We have some new info on this from Yamaha. It turns out that one of the Corporate tech supervisors has (or had?) a Gen1 Tenere and the person I talked to a couple of weeks ago mentioned this topic when talking to him. Now hearing that we still consider it to be an issue, my person called to share the following.
The company had been looking at hard starting and didn't have a clear answer when they came out with Gen2. By that time the number of service claims had diminished so with the new model they moved on to bigger problems. I'll add that in retrospect it kind of makes sense since the owners had their work-arounds and had gotten frustrated with the dealers.
We owners have long known that we could induce or aggravate a bike which has a hard start and in this forum we've repeatedly come back to discussing:
Not letting the engine fully warm before shutting it off.
Leaking fuel injection or letting the system pressure build correctly by interrupting a start.
The start may be harder with an older (lower voltage) battery.
The tech supervisor related through my person that when trying to figure this out, they had been suspecting that the issue is related to fouling the plugs, because they found the bikes doing short runs and not warming were the worst offenders. This would validate what we'd thought on our first point, because before the engine warms up, the ECU enriches the fuel-air mixture like an automated choke on a carbureted engine.
The forum members found that you need to let the fuel pump fully cycle before hitting the start button and we've known that once a bike wouldn't start, pulling the fuse or using the wide-open-throttle would be needed to clear the cylinders. This fits with the company's suspicion of fouling the plugs too. I'll add from instrumented airplane injection system tests that if the fuel pressure isn't allowed to stabilize, then the system may fluctuate pressure drastically up and down to "chase" getting it right and suddenly you can have raw fuel in the cylinders.
And finally, at the same time the battery has the heavy current draw of a starter motor, the battery needs to also provide enough power to run the ECU and ignition system. Fouled or wet plugs need a lot more power to develop a spark, so what we discussed fits this too. And once they start to coat, the down-hill degradation in performance just accelerates.
So for those having a bike which starts hard, we already figured out that we need to (1) let the fuel pump fully cycle before pushing the start button and (2) let it warm before shutting it off. Once warm, it is out of the enriched fuel-air mixture of starting. (3) If you still have a problem and are letting the engine warm, look into your battery and connections.
(4) The new item that the tech supervisor wanted us to know is that when they stopped looking into this they were getting positive results from regularly using Yamalube Engine Med RX. I looked it up and while the MSDS sheet just says it's a proprietary mixture, the Yamaha site says the following about it:
"
Provides superior carbon deposit control, cleaning injectors, carburetors, intake valves and ports, and combustion chambers. It also protects fuel system metals from ethanol sulfate salt corrosion. Add it at every fill up to avoid unnecessary engine repairs due to poor quality gas, and to keep your engine clean and running efficiently."- See more at:
https://www.shopyamaha.com/product/details/engine-med-rx?b=Search&d=34|34&dealernumber=#sthash.P27PGRTi.dpuf
The stuff is simply a fuel system cleaner/stabilizer, similar to Ring Free, Techron, and Seafoam. His suggestion to people is use it at fill ups, which also fits with the idea of preventing fouled plugs.
My person and the tech supervisor talked about ECU changes for the 2014 Gen2 bikes and they are only willing to disclose what changed with no details about how. The only relevant thing was that the engine fueling and management was changed for the mechanical changes implemented, and these likely would very much affect starting. No surprises.
Finishing our talk and finding out that this tech supervisor at corporate was or is an owner of our bike, I was curious about whether the corporate folks follow the forums to know when there are ongoing issues like this. Our forum has had a couple of employees "out" themselves out over the years, so we know there are a couple among us. The answer was that many of the company employees own Yamaha products and may be members of a forum for their particular model, but the company does not do it. The key comment to me was that he said after working and talking motorcycles all day, most of them just aren't interested in forums and such after work. That's fair too.