Staff bikes: Triumph Tiger 800 - Taming the Tiger's thirst

Since returning from Spain a while back I’ve had numerous emails from Tiger owners concerning fuel consumption.

It appears that quite a few are finding it a little on the thirsty side compared to their BMW F800GS-owning friends.

On French and Spanish autoroutes at a steady 85mph with pillion and luggage, I got a reasonable 45mpg from my Tiger. Dropping below 80mph raised that figure to 51mpg.

Not bad, but turning off the motorway to make full use of the excellently torquey engine saw figures fall to a disappointing 39mpg.

Some F800 owners report figures nearly 10mpg better with a few getting as much as 65mpg. I’ve been told that the Tiger’s onboard computer can be ‘reset’ to optimise fuelling and mpg, and I’ve since confirmed this with the factory.

The fuel management system is ‘closed loop and fully adaptive’. In simple terms, this means the fuel settings are updated every 12 minutes while riding.

This update only occurs when the throttle is in a steady riding condition with the bike not strongly accelerating or decelerating. If the conditions are not in a steady state, the update will be delayed to the next cycle.

At the time of each update, information is taken from various engine sensors (throttle position, Lambda, ignition, fuel injection, temperature, etc) and the CPU adjusts the quantity of fuel delivered to the engine, thus increasing engine efficiency.

You can ‘force’ an update by leaving the bike idling on its sidestand for 12 minutes without touching the throttle. So has it made any difference to fuel economy? Disappointingly, no – it’s remained exactly the same.

It seems the only way of improving the Tiger’s economy is to roll off the throttle but with such a glorious wave of torque at hand, I’m not sure that’s going to be possible.

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