been down including in the lower Hp modes.

60, 70 & 80 hp had been feeling too similar. The power delivery feels different between modes but the power output feels similar. 80Hp used to be terrifying, now it feels like 60Hp with a more sensitive throttle.

Overall the bike just feels less powerful across the board.

I’m finding myself going full throttle in Hp / modes I never have before. My map 3 is 55Hp… in the past, that was my go to setting for trail riding. I would rarely go full throttle in that map in the trails. If I did, in a faster section, the front end was hard to keep down. Now I can pin it … it’s still fast but not like it used to be.

It’s almost like the latest software has a softer throttle response and more traction control across the board?

 

[Philip]

 

[Chaconne]

Did you try upgrading the firmware a 2nd time and waiting until it fully cycled? Maybe something happened in the firmware update process and it fell back to a default version?

I worked on embedded firmware for many years and we always kept a default backup in case something went wrong in the upgrade. The values in default were always baseline rather than full feature.

 

[Philip]

The topic of this thread seems to have shifted from power maps to thermal limiting. That's okay. We are going to split this thread into two:

Varg Down on power? (Ride Modes/Power Maps) <-- This thread (the original thread)

Varg Down on power - Thermal Limiting (The new thread)

 

[Philip]

Back to the OP question...

60, 70 & 80 hp had been feeling too similar. The power delivery feels different between modes but the power output feels similar. 80Hp used to be terrifying, now it feels like 60Hp with a more sensitive throttle.

I think this is normal. Stark must be quietly working on improving traction control. Keeping the bike feeling "terrifying" to ride would have been a mistake.

I did the math somewhere, and the conclusion was that using 80hp at speeds below ~66 mph was physically impossible. The bike was either traction-limited or wheelie-limited below ~66mph. With good traction control (or wheelie control), the bike will not be generating its maximum power at low speeds or on loose terrain. Maybe only in the "burnout" mode, or in deep sand, like @willy tried.

I was going to suggest a top-speed run on a highway, but there is another caveat... According to the dyno, the max power is developed at about 55mph. However, there is no way to put down 80hp at that speed! You would need to change your gearing, gear the bike up by at least 20%, and see if you can log 80hp at speeds above 66mph.

The "80hp" setting is really a misnomer. It's a promise that the bike will show 80hp at some high speed. It doesn't promise at what speed that will actually happen, so Stark can play with the maps any way they see fit. What they are really changing with different HP settings is the torque. It would have been more accurate to quantify the maps in N-m or ft-lbs, but nobody understands torque measurements on motorcycles, and the EV crowd cannot even agree on whether to measure that torque at the motor or at the wheel. That torque can be flat (good) or peaky (bad). And a very high and peaky torque at low speeds is cheap to obtain in EVs, so then we would be opening a can of worms with everyone claiming thousands and thousands of N-m of torque...

I emailed Stark…

What did they say?

 

[Chaconne]

Back to the OP question...


I think this is normal. Stark must be quietly working on improving traction control. Keeping the bike feeling "terrifying" to ride would have been a mistake.

I did the math somewhere, and the conclusion was that using 80hp at speeds below ~66 mph was physically impossible. The bike was either traction-limited or wheelie-limited below ~66mph. With good traction control (or wheelie control), the bike will not be generating its maximum power at low speeds or on loose terrain. Maybe only in the "burnout" mode, or in deep sand, like @willy tried.

I was going to suggest a top-speed run on a highway, but there is another caveat... According to the dyno, the max power is developed at about 55mph. However, there is no way to put down 80hp at that speed! You would need to change your gearing, gear the bike up by at least 20%, and see if you can log 80hp at speeds above 66mph.

The "80hp" setting is really a misnomer. It's a promise that the bike will show 80hp at some high speed. It doesn't promise at what speed that will actually happen, so Stark can play with the maps any way they see fit. What they are really changing with different HP settings is the torque. It would have been more accurate to quantify the maps in N-m or ft-lbs, but nobody understands torque measurements on motorcycles, and the EV crowd cannot even agree on whether to measure that torque at the motor or at the wheel. That torque can be flat (good) or peaky (bad). And a very high and peaky torque at low speeds is cheap to obtain in EVs, so then we would be opening a can of worms with everyone claiming thousands and thousands of N-m of torque...

Well maybe but the OP said he was feeling it across the board. Modifying traction control for 80hp or 44k ft-lb/sec would be one thing but across the board would seem more like de-tuning to many owners --as other modes would be impacted (maybe in negative ways) if a linear one size fits all traction control algorithm was applied.