Aprilia Tuareg 660 Motorcycle Suspension

It feels well built and looks great. Lovely plush suspension on the showroom floor, but it falls apart when you get rougher with it. The suspension thinks it is a road bike, not an offroad one.

We took our first Tuareg for a long ride on both the road and gravel with some offroad thrown in. Initial impressions were that the engine has a very similar feel to the T7 Yamaha. The colour TFT is a nice touch and the bike has a typical quality euro feel.

The forks were attention grabbing as they moved through their travel quickly offroad, while being very supple on road they did not build confidence in the bike, especially when pushed.

Aprilia Tuareg 660 Forks

KYB 43mm USD in a split design, with compression in one leg and rebound in the other. Comp and reb damping plus spring preload are all adjustable. The standout for us was the 0.37 kg/mm rate in the initial part of the spring. This is far lighter than any of the contemporaries; Tenere T7 (0.60), KTM 890R (0.68), Africa Twin (0.54/0.56 Progressive), Ducati Desert X (0.63).

The fork springs are the same diameter as a Yamaha Tenere T7 but requires a spacer to fit the Tuareg 660 tubes - we send the springs with a spacer tube that needs to be cut to fit. Unless you are very light, under 60kg, getting stiffer spring rates are a good move.

From a damping perspective the Tuareg is also quite light, designed for smooth road comfort. We replace the fork springs and revise the entire fork specification to a more adventure/offroad setting suitable for Australian conditions.

Our workshop found some nasty surprises inside the forks of one of our first Tuaregs and every subsequent set we have seen, the main piston is, to our expenerience, upside down. The mid-speed valving spring being warped and wrapped around the bent shims isn't great, but the missing chunk out of the damping piston bottom skirt (on what is a very new bike - see the pics above) was concerning. Getting lumps of disintegrating metal ripping up the insides of your expensive suspension will quickly turn it into scrap. there has only been one Tuareg with a damaged piston so far, but all have had damaged shims on dissasembly. We have developed solutions on the dyno though; check out our fork upgrade kit.

It's also worth noting the first Tuareg we worked on had bent chrome fork tubes from heavy landings over MX type obstacles. There was a lot of deflection going on there (red arrows) when we spun it in the lathe as seen in the pic above. We can replace bent fork tubes if this happens to you.

We highly recommend getting your forks re-valved and re-sprung if you use your Tuareg 660 for anything other than basic road commuting. They are not capable of handling anything more intense.

Aprilia Tuareg 660 Shock

KYB 40mm bore with Hydraulic Preload Adjuster. The same overall design as the Tenere 700 shock but with a different shock body design to suit the Aprilia chassis.

While it performs OK on road, like the forks it needs some toughening up to cope with anything less predictable.