photomike666 wrote:Mid range power is boosted by back pressure.
Would this be an opportune place for a moan about what a hideously misleading term "back pressure" is.
Remove the cat (slows the gas and causes some pressure) and the valve which activates for the mid range and you have no back pressure at mid range. The free flowing exhaust will allow far more horse at peak revs, but the mid range will be very weak.
It's, really, not that simple, and, in some ways, it's off the mark. Exhaust flapper valves serve one purpose; to enhance and/or alter the pressure wave dynamics in the exhaust and thus assist tuned cylinder filling. They don't so much *add* power as *smooth* the power out. As the engine moves through its rev range, exhaust gas speed and temperature interact with header lengths and collector box design so that the interference in the cylinder between exhaust gas pressure waves reflected back from the collector and pressure waves in the incoming mixture changes from constructive to destructive and back again. At some points in the rev range, the interference is beneficial to the operation of the engine and the engine breathes better there and makes more torque. At others, the interference is detrimental, and the engine makes less torque.
Exhaust flapper valves change this wildly-varying interference to something more uniform to give a flatter torque curve.
However, their presence can't but increase the exhaust's flow impedance, meaning the engine has to do more work to pump its waste gases out. This is work which doesn't end up going to the back wheel to drive the bike forward.
To make an engine produce more power through altering its exhaust, there are two options; lower the total flow impedance of the exhaust so the engine doesn't have to work as hard pumping out its own waste gases, or alter the exhaust tuning so the pressure waves reflecting from areas of varying local flow impedance assist in cylinder filling. The former has a positive effect throughout the rev range and can be huge (40%-50% lower flow impedance for one exhaust vs another), the latter has an effect only at some points in the rev range and is relatively minor.
A full race system is going to have *much* lower flow impedance than a stock system (just compare the sizes of the header pipes; the bigger the pipe, the lower its flow impedance), especially one with a catalytic converter, and it's going to have a better collector design than a stock system, for better tuning.
Racebike builders everywhere bang on about how important it is to give a bike a good spread of power. If exhaust flapper valves really *increased* midrange power, we'd be seeing them on GP bikes instead of the dump pipes they mostly run.
"Exhaust flapper valves boost midrange" is another piece of bike journo intellectual shorthand which has crept into common use.