Muscles get weaker when not used, and this is especially true for that big grey muscle between your ears.  Accident statistics in the Spring suggest that riding skills atrophy quickly between the three months of winter.  You may not FEEL like it does, and some people get back up to speed faster than others in the Spring – but the rust is real.  So how can you keep up your riding skills during the winter months?  Here’s our completely unscientific Top 5 Tips…

5. Read CityBikerBlog and fantasize about riding.  Like I said – this isn’t scientifically proven, but it should be right?  But seriously it’s a good time to catch up on instructional books (like Proficient Motorcycling, Twist of the Wrist 2).  If you don’t have any, you can even buy them for someone as a Christmas gift and then borrow it.  It won’t keep your skills up – but it will give you plenty to think about for when you do get back on your bike.

4. (Along those same lines) Racing and instructional videos. Yes your family will think you’re sadly going through withdrawal – and they’ll be right – but research using fMRI machines have found that when people who play particular sports watch that sport – their brain lights up differently than non-players.  Basketball players watching basketball have brain activity similar to what they experience when they’re playing – tennis players show similar brain activity watching tennis to when they’re actually playing… Golfers… For people who actually play the sport, they view games as though they were in the game and the corresponding parts of their brain light up.  This probably applies to watching MotoGP (or even instructional videos)… although if someone would lend me an fMRI, I’ll be glad to try and prove this.  And although I’ve never dragged my elbow like Spies or Stoner, watching them do so reminds me of what it feels like to have my arm stretched across the tank and my toes pointed…  Watching the TT gives me the sensation of modulation the throttle for traction and hunting for smooth spots to brake and downshift…

3. Hoon a car on the track. Driving on the track is somewhat like riding a motorcycle on the street in the sense that you’re thinking about brake points, turn points, lines, and traction… It’s different from driving your minivan to the grocery store.  So if you have the means get out and do a few laps in your Carrera – or more realistically for regular folks, give indoor go-karting a try – there are a couple within 30 minutes of Manhattan.  You might try SIM racing too – iRacing is getting better and better – and if you see a Leo from NY racing in Miata Cup, say hi, that’s probably me.

2. Get out and ride. I ride all winter here in NY – meaning I get out a couple of times a week in the coldest months.  And I’m STILL rusty come Spring…  But I’d probably be worse if I weren’t riding.  The problem with winter riding (other than it’s cold and icy and the DOT throws dirt on the road that makes the non-icy parts slippery too) is that it’s very “reserved” riding that doesn’t resemble regular “sport” riding.  So when the weather thaws it feels really weird to lean over, or get your head down close to the tank, or open up the throttle…  But it still helps to keep some of the muscle memory alive, and makes the transition to your regular riding style easier come the Spring.

1. Move to Australia for the Winter.

How do you keep up your riding skills in the Winter?  Share the wealth in the comments section.  Cheers!

Related posts:

1. Winter Bikers
2. The Most Dangerous Time of Year
3. In just a couple of months…

No not twins… Twin cylinder engines (like you find in Ducatis and Harleys, also popular sportbikes like the RC51, SV650), and also single cylinder engines for that matter (like you find in dirt bikes and scooters) have a quality that higher powered four cylinder engines don’t have. We call it “tractability” or manageability; there’s something about the tempo of the engine firing that makes it easy to gauge how much power you’re putting down to the ground with a corresponding twist of the throttle. Low revving v-8 muscle cars have a similar quality: each pulse equates to an amount of power that’s easy for our brains to quantify intuitively. Whereas inline-fours are more like turbo powered engines in car world: you open the throttle and it takes a moment for the engine to spool up and power to be translated to the ground… This lack of directness makes it easier to over-rev and lose traction, whereas twins help you make the most of their power. This is especially useful in low traction environments like off-road, or deep into a corner with the bike leaned over… Twins (and singles) just help you make the most of what you got.  So it’s no wonder why people who ride them love them so much…

Then why aren’t all bikes twins or singles? The short answer is: they make less power than fours.  Ducati is the only sportbike company that is fanatical about sticking to the twin cylinder engine in their sportbikes.  But the only way Ducati can be competitive in production class races is to fight for rules that allow bigger displacement engines, like running the 848 twin against 600cc fours. Because a 650cc twin makes much less (around 30hp less) power than a (comparable) 600cc four. But in the premier MotoGP class, even Ducati had to go to a traditional v-four in order to stay competitive.

Interestingly Yamaha’s MotoGP bike is an inline 4, but they tried to get the best of both worlds by tuning the engine in a way that two cylinders fire at a time (or close enough together), so that the four behaves like a twin in order to get better tractability and power management (same thing) through the corners.  They trade off a bit of overall engine power for the benefits that come from a twin – while still making more power than a twin of the same size.

So which do you prefer? The screaming top end power of a four, or the finesse-ability and the (po-ta-to po-ta-to) character of a thumpy twin?

Related posts:

1. Big Bang Theory
2. Moto-Myths, Part 1 (Size Matters?)
3. Why not three?

Quick! What do you see? According to Tom Tom, the GPS navigation people, this city (which city is it?) is supposed to have the worst traffic in the country… But when you see this, what do you see?

I see motorcycle lanes… Faster moving bikes toward the left, scooters and slower bikes to the right.

Yes there are reasons when you absolutely need a car (like when you have to carry a lot of equipment, or drive your grandmother to the knitting supply store). And there are people who don’t have the necessarily coordination and to ever learn to ride… But for the rest of us – roads like these are WIDE open… You see traffic, I see bike lanes.

By the way, this is a picture of Seattle. And I don’t know for sure, but I think NYC or NJ gets it worse than this picture…

Related posts:

1. Top Five Motorcycle Misconceptions…
2. Time Waster: DMV Road Test
3. Riding Skills: Wide Vision

The computer in your phone can crunch a spreadsheet full of numbers faster than you, remember more dates and facts, and that’s nothing compared to what your desktop or server can do…  But that’s just comparing surface brainpower.  It turns out that there’s no computer (today or in the immediate future) that can do the calculations necessary to catch a fly ball: something your ten year old nephew can do.  And no computer can do the calculations necessary to ride a motorcycle to work through traffic.  Because whereas our brains work on a two tiered system: conscious thoughts, and also below-the-surface calculations that often present as intuition or reflexes, computers only have the first one.  And this has real practical applications for how you learn to ride better…

When you ride a motorcycle, your brain is actually performing billions of calculations a minute to keep you upright and away from other traffic.  But consciously you might just be thinking about how good it feels, or where you might find parking by work.  Whereas when you’re developing a skill (like throttle control) you have to consciously work at it, once you learn it you do (we say) it “automatically”… So really we’re trying to take these skills and make them automatic.

How do we do that? Simple.  Conscious focused effort + time…  When you work on some skill intensely or try to solve a problem, then go away go to sleep and come back the next day, your brain actually works on the skill while you’re doing other things.

So it helps to schedule your practice sessions in twos and threes.  The more frequent, the better.  Don’t just take an advanced riding class and stop, but schedule  a track day a couple of weeks later to work on what you’ve learned.  Don’t just plan one group ride, plan a couple, because whatever you work on in one day will probably improve by the time you get to the next… That’s why I tell new riders to just get out there every day they can, even if it’s just for half an hour to the grocery store and back.  An hour every day is better (and safer) than riding for six hours every Sunday.  And when you’re ready for it, the best thing is to simply ride to work every day, and ride to play every weekend.

Also, get plenty of rest in between sessions. A good night’s sleep in between riding practice sessions gives your brain time to process and write lessons to the  ”automatic” part of your brain’s hard drive.  It sounds basic, but that’s the secret to learning ANYTHING really…just ask the geeky honors students you went to school with.  Cheers!

Related posts:

1. Working on throttle control…
2. Who Shouldn’t Ride
3. Can you improve your sense of balance?

And Abba, and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo…we get the VHS street racing video series “Ghost Rider.” Now if you are too sensible to know who that is – it was a series of full length videos showing “crazy” footage of an illegal motorcycle rider who sometimes taunted police cars and zoomed away. He’s best known for giving a lot of dumb kids in the U.S. even dumber ideas about motorcycles… But if you’re not actually an idiot in real life – then these videos can actually show you a thing or two! GhostRider is an excellent street rider. There’s a video out there of him riding Sachsenring, and on the racetrack, he doesn’t seem exceptionally fast…But on a public roadway, among predictable Swedish drivers (somewhat accustomed to autobahn speeds), he’s quite fast and in control of the traffic around him… Notice how far in advance he changes his speed (throttle position), and switches lanes to put him on the line he wants to take…

Anyway if you slow this down ten times, and change the setting to 2nd Ave instead Stockholm, it kinda’ looks like my morning commute… Kinda’.

Related posts:

1. Electric land speed record…(zzzz)
2. What fast looks like…
3. The World of Superbike (2011)!!

[btw - can't see the video? Here's the YouTube link]

It’s hard to watch MotoGP without falling for the usual PR storylines… Valentino Rossi is the one everyone is supposed to root for, and “everyone else is just a prick or a poseur…” But that’s just PR for the kiddies. Make believe, really. The reality is that there has never been such a high caliber group of riders in one series at the same time. All the front line riders (Stoner, Lorenzo, Pedrosa) and even the second tier riders (like Spies, Hayden, Dovidsioso, Simonicelli, etc) not to mention the pillars of MotoGP (like Edwards) – they’re all worthy of being racing legends in their own right… It’s just too bad for them that there are so many of them all at once… But out of this illustrious crew, there’s probably no one rider who has such perfect technique as Casey Stoner…

So what are we looking at here?

• First off notice his body position going into the turn… His chin is below the level of the windscreen, right arm stretched across the top of the tank. More than any of the other riders, Stoner has textbook body position… It looks easy, but it’s hard to do while remaining loose on the bars with arms relaxed the way it is here…
• Second, notice how he hangs off further (with his upper body) AFTER the apex while the lower body remains locked onto the bike. Where other riders might stay put and spin the rear (like Nicky Hayden), Stoner hangs off further so that he can stand the bike up sooner. The sooner you stand the bike up, the sooner you can get on the gas hard…
• Also, by getting in a good position for the turn with the lower body, he’s able to tighten the line (if he needs to) just by moving his head further out… which seems to be what he did here.

That’s what I’m seeing anyway… Cheers!

Related posts:

1. Riding Tips: Body Steering
2. Quick body position check…
3. Get in position first…

Many street riders tend to shift too frequently: One test to see if you fit into that category is to ask yourself, “do you forget which gear you’re in?” If you can’t tell the difference between your speed and engine sound in 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th or 5th – then it’s probably because you shift so often you don’t have a sense of what each gear can do.  But just the way good golfers practice shots with each golf club in their bag, learning its feel and swing and the distance it sends the ball – part of motorcycling skill is getting to know each gear, using it thoughtfully, and developing a mental map of what each can do and how the engine feels in each gear… So what can we do?

So here’s what you do: city riding is good for the first three (or four) gears.  Spend some time with each gear.  Instead of shifting up as soon as you can, spend some time in each gear, starting with the higher gears.  Cruise in 3rd.  Take slow turns in 3rd remembering to get on the throttle early and gradually rolling on throughout the turn.  Then cruise the same speeds in a lower gear.  Make mental notes as to how sensitive the throttle is going from on to off or vice versa.  Learn to ride smoothly in that gear using your throttle control.  And as you go from one gear to the other make mental notes as to the difference in engine speed.  Aim for smooth shifts and smooth throttle control especially in the lower gears.

I know lots of experienced riders who have plenty of miles under their belt, yet have trouble riding smoothly around town in first gear because they never developed the throttle control to manage their engines in that gear.  Then they wonder why it’s so hard for them to ride on slick roads – they never learned to be delicate with throttle control.

By the same token I meet newer riders having a tough time riding smoothly because they tend to use lower gears.  They get around much easier once they convince themselves they can use a higher gear without stalling the engine.

So on a given road (at a given speed) you can probably choose from at least 3 gears, all of them can carry you comfortably, and all of them have their place in your riding arsenal:

• the higher gear will keep the engine sound low, so it’s good for riding quietly through neighborhoods.
• The lowest gear is good for acceleration and for making sure your engine charges your battery (many bikes don’t charge batteries adequately below certain engine speeds); but is hardest to be smooth with.
• And the middle gear is good for slippery surfaces balancing throttle manageability with the control needed to handle wheel spin.

Related posts:

1. Tips on Braking and Downshifting
2. Reasons to Gear-Up
3. Clutchless Shifting

Although the graphic is entitled Vespanomics, it might as well be called Scooternomics.  Because I live in NYC, my (economy) car only gets around 35mpg, but my 125cc (non-Vespa, but still cool) scooter gets 95mpg!  I still need the car to lug people and gear for work sometimes, but when I’m just in or around Manhattan, the scooter is fastest and easiest.  So for just local commuting I’d say I spend 65% of my time on a scooter, 25% bike, and 5% car…  Which is why I’m never really concerned about gas prices… I spend less money on gas (miler per mile) than my Prius driving friends!

What this infographic shows is, even if you drive a gas guzzler some of the time – you don’t need to switch to a Prius to get tree hugging gas mileage…  You just need to spend some of your time on a scooter (or motorcycle).  That’s exactly the kind of advice I like to hear!  If you’re interested in how spending money on a scooter can actually save you money, you can check out the site here…

Related posts:

1. Reponsible Motorcycles
2. Save Motorcycle Parking
3. Motorcycles Save Lives

1. Your smartphone, and a way to keep it safely on your bike or on your body.  I use the Otterbox Commuter for my iPhone and keep it in the inside pocket of my riding suit (screen facing inward).  But it will also fit into the tiny “truck space” under the passenger seat…which might give your phone’s GPS a clearer signal to the satellites.
2. Lap/speed/timing software. I use the basic version of Harry’s Lap Timer…  But you can also use the MCN motorcycle app.  For other phones there’s also Racechrono, and Trackmaster…

Typical GPS devices and the GPS in your phone updates just once every second.  Too slow for accurate readings of your high speed turns.  But what these motorcycle specific apps can do is use the data it gets for the GPS of your phone (which updates quite slowly), and calculate what your speed might have been in-between the update points…  

But if you want more accurate high speed data, you can use an external GPS device, like this QStarz 818XT Bluetooth GPS.  It communicates with your bluetooth equipped phone and gives you more accurate GPS data.  This one updates ten times per second as opposed to one, giving your phone a lot more data to work with…  This particular model can be found for under $100, but requires some technical fussing about (which I don’t mind): you need to download satellite data in order to get 10hz updates, otherwise you’ll only get 4 or 5 – which is still much better than your phone’s GPS.  And it also requires a jailbreak in order to work with the iPhone.  That’s the bad news.  Once you jailbreak your phone you’ll need a program called BTStack GPS that allows the GPS to communicate with your iPhone.  The good news is, once you do so, both the GPS device and the iPhone software works really well!

But regardless of whether you decide to go with the external GPS device or not, the fun is in being able to see not only overall miles traveled, average speeds, etc… But your actual speed during a corner. Check out my rather slow turns going into the “Carousel” at Thunderbolt.

So there it is… Not a full review, but just a taste to show you it can be done… there are a lot more things you can do: like overlay your GPS data onto a video file, analyze g-force and acceleration data… But I haven’t messed around with those things so I don’t know much about it.  I suppose, in theory, your g-force data could help you compute (from trackside) how much more speed you *could have* taken on a turn or accelerating at a certain point.  But I’m not there yet!

Do you use GPS lap timing or trip software for your smartphone? What do you use?  How do you like it?  Share the wealth in the comments section!  Cheers!

Related posts:

1. How to keep your iPhone handy…
2. It’s all about timing…
3. How to use your iphone GPS while riding…

If you want full on race bike, you might do better spending your money race prepping a Kawasaki, Yamaha, or Honda… And if you wanted the ultimate in Italian performance, the Aprilia *might* give the 1198 a run for its money… But when you talk about the Monster, there really is no competition. It’s the best in what it does: a naked sport street bike. Sporty enough to kick some butt, but still somewhat street friendly. So if you like Monsters, here’s the newest, along with some great ride footage – let the video load, and skip to the 7:45 mark for the unedited footage with engine sounds.

Related posts:

1. Ducati-nomics: the Monster 696
2. Longing for the big screen…
3. A “Monster” 1098