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Glad you avoided the CBR600RR!

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Your ’06 250 might be cheap to insure (did you buy it new or used?), but when I bought my new ’08 250R during winter of ’07, it was NOT cheap to insure. I’m paying $1000 less per year with the same company for better coverage of my DR-Z400sm than I was paying for crappier coverage of my Ninja.

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Beautiful country in that video, Eon!

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I think my fear of a big bike at low speed indicates a big gap in my riding ability. At $1K+, that course is a tough pill to swallow, but I think you (Eon) have inspired me to give it a shot. It’ll be a while before I have time and money for this, but hopefully I can make it happen by the end of next summer. We’ll see.

Still, Owlie, for now I’m with you. I’ll stick to my 300lb bike

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Owlie, these are the five reasons one typically runs wide:

1) Trying to make the turn at too high a speed (unlikely, unless you’re scraping hard parts)

2) Not turning hard enough (e.g., afraid to lean more, not putting enough force on the bars, inadvertently leaning your upper body away from the turn, etc.)

3) Not turning in fast enough, i.e, taking too long to get the bike from upright to turned in (if you’re running wide before the apex)

4) Turning in too early (if you’re running wide on the exit)

5) Rolling on too much throttle on the way out

Do you think you might be doing any of these?

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I can do the box in about 2/3 of the allowed test space on my DR-Z, but when I used to ride my GSX-R on the street, I sometimes struggled to stay inside the lines at all. It took me months of weekly practice to finally get the box down on that bike. The combination of very high gearing in 1st gear (it’s geared for 82mph), almost no handlebar turning range lock-to-lock (a safety feature for high-speed head shake), and the combination of extreme top-heaviness and almost no fork rake made it extremely difficult to turn tightly at low speed. A tiny bit too little throttle/clutch, or a bit too much pressure on the bars and the bike would just dive into a lean. I could turn in a really tight circle, but only after slowly tightening it up from a bigger circle. That first dive from upright to full lean was just terrifying. Just keep practicing and, even though you’ll always find it easier on other bikes, you’ll eventually get it. Be stubborn

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None of that seems too scary, provided you let me ride my 300 lbs DR-Z. Make me try that with a cruiser and I’d be a dead man. That looks SO HARD. His skills are impressive!

Eon, you thinking about giving this a shot?

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I have no idea what you’re talking about

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I’m not going to argue that it should be taught to beginners, but I use pulling ALL the time. Coming out of a turn, for instance, I almost always pull on the inside bar rather than push on the outside bar to straighten the bike back up. The reason I do this is that, because I will have shifted my body inwards of the bike, my outside arm will be outstretched and will not be able to exert much pushing force. This is made harder if the outside arm is the right arm, because you then also have to worry about precise throttle control. It’s a mental thing for me, and I’ve found it works really well. It may not work for everybody.

Knowing that you CAN pull on the opposite bar, regardless of what you normally do in a turn, can also come in handy. I find that, especially in a weird chicane (and I’m not talking about the track here), a bumpy road, or an otherwise awkward situation, the forces on my upper body might make it hard for me to push on a handlebar without unbalancing myself, perhaps making me tighten my arms and/or cling to the bars. In this case, as in the one above, it can be useful to pull on the opposite bar to keep everything settled.

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I took a gixxer 600, removed the beautiful, shiny black bodywork and put on crappy race plastics/windscreen, added a full exhaust system + fuel mapping, grip pads, race levers, rearsets, re-valved the forks, swapped the rear shock, and got better tires. None of these are things that most bike shoppers care about, so I’m never going to see any of that money back in resale (if the bike lives that long). Like you said Shamrock, resale be damned!

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I love how completely statistics-based everything is. For instance, despite having much more power than the KLR250, the KLR650 has much lower insurance premiums. Presumably that means that State Farm has, over time, paid very little in claims money to KLR650 riders and therefore has assumed that they are a less-risky bunch. Similarly, the Ninja 250 has higher premiums across the board than the Ninja 650. I think, once again, that this is because a) Ninja 250 => new rider, and new riders crash, and b) if you wanted to get a 600+cc machine and DIDN’T get a Kawi ZX-6R instead of the Ninja 650R, you’re probably a tamer and less-risky individual. Maybe?

Another funny case: the Ducati 1098R is a $40,000 supersport bike. While it has an E (highest possible premiums) rating for collision as you would expect, it only has a B rating (lower-than-average premiums) for liability. Most other supersports have E ratings across the board. I guess that makes sense, because in the event of a crash, it’s going to be super expensive to repair, and will cost the insurance company a great deal. However, somebody riding $40,000 of their own money is less likely to be pulling stand-up wheelies on the interstate, so they’re less likely to incur liability charges against others. Or have I misunderstood something? I might be mixing up my insurance terms.

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+1 to newer-ness

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Look at horsepower, torque, and weight. As a beginner, you want to keep them all relatively low. A lot of weight, especially for a woman that’s 5’2″, will make learning really hard. I was helping a friend of mine practice in a parking lot after her MSF course and she dropped my Ninja 250R at a standstill because the weight got the best of her. She’s 5’4″.

Too much horsepower and torque FOR THE WEIGHT of the bike is also bad because it will be very hard to learn to be subtle and precise with the throttle at first. Look at horsepower-per-pound (power-to-weight) as a good indicator of how ridiculous a bike might be. For instance, my 600cc GSX-R600, my track bike, makes 114hp at the rear wheel. It weighs 393 lbs sopping wet. That’s a whopping 0.29 hp/lb with a 600cc engine. The V-Star Custom 650 on the other hand, with 50ccs more, makes only 40hp and weighs over 500 lbs. That’s a power-to-weight ratio of only 0.07 hp/lb. The Ninja 250R, a 250cc bike has a larger power-to-weight ratio at 0.08. So yes, the V-Star 650 is a perfectly reasonable beginner bike for you.

However, I would be worried about your lady’s ability to cope with 500+ lbs of bike. Once a person learns how to ride, not being able to put their feet all the way down (i.e., being on their toes when sitting on the bike) isn’t a big problem, nor is lots of weight. For a newbie, however, both of those things can cause a drop very easily even with a not-so-heavy bike, like they did for my friend.

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Reverse a road and you get a whole new road. You have to tackle all the same problems all over again: scouting, picking a line, figuring out where to turn-in, where to brake. Take this to the extreme and you get reversible racetracks. Oregon Raceway Park is one such track. It’s run clockwise and counter-clockwise, while most tracks are run in a predetermined direction every time (e.g., Laguna Seca: counter-clockwise, Le Mans: clockwise). Riding it one way doesn’t prepare you much if at all for riding it the other way. It’s a whole new experience.

Glad you’re out and about again. Post up some pictures of your ice-free stomping grounds when you have the time

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Everybody is entitled to their own gear practices, but I personally can’t understand wearing less than full gear:

-Full face helmet
-Armored, abrasion-resistant jacket
-Abrasion-resistant pants, preferably armored as well
-Gloves, preferably gauntlet
-High boots with foot/shin/ankle protection

Yes, it can be hot on hot days, and it can take a while to put on. Yes you don’t get the “wind in your hair” feeling that, admitedly, feels great. But if you don’t gladly wear all this stuff, you haven’t had the pleasure of even a low-speed crash. Just trust me. When you hit the ground at a mere 20mph and find that your kevlar-reinforced riding pants tore, leaving with you with mild road rash in places, you’ll never wear regular jeans again. Same goes for common omissions like boots: the most common (though non-fatal) injuries are to ankles and shins, mostly from dropping bikes on them. Invest in a solid pair of riding boots. That’ll come in especially happy when you lowside and your bike comes down on top of your unprotected lower leg and grinds it to nothing against the asphalt. I have a buddy who has one leg as a result of a 25mph slide.

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