Downshifting vs Braking

[BajaRon]

Had 65 years of manaul transmission driving, car, truck and motorcycles. The new F3-S was a grasp to keep on the road into my 80's without falling over, especially two-up. Immediately I did manual downshifts.

Little happens.

There is so little engine compression and braking you have to use the brakes hard to really slow down. Now I have yet to get out of Florida to the Carolina Mountains but that will come soon. Just disappointed the engine braking I do is near useless. Reads like many owners find it useful and aggressive. Hope you are right and I am wrong.

Castrol 5/40 Synthetic has a proper SL rating so my first oil change will be with that.

Most lubricants will meet the SL Rating. It's the JASO rating that you should be most concerned with. It needs to be MA2. Don't get this wrong or you will be in for a very expensive clutch repair.

Try spinning the engine a bit faster. In my mountains I mostly stay in 4th with downshift to 3rd or 2nd as needed keeping the RPM between 4-7K. The 1330cc engine is just such a sweetie and it loves to run high.

You have to shift down to a gear that gets the RPMs up quite a bit, as in one gear down does very little 2, 3, or 4 gears down creates some hold back.

Exactly Right! If you're not getting significant engine braking, you're downshifting too late or not going down enough gears. As long as your downshift doesn't put you over 8,500 RPM, you're good to go. And even then, engines typically have headroom above the listed Redline RPM. You're not going to hurt it at 8,600 RPM. But you will get very good engine braking well below Redline.

You should not be needing to mash the brakes to get your Spyder to stop unless you're overheating them. Proper engine braking will go a long way towards lowering brake temps and extends the life of the pads as well. I've got customers who get 40k or more out of a set of pads. Riding style and loading also contribute to brake life, or the lack thereof.

Brake component manufacturers love riders who do not use engine braking. They are money in the bank!

[Peter Aawen]

....Exactly Right! If you're not getting significant engine braking, you're downshifting too late or not going down enough gears. As long as your downshift doesn't put you over 8,500 RPM, you're good to go. And even then, engines typically have headroom above the listed Readline RPM. You're not going to hurt it at 8,600 RPM. But you will get very good engine braking well below Redline.
......

Brake component manufacturers love riders who do not use engine braking. They are money in the bank!

If your Spyder is an SE, the computers won't let you down-shift if your road speed is such that the resulting revs would be damaging; but that means you're going to be pretty damned fast if you're in one of the higher gears!! Far faster than is strictly legal!

As for the redline on these things, the exact same Rotax engines are in use in other platforms/applications where they have significantly higher red line limitations, and those engines don't have any reliability problems, especially not any due to the high revs that they thrive on!! Our Spyder engines are significantly de-tuned in terms of both power output and the red-line limitations imposed upon them; you would be hard pressed to damage one of them at all, except maybe by being too gentle &/or not revving it hard/high enough!

Just Sayin'