Image: Foremost Media.

Mi-Bike Australian Superbike Championship (ASBK) racer Matt Walters will sit out the fifth round of the 2023 season at Morgan Park to ensure he can adequately prepare with the recently acquired Motec software for his Aprilia.

Walters received the adequate Motec software yesterday for the RSV4 1100, but with just over a week until the Warwick round commences, the decision was made to sit out the event to ensure the necessary time can be taken to install and best-tune the bike with the new ECU and components.

“We finally took delivery of the Motec for the Aprilia, which has been a little bit of a hassle for a while,” Walters explained to CycleOnline. “We finally got the right software, the right ECU and everything for it.

“Really looking forward to getting it on the bike, but it’s just not going to happen in the space of time that we have got before Morgan Park. Just the stuff that can go wrong on it in the meantime as well, which could be a bit of a drama for us.

“I got it yesterday, with all of the sensors and everything to run on it, all the fuelling software and everything on it. We don’t have a huge budget to blow for testing and tuning all of this stuff, we have only got one bike and we can’t really afford to stuff it up.

“We have got our own dyno facility and everything at work which is good, we will be able to tune it relatively safely which is fine and we will be able to take it to this magical bike that everyone reckons from Europe is a winning machine.”

Following an extended 13-year stint racing onboard a Kawasaki, Walters made the switch to Aprilia machinery for 2023 and entered the season with little testing and modifications to the RSV4 1100, including using a standard ECU.

Nonetheless, he has made clear progress while eagerly awaiting upgrades and now looks to take the time to prepare in the best possible way for the final two rounds of the 2023 ASBK season.

“It’s one of those things where the road ECU has been great, it hasn’t given us any dramas whatsoever so the bike is reliable as it is, but it is very restrictive,” Walters continued. “We are really happy with how the bike has gone as it has, I don’t really know of any bikes that you can turn a key and get in the top 10 in the Australian Superbike Championship on, that is for sure.

“It’s been promising for me as a rider to see every time we change something, the bike will react really well to it, or it will react really bad – it is really easy to find a path with it. It’s not a bike that’s hit or miss, if you make a change, it’s a positive change or it’s a negative change, there’s no in-between which is great.

“We will be at Phillip Island and Tailem Bend, it’s just one of those things, purely a time thing. I think if we go up with something that is rushed, we won’t have the same result that we are hoping to get with it.”