This titanium Graves exhaust for our GSX-R1000 sat in its box while we conducted our literbike shootout and continued to gather dust when the big Suzuki was needed for Bike of the Year duty. But now that we've finally had a chance to mount up the beautiful pipe, we're kicking ourselves for not doing it sooner-it's a seriously nice piece.
The Graves pipe consists of an all-titanium 4-into-2-into-1 header section (that mounts with billet aluminum flanges) along with a small carbon-fiber canister. Weighing in at a paltry 7.8 pounds, the new system saves a whopping 20 pounds compared with the stock setup. While the aftermarket header weighs only slightly less than the stock titanium header section, past that point is where the big savings are. The stock underengine catalytic converter/boom box scales in at 7.2 pounds, while the left and right canisters are 6.9 and 8.4 pounds, respectively. All that is replaced with a straight pipe and single canister that weighs just a couple of pounds.
Installing the Graves exhaust was something of a chore, as the new GSX-R is quite cramped between the engine and radiator. Some tweaking was needed for everything to line up properly, and a couple of the springs gave out and lost their springiness when pulled for assembly. Finally, the provided instructions made no mention of the FI code caused by disconnecting the stock SET valve-as with most GSX-R models, a wire at the ECU must be snipped to disable the fault code.
Other than those details, however, the pipe is a work of art with clean welds, solid construction and a nice finish. It's a quality system when it comes to performance, too. On the dyno the new exhaust bumped our test bike's peak power by almost seven horsepower and peak torque by 2.5 ft-lb, with smoother curves than stock. Those hard numbers are backed up by performance on the track as well. The GSX-R has smoother power, pulls harder and runs nicer practically everywhere-and that's with no remapping of the ECU. As you'd expect from such a tiny canister, the pipe is plenty loud and will definitely put you in your neighbors' bad books should you ride on the street with it.
At $1899 the Graves exhaust is not cheap, but this is the full-on race-spec system with performance that easily matches the lofty price tag.