[a beginner]

I started riding on the farm last June on a used KLX300r. I’ve been spending a lot of time practicing maneuvering, with parking lot exercises on pavement and in the grass. I admire the police rodeo and japanese gymkhana skills.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTO2s7wyrFs Is there anyone here spending a significant amount of time doing parking lot style practice?

[megaspaz]

not i. i do parking lot drills once every couple of months… and now a days, i don’t do ’em for that long. But yeh, those guys are bad ass.

—
If there’s anything more important than my ego
around, I want it caught and shot now…

[a beginner]

I’ve been looking for discussion about practice with people who practice. People who don’t practice could ignore this thread instead of interfering.

I started riding in June and got about 320 hours on the bike before the weather closed in. I spent half of that time doing drills and exercises, PLP. After all that I asked myself, am I certain I could maneuver my bike in a panic situation at least as well as my car. The answer is no so it’s certain I can’t, yet.

Motorcycles have better brakes and turning than any other vehicle on the road yet after so much practice I can’t yet equal what I can do in my car. That is the same as driving the car wiith bad brakes and steering, which nobody would do in their cars yet most bikers do exactly that when they ride their bikes.

I’m sure I can learn to do emergency maneuvers on the bike better than in my car with enough practice. That project might go better and be more interesting if there were other riders with the same goal interested in discussion about it. Where are those riders?

Maneuvering skills won’t prevent every crash but it will improve the odds a lot. My impression is at least 30% of crashes happened because the riders had inadequate skills and hesitated, chose the wrong action or froze at the controls in a panic.

Who wants to talk about how to get collision avoidance skills on the bike that are superior to what you can do in your car?

[Munch]

Collision avoidance is learned by getting experience. A parking lot will give you minimal experience.
Gaming is a good example I use for my daughters. I used games and continue to to help me teach them simple things like economics, ambition and adventure. Not to mention problem solving skills and the like. They would come to me and tell me that they are really good at what they are doing, I would sit and watch and quickly notice they are doing the same things over and over again in the same area and level. Pushing them to get past that and they suddenly “freeze” or forget suddenly how “good” they are.
Riding is the same. If you do not push your skills and get complacent to rubbing an “8” in a parking lot…that’s as good as your gonna get. As I said in response to another of your posts. Parking lot speeds and predictability is good for base skills. 300 hours is near ridiculous and not remotely close to being a good judge of “survivability”.
You will not learn what to look for in behavior of other people so you can better your avoidance of insane actions. You will not have the mental acuity to stay a step ahead of those around you. All very much needed in real world riding where you will find that those are not cones your are swerving around.
You can not use the maneuverability of a car and a bike as a judgment on skill or preparedness. The physics…reaction and control is completely different not to mention the very mindset in each surrounding. The moving world around you changes in an instant, the cones don’t.
Will it shave a split second on “doing” possibly, will it give a better command of which skill to use…nope. Will it help in better predicting a situation that may arise outside of your PLP….. not remotely.

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