If you think about what bike would benefit from a general preparation, including a turbo, you probably wouldn’t think of a Royal Enfield Interceptor 650 because it already comes pretty well defined as standard. Its classic style, its large crankcase… everything fits together and although things can be done, it’s not that pressing. Much less ending up including the aforementioned turbo system.
In fact, it is normal to see how turbos were fitted to motorcycles with already quite high performance from the start. The Suzuki Hayabusa is the queen of preparations when it comes to turbos and the Kawasaki H2 with its superchargers.
But an Interceptor with its 47 HP is not a bike you think about, nor is it a bike that can have its power increased significantly. Speaking in percentage terms and in the best case scenario, it could gain 50% of power and that would mean it would have 23.5 HP more to reach the staggering figure of 70.5.
However, thanks to this preparation of Doctor Motorcycle and the video-documentation process that they have made of it, we can see the entire creation process. A process that had as its objective a figure that was to improve the time in which the bike could accelerate from 40 to 80 miles per hour, that is, from 64 kilometers per hour to 129.
The starting time was 7.1 seconds with the standard bike and the time they were aiming to reduce it to four seconds. That is, with the Interceptor already equipped with a turbo they wanted the time to be lower, at least by 3.1 seconds compared to what they already had with the bike as it came from the factory.
Did the turbocharged Interceptor achieve its goal?
After a laborious preparation, because installing a turbo is not as simple as just putting it on and that’s it, it was time for the on-road checks. Behind us were hours and hours of work to fit the whole puzzle together. However, before that we can be dazzled by the final work and a sound that suits the twin-cylinder engine quite well.
The end result was just as they had hoped, in fact it was even better because with the turbo blowing “only” 7.5 psi they managed to lower their time to 2.8 seconds, so the target was more than achieved. They then increased the turbo pressure to 12 psi so the performance will increase even more, so now they have to look for another target.
