Involuntary MPG research...

So the short story is I lost my passport and military ID out of the top pocket of my tank bag while on a day ride to the west of Glacier.

The "involuntary" part is I spent most of today driving up and down roads, looking at the verges of the road, hoping to catch a glimpse of my passport laying there.  180 miles by GPS in total, 2.227 gallons total.  Average speed traveling, just over 30 mph.  Pretty easy riding, just putting along - but, also a lot of coming to almost a complete stop to get a good look at something, then accelerate back up to speed again to carry on.

So it is fairly similar to ambling along, exploring along old logging roads, abandoned mining exploration roads, etc.  No hard charging, just poking around up in the mountains exploring.  And mileage works out to 80.8 mpg.

Started getting dark, tired, losing concentration, etc.  Fuel up and head for home.  Got behind a guy going the same way to use him as a shield against the asphalt rats starting to drift out onto the roads.  84 miles home... averaged about 65 - 70 mph the whole way, via GPS.  1.67 gallons... about 51 mpg.

And from memory, when I'm in a hurry go get home and I'm doing 75+ mph the whole way, the MPG drops down into the low 40's.

Kind of a glimpse of what I've found over the last six years with the bike.  When you're just riding the forest service roads, exploring old mining roads, or idling down the highway about 60 MPH, the WRR is a pretty economical gas sipper.  Once you start winding the engine out, especially on highways where the little engine is dealing with wind resistance, then gas milage quickly takes a significant hit.  No surprises with that observation, but there's some numbers to go along with it.

Not surprising at all. The coefficient of drag on a bike like this is pretty high. Power required to overcome drag is a function of velocity to the 3rd power (cubed). So a 2x increase in speed means 8x more power.

Have you ever tried tucking on the highway to see the difference in mpg? Not sure if your back can sustain that sort of research...   My commute only has about 2 miles of highway total and 20 miles of back country roads, so it isn't such a big deal to me.

More importantly, did you ever find your ID???

No, numbers aren't surprising at all. Just thought I'd post it up as people often seem to get a bit twisted in the differences between their fuel consumption and others. Shows that even the same rider can get enormous mileage differences, depending on how they're riding and how fast they're riding at. This is a great little engine, but it does not have the headroom to deal efficiently with resistance increases as speed gets up there.

No, I'm not going to bother doing an upright versus tuck test for a couple of tanks of fuel over the same stretch of road to see what mileage differences are. Please feel free to check that out for us!

No. No luck on the passport and ID. Pretty bummed out about that; just the associated paperwork and statutory declarations is enough to ruin the day.