[eternal05]

…people blip because it allows you to downshift MUCH faster. The reason is that you don’t have to spend any time finding the right engine rev level. You just rev it and dump the clutch. Here’s proof of how fast you can downshift smoothly (notice that the camera doesn’t shake at ALL) when blipping. Pay attention to Rossi’s neon yellow glove on the clutch starting around 00:26 or so. Each pull is a downshift. Yes. That fast:

The Video (MotoGP has disabled embedding)

You say it’s harder to achieve a smooth downshift, and while it’s true that it’s harder in the sense of taking more practice, once you’ve figured it out, it’s actually easier because it’s totally mechanical. Again, notice that the bike doesn’t shake at all as Valentino shifts down. Part of the reason is that you wait for the engine to hit the top of the rev and start spinning back down before you dump the clutch. That way both the engine and the bike are slowing and some of whatever inevitable speed differential gets “absorbed.” The other reason is that the if you’re in one gear, there aren’t too many possibilities for how hard you should rev it to drop down a gear. You figure out how hard you need to rev in a particular situation and that’s that. In a way, you’re just “rev matching” REALLY fast.

So why would you need to go that fast? The obvious answer is “for the track,” but that answer is a bit naive. Anybody who thinks of a riding skill as wasted on street riding should think twice. I could give you lots of little examples where this would come in handy, but here’s the over-arching principle: combined with simultaneous braking, blipping allows you to stop or slow down quickly, ending up in gear with the clutch out when and if you need to get back on the gas. This can save your neck, and has saved mine more than once.

[eternal05]

I forgot to address the issue of braking for a stop-light or quick braking. If I see a stop-light 200ft ahead, I’m going to just downshift slowly through the gears, letting the engine slow the bike down. I’m not in a hurry, and I’d rather get lucky and have the light turn green while I’m still in second gear so I can just keep on going.

If you need to stop fast for whatever reason (emergency, surprise yellow/red, starts raining cats, etc.), then yes, just

1. Start applying the brake firmly.
2. Pull in the clutch
3. Click down through the gears until you get to first.
4. When you’ve braked to stop, put your foot down. STAY IN FIRST until you are sure that a) the car behind you has stopped and b) there aren’t any other hazards that might force you to get up and go.

[eternal05]

Ok, to downshift one gear you have two main options: the blip and the slow-release.

Slow-release (aka what you learn in MSF, the “easy” one):

1. In one motion, pull in the clutch lever and roll off the throttle.
2. Click down one gear with your left foot.
3. Release the clutch lever slowly (e.g. seconds) and let the engine speed back up while slipping the clutch. Once the engine has revved up, smoothly crack open the throttle.

Blip:

1. In one motion, pull in the clutch and roll off the throttle.
2. Simultaneously click the gear lever down one gear with your left foot, and with your right hand rev the throttle hard and quickly: just on/off.
3. Right when the engine revs start to fall again, release the clutch lever to re-engage the engine and smoothly roll on the throttle. Make sure the clutch is at least in the friction zone or all the way out before you get back on the gas.

Does that make more sense?

[eternal05]

Thanks for clarifying that up!

[eternal05]

First and foremost, if you haven’t taken an MSF beginning rider’s course, you need to do that pronto. That will answer all of your questions and vastly improve your riding ability and preparedness for street riding.

When you say “downshifting” do you mean a single downshift, or downshifting all the way when stopping for, say, a light?

Either way, it’s better, when possible, to engage each gear as you go down for a number of reasons. First, it’s the easiest to do smoothly once you’re a proficient downshifter. You don’t have to guess as to how hard to rev the engine and how hard to brake and when to let out the clutch to make up for the big jump from a high gear to a low gear.

The trick to smooth downshifting is to be very fast and to blip the throttle. Being fast will develop with time and repetition. Blipping takes some practice. To downshift, you pull in the clutch, bump down a gear, and let the clutch back out. To blip, what you’re going to do is give the throttle a twist while clutched in to get revs higher for the lower gear. One big and quick rev. Don’t linger. Open and close it immediately. You have to be ready to clutch back in at the “top” of the blip, so at first you might want to wait to blip until you’re in the lower gear, clutch still disengaged. As you get more comfortable, you’ll blip as you downshift for extra speed.

One thing people sometimes do is wait too long to clutch back in. You have to catch the blip when the engine is revved up or you don’t get any benefit. It can be a bit worrisome at first if you’re afraid you revved too hard and you hesitate, but you just have to go for it. Start with a smoother change like 4th to 3rd (on a 250) or 3rd to 2nd (on a bigger bike). 1st gear is the hardest to hit smoothly.

But yeah, emphasis on taking that BRC before you ride more!

[eternal05]

…but please tell me you’ll be getting a jacket and other gear to match that helmet!

[eternal05]

0-60mph in 5.0-5.5 seconds is really pretty damn fast. It’s in the same ballpark as, say, a Subaru WRX STI or an Audi S4. The lightness of the bike makes it very nimble and easy to flick from side to side, and I can still smoke 99% of cars on freeway on-ramps (not that I do…mind you…*ahem*). Best of all when you’re beginning, you can really muscle it around at slow speeds to avoid what would be drops with a heavier bike. The price, fuel economy, and insurance are all other selling points. Top end is also not your concern at this point. Just about any motorcycle will go faster than you should on the street (though I’m all for whippin’ it up at the track). The 250R doesn’t have any problem going fast if it needs to (e.g. freeway haul at 70mph), but it does rev high to do that. Some people get unnerved running the engine at that level and feel a bit more vibration than on other bikes. Honestly I never found it to be an issue.

Second, NO CBRs! No R6s, no GSX-Rs, no ZX-6Rs, no Daytonas, no race-tuned bikes! These are NOT beginner friendly bikes at all. The difference between these and a 250R is night and day, and will probably not make you the better man for it. There are lots of great beginner bikes suggested all around this site, so really scrape it for everything it’s got.

Finally, just so that you don’t think this advice is coming from somebody who doesn’t like to go fast and have fun, I do own a bigger and faster bike now, and I visit the track pretty regularly during riding season. All the same, the 250R still sits in my garage because it’s the better of my bikes for commuting and riding around town.

[eternal05]

First, a Ninja250 is not too small for you weight-wise, but may be a tad small for you height wise. The only way to know is to go to a Kawi dealer and sit on one. Be sure to have a buddy or a sales rep hold the bike upright for you so you can get both feet on the pegs and check the real riding position.

$750 is definitely enough for what you want. I’d suggest HJC as a helmet manufacturer. they make a lot of affordable helmet models. I would also suggest that you invest in a pair of riding boots. Statistically, injuries get less and less common as you go up the body, even if they get more severe (i.e. the most common injuries happen to feet and ankles, the least common to heads). A pair of boots can protect you from rolling your ankle, breaking your foot if you drop your bike, or losing your foot in a bad crash. I’d really try to make it work. The other gear you mention is a must as well.

Be sure to check these out:

How to survive with no car and only a motorcycle
Are motorcycles cheaper than cars?

Welcome to the site, and good luck beginning your motorcycle career. Be safe!

[eternal05]

But the admin of the site (Ben) has other full-time work and runs this site as a one-off hobby (i.e. he wrote it from scratch). I’m sure he plans to get to it at some point, as many people have expressed interest in such a feature, but he’s a busy guy…

[eternal05]

Check out Ninja250.org. They have TONS of information, though you have to be careful because some of it doesn’t apply to the new Ninjas (’08 and later).

As far as your question goes, I have some things to add to what briderdt said. First, you’re in the hard-break-in portion of your bike’s life cycle up until 600 miles. That means no revving over 4,000 rpm. That’s your shift point for the first few hundred miles. Once you get to 600 miles, you should get the bike serviced and then you can ride it up to 6,000rpm until you hit 1,000 miles. That’s what the MANUAL says anyway. I wouldn’t take the 4,000rpm too seriously, but I would keep it under 6,000rpm for the first 1,000 miles. That will give you a chance to really brake the bike in, but also force you to stay at slower speeds (but not THAT slow) until you’re really comfortable.

If you’re going to start dicking around before taking a course, you need to do some practice before you start shifting. First, you need to, as you say, figure out where the clutch engages. To do that, put it in first gear (shift down once from neutral) while holding the clutch in. Now slowly (and I mean SLOWLY) start releasing the clutch until you START to feel the bike move. That’s the beginning of what the call the friction zone: the area of clutch range where the clutch plates are touching enough to affect each other, but still slipping. Now pull in the clutch. Rock the bike back to where you started (you probably moved a few inches to a foot), and do it again, rock back, again, rock back, etc.

Once you’re comfortable with that, it’s time to get the bike going a bit faster. In neutral or with the clutch in, try playing with the throttle a bit. Try to get to the point where you can crack it open to exactly, say, 2,500rpm and have it stay there. Now, as you’re letting out the clutch this time, add about that much throttle. When you’re beginning, err on the side of a bit more throttle and the clutch not let out quite as much if you have trouble with stalling. The bike will get moving a bit faster now. Keep your feet on the ground and just walk your legs with the bike as it moves until you’re comfortably balanced and feel good about lifting your feet onto the pegs. When you do lift your feet to the pegs you should have the balls of your feet on the peg, not your arches.

Finally, with respect to shifting, as briderdt said, you ultimately want to do it as fast as possible. Sporty motorcycles, and all motorcycles in general as compared to cars, have engines that slow much faster than you might be used to (that is to say, the needle on the tach drops fast when you get off the throttle). As such you want to catch it (by engaging the next gear) before it drops too low. For NOW, however, you should take your damned time. You’ll probably take two seconds to shift the first time (that’s really slow), and since the engine will have probably gone to idle, if you just let out the clutch, you’ll feel a huge jolt. If you took too much time to shift or downshift, just let out the clutch really slowly and eat up all the differential by slipping that clutch. Again, the steps are:

1. In one motion: pull in the clutch while rolling off the throttle
2. Shift up firmly
3. Drop the clutch into the friction zone and then let it out from there, while smoothly rolling the throttle back on

Two tips to help you:
1. If you know you’re going to shift, get your toe under/over the shift pedal BEFOREHAND. Nothing stresses you out when you’re learning to shift like having to find the shifter blind in a hurry after already pulling in the clutch lever.
2. When you shift up, make sure you click it up all the way and keep pressure on the shifter until you’re back in gear. This will avoid the problem of “missed shifts” in which you try to shift up but either fail or end up in a false neutral (transmission disengaged between, say, 3rd and 4th gear, even though there shouldn’t be a neutral there).

[eternal05]

Every single morning commute I come across at least one or two instances where I’d be dead if I wasn’t more alert. When I’m on the ball it’s no sweat. You see it coming so far off and you expect it so much that when it finally happens, you just calmly carry out your avoidance plan and that’s that. Cars randomly change lanes with no warning or blinker all the time. They slam on their brakes unexpectedly, cut you off, turn right from the left lane…they never run out of ideas. Not expecting it is just foolish.

It’s funny, but when I’m on a bike I have this weird temporary hatred for cars, this pessimistic outlook on everything, expecting the worst from everybody. Kinda like this (Rated NSFW on account of all the F#$%ing swearing):

Aww yeah, I bet you’re gonna try to rush past me in the right lane and then force your way in when it merges down to the left lane in 100 ft, yeah I bet you are cause you’re a dirty car, aren’t you, yeah you’re just a selfing punk and you’re gonna do…awww you did it! I KNEW IT! YOU COCKSUCKER I KNEW YOU WERE GON….err hi….didn’t see you there…

[eternal05]

Let me preface this with a disclaimer: I don’t suggest that I could have reacted any better, or that her handling of the situation suggests that she is a poor rider. I claim that her response to the threat ahead of her was very poor, WHETHER OR NOT IT IS REASONABLE TO EXPECT THE AVERAGE “SAFE” RIDER TO DO BETTER IN SIMILAR CIRCUMSTANCES.

Put as simply as possible, her reaction was not optimal at all. Especially when you’re traveling at that speed, the MOST OBVIOUS targets for your continued vigilance are the cars immediately encircling you: in front, behind, and adjacent to you, both slightly ahead and slightly behind. Especially when I’m moving past an adjacent car, I have to take extra precaution and be extra prepared to either brake rapidly or GTFO on the gas. It “looks” like it happened fast, but as she was coming up on that left-hand car she should have already been keeping tabs on it, waiting for it to unexpectedly lane change into her or do something erratic.

With two fingers on the brake in such anticipation, it should have been only a tiny fraction of a second before she was hard on the brakes. I count 3 seconds from beginning of skid to impact. If we throw away a WHOLE SECOND for reaction time, that still leaves her with 2 seconds. A competent track rider can lose about 22mph/sec of braking, and a competent street rider with a decent front brake can lose around 18mph/sec or so. That leaves her with a ton of options: slow to a stop combined with leftward drift(maybe not if there was a car on her ass), lane change right (not the best since the car was headed that way), lane change left (only bad if the skidding car circled around and went left again…the left lane was clear, which she should have known), or continue braking hard in order to minimize impact in the ensuing collision. If she didn’t change her trajectory at all, she should have been able to get down to about 0-10mph depending on her brakes and her riding skill, and the precise speed at which she was going.

Her response was the worst possible response: she failed to brake much (I see only mild slow-down) and clearly target fixated on the threat itself, moving towards the skidding car instead of away from it. In fact, I would disagree with Zep with respect to the fact that you don’t have to be scanning ahead at ALL to see that coming. If you freeze-frame the vid at the moment the car started skidding, there are only about 2 car lengths between her and her target (it’s hard to tell because of the fisheye lense, but use the gold Accord to the right as ruler). That was practically in front of her nose!

In the end, like I said, there might be little chance to be so clear-headed in that moment, but there were lots of things she could have done to either completely avoid or dramatically lessen the effect of that accident.

[eternal05]

Always keep them thinking they’re the only ones that can make you that smiley

[eternal05]

Just like the regular words, the type of brake you speak of is a “drum” brake (as opposed to disc). They don’t perform nearly as well as disc brakes and tend to be subject to greater brake fade as a result of construction and poor heat dissipation. A lot of cruisers have drum brakes for their rear.

[eternal05]

Congrats, and happy birthday!

[Author]

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