John Sample Automotive, the Australian importer for Aprilia, has confirmed that the voluntary engine replacement on the RSV4 Factory has been completed.

In January the Aprilia factory announced a worldwide voluntary recall to replace engines on affected bikes manufactured during 2009. While not every bike sold in Australia was affected almost 100 bikes were part of the engine inspection and replacement program.

John Sample Automotive elected to complete the engine replacement program directly rather than rely on the Aprilia dealer network to complete the task.

Kris Matich, general manager of John Sample Automotive, commented on the replacement.

“It was our foremost intention to ensure that this engine exchange program caused as little inconvenience to our customers as possible,” Matich said. “We were fortunate that we were able to call on some additional technical support from the factory by way of three technicians being allocated to work with our JSA team.

“This additional resource allowed us to have teams all over the country simultaneously working in our Aprilia dealerships to affect the engine exchanges in the shortest possible time. With support from our dealer network JSA and the Aprilia technical teams from Italy have been able to complete this task in a very short period therefore causing minimal inconvenience to our customers”

The new Aprilia RSV4 R model, which has just been released onto the Australian market in March, was not affected by this voluntary engine exchange program.