Do drag pipes make a difference other than noise?

They add a little power at high rpm but shorty drag pipes are nearly impossible to tune for normal street riding over a broad range of engine speeds.

A set of after market internal baffles will usually help increase low end torque & reduce noise quite a bit.

drag pipes can be made to work pretty well on the street if you have the time to experiment with changing their length with a slider pipe until you get it just right for your style of riding.

It takes a lot of test riding (usually several weeks worth) to get the length right because you have to change the jetting or fuel mixture as you change the pipe length.

exhaust Engineers & fluid dynamics mathematicians are not paid to get the maximum performance from street legal motorcycles.

Their paid to keep the noise level under the federally mandated 80dB limit & try to get acceptable performance while operating under this severe handicap.

any fool with a hacksaw & a bucket of pipe can increase horsepower up to 20% in a narrow rpm range with a little experience.

Reducing back pressure is the easy part. Its the reversion waves that travel back up the pipe into the exhaust port that make exhaust tuning more art than science.

This is why torque cones are so popular on street bikes & race bikes are always noisy.

Crash, if the bike is stock then stock pipes will give you the best performance. They pay Engineers a lot of money to get the best combination of gas, air and back pressure for motorcycles. Think about it this way; if you give a motor more gas you have to give it more air, and if you give it more air you have to give it a way to remove the air faster. When you start changing one thing you will have to change everything to increase the performance. If you want go faster buy a faster bike or be prepared to spend a lot of money for a very small amount of horse power.

Yes , they do ,,, you lose low end power too due to the lack of back pressure and you get to rejet for the leaner condition too !

The good news is that if you spend a lot of time red lined , wide open down a drag strip the bike will run better .

Thus the term " drag pipes "

confusing factor. seek onto google and yahoo. it will help!