3rd night and another night of riding in the Sun. We did exercise 6 again in the day light this time and it was a little easier than before. Getting a good head turn in helps with the staggered sharp turns.
We then went on to do some cornering in 2nd gear in a big oval. That was fun. Its much easier to corner at speed than when going too slow. If your fast enough you can get a nice lean in and if you roll on the throttle and trust the bike all will be fine. After that was a shifting exercise of going up to 3rd in a turn before coming back to 2nd.
We got to do the emergency stop exercise and I was apprehensive about it but it wasn’t too bad, The bike will stop pretty quickly compared to a car. Instructors did warn us that this is one of the exercises on the test and that it’s one that can fail the entire test if you get it wrong. Good to know.
Last exercise was the figure 8, double u- turns, in the box. Found this one a little harder. Trying to counterbalance didn’t actually help. I found what helped was to not think about it too much. Seriously the one time I was thinking about everything I should be doing I messed up and had to put a foot down. I found the head turn and using both the clutch to trim speed helped a lot.
Rode a Nighthawk tonight and it seemed easier than the Rebel. Turning seemed easier but maybe I was just more comfortable my second time on a bike. I could get both feet down and it’s good to know I can deal with the seat height of the Nighthawk. I’ll consider one as a first bike but I haven’t seen many 250 Nighthawks used and a new one is out of my range. The 29.3 ” seat is the same as the older Ninja 250’s.
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