I did a separate post about my experience at Circuit of the Americas with Aprilia Racers Days but that was focused on the event, not my bike of choice. I highly recommend you check out the above post (and I also highly recommend that you join me at CotA next year), but here’s what I have to share about the Kramer in Texas as a continuation of the series detailing my ownership experience!
No, I obviously didn’t win anything. But how could you pass up on this photo?
Did you miss Part 4? – I finally get to break in the Kramer and its KTM 690 single-cylinder engine.
One of the things I need to get better at as a rider is being able to discover the best lines on a new-to-me track as quickly as possible. If anyone has advice on this, I’m all ears. I had never ridden CotA before so it took me all 30 minutes of the first session until I felt vaguely comfortable with the layout. Well, I say that but even after roughly four hours of track time I still hate my line through Turn 15, I can’t get consistent with it.
Weird corner to ride, but it’s a popular corner to spectate from!. Photo from Oversteer48.
Regardless, after just a session or two I was going around corners faster than I have on anything else. I know that photos don’t tell the whole story and I definitely know that just because someone has a knee down it doesn’t mean they’re going fast, but with the Kramer I was comfortably getting lower in turns than I ever have before. It’s not like I have a photographer following my every move, but even in this random shot from a morning session I can tell based on my elbow that this is the closest I’ve been to the ground in a motorcycle photo where I wasn’t crashing, and it’s not like I was trying to ham it up for the camera. I didn’t know where the photographer was, I was trying to enjoy my bike and the track. I had no reference to other bikes here as this was my first time riding CotA, but I was in love – the Kramer is just magical.
Later in the day, my buddy Shane (Chief Marketing Officer at Piaggio Group Americas) took my Kramer out for a couple of laps – I thought it was very cool that we were all in the pits that MotoGP/2/3 teams were using just the weekend before.
As a Piaggio-sponsored event, there were several Aprilias for people to test out. I’ve had the pleasure of riding everything in Aprilia’s fleet a few times over so I decided to just focus on develop my skills on the Kramer and leave bikes for other folks to sample. With that said, I feel obligated to mention that the closest thing to the Kramer in Aprilia’s line-up would be the RS660.
The Kramer definitely gives up some power to Aprilia’s 660 twin (25 horsepower, to be exact) but it weighs 115+ pounds less! If weight is the most important thing to you, Aprilia’s recently announced the RS 457 (47 horsepower parallel-twin) which should be arriving in the US in a few months. I’m sure Aprilia will have these available for people to try out at future Aprilia Racers Days events as well! I asked Shane for his thoughts on my bike as he hadn’t ridden a Kramer before, I don’t know if he was just being kind to me but he had nice things to say (particularly about the low curb weight).
The three liveries for the upcoming RS 457.
My Kramer was great, though I obviously got walked by the liter bikes on the two long straights at CotA. I didn’t mind that much because the bike was so much fun around the corners and it helps me build skills.
A slight difference between the racing and the track day? Crowds aren’t packed when I’m rolling through Circuit of the Americas on my Kramer…
So, how happy am I with my Kramer? Well, I got rid of my former track bike (Ninja 400). I was going to auction it off on Iconic with no reserve but a client randomly reached out asking for advice on his next track bike – he was deciding between the Ninja 400 and the ZX-4RR. He knew about my N400 from my RevZilla Highside/Lowside podcast episode and he knew that I had ridden a hopped up ZX-4RR from a different video, so he asked me for some recommendations and…he ended up buying mine.
Goodbye, Ninja. You were a good one!
In other words, I’m very happy with the Kramer. But I was struggling with how I was going to make it mine, from a livery standpoint. That got worked out for me at CotA, as Aprilia brought Maverick Viñales out to ride with us and near the end of the day I noticed an Aprilia owner had Maverick sign his bike. I thought that was pretty cool so I asked Shane if he could have Maverick sign my bike as well and that was kindly arranged for me:
This has inspired a series of encounters where I’ve had a bunch of other people sign my bike…but that’s for the next part of this story!
Will you be able to guess which celebrity gave me a (written) kiss?