It's a water cooled V-twin engine Rich and when the era of superbikes really got going the racers that added cheap pod filters directly onto a bank of CV carburetors were not the winners, the winners ran velocity stacks with air filters over them. The carburetor fuel circuit dedicated to cold starting is called a 'choke' even though it doesn't actually choke anything on a CV carburetor, the 'choke' is a fuel enrichment circuit that bypasses the normal operating main fuel jet. ... you don't adjust a main jet size to accommodate cold starting you choke it to get the engine up to operating temperature then adjust the main jet for normal operating condition.
Turbulence is what you are trying to avoid and a laminar flow through the air intake is what you really want, it's turbulence in the air flow that hampers the carburetors ability to draw as much air into the combustion chamber as possible and efficiently atomize a mist of fuel into that oxygen rich air stream. Turbulence means less smooth controlled flow of air across the carburetors venturi and turbulence at that point results in poor atomization of the air/fuel mix and That is why people are pounding more raw fuel into the carburetor in an attempt to fix the fuelling problem they created.
If one could just stick a cheap pod filter on the mouth of a carb and call that a job well done, all of the manufacturers would have been selling bikes that way over the past century and the term airbox would have never existed. If you remove the velocity stack, cone shaped air intake from any engine and stick a cheap pod filter right on the open mouth of the CV carburetor, you have introduced an air turbulence inside the working part of that carburetor that is guaranteed to degrade the engines performance potential.
