My new "motorcycle"

[Guth_imp]

I have been following GP since 1972 and remember well the 50 cc GP races. Sounding like a bunch of bumblebee bees and passing at seemingly impossible places.

Man, that's awesome. It is seemingly all to easy for me to forget the depth and width required to measure your experience with and exposure to motorcycling overall. That likely plays into your feelings that are similar to others, include VLJ's to some degree...

Reading mickey's and Guth's posts, I admit to being torn on the subject. Guth is correct, in that the experience is every bit as visceral in a soft top, if not more so. mickey is correct, in that leaning the correct way just feels better. The explosive rush of speed a motorcycle can provide is also a difference maker. No real-world car can match the instant acceleration of something even as pedestrian as an $8K Z900, never mind something like a BMW S1000-RR. If you like to feel your hair on fire exiting a corner, or approaching one, cars can't match sportbikes.

That being said, cars are just as fast on public roads, to a point. If the bike rider is willing to use every last ounce of available acceleration, nope, the car can't hang. It'll cook its brakes, never mind the driver's skill and/or nerve, or lack thereof, bottling out. If the bike rider isn't pinning it between every corner, however, yes, the car is just as fast, maybe faster. He certainly can carry more corner speed, unless, again, the bike rider is willing to treat a public road like it's a racetrack.

I'm not, and I don't pin it between every corner, so for me and, I suspect, most other people, a good sportscar is just as fast on a public road. We all know how much faster race cars are on the track, vs race bikes.

I think the main issue is fear management vs thrillseeking. Which side of the spectrum does one fall on? If one is willing to go balls out on a bike, the bike is more thrilling and much more engaging. Below that very dangerous threshold, however, I think things even up quite a bit.

Conversely, if we go the other direction and compare casual riding to casual driving, I think the top-down sportscar experience is more visceral, more thrilling, and more satisfying. Riding a very fast bike slowly, being overtly cautious on it, is not very satisfying. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's a bit frustrating. That's why I would never want to drive a mega-horsepower supercar on a public road. It'd be worthless. It would be nothing but an exercise in impulse control. My GSX-R1000 was like that. 123 mph in second gear meant that I never got to use much of the motor, or any of the bike's capabilities, really.

The Miata is like an older 600 sportbike, say, a CBR600F2, or F4i. It's fast enough to be fun, fast enough to be thrilling, fast enough to be a terror in modded form at the track, yet not so powerful that you never get to twist the throttle hard. If you screw up a bit, it won't kill you, nor will it land you in the pokey. The ride and handling aren't racetrack sharp. It's just simple, undiluted, made-for-public-roads fun.

I do feel more of a sense of achievement following a great ride, however, or, especially, a good motorcycle roadie. It's just easier in the car, requiring less concentration, less constant attention.

Yeah, all in all, I still prefer the overall feeling from a great motorcycle. Like I said in the initial post, though, a Miata isn't a bad trade-off, if trading off ever becomes necessary. You're giving up something, but not everything.

I suppose that I truly do feel fortunate in that I am just as enamored with the driving experience as I am with the riding experience. Every single time I head out for a ride I am instantly taken back to my childhood, for however briefly. I say this as the sensation of riding almost any motorcycle yields enough similarities to those that I first enjoyed as a little kid riding a Z50 Mini-Trail. Even after technological "advances" have managed to wipe out everything else that I have found attractive about motorcycles (both in admiring them and in riding them), the "lean" will always remain.

While manufacturers are working to eliminate so many of the very things that are core to the joy I get from riding and driving, I prefer the satisfaction I receive from doing things the old-school way. Be it a motorcycle or a car, I like to interact with the machine as much as possible rather than having the vehicle do all the work for me. Rev-matching is a great example. In a car, rev-matching using heel & toe inputs deep into corner entry to weight the front wheels in preparation for the turn is more challenging yet also similar to blipping the throttle and working the clutch and front brake on a motorcycle to achieve the same thing. But I consider this type of stuff to be part of the "craft" of either riding or driving. When done properly both bring me great joy.

With driving, my heel & toe technique has quite a ways to go, but in my case that's a good thing. Working to maximize the efficiency and smoothness of my control inputs will keep me entertained to no end. The improvements that I've enjoyed from the time that I have invested in this has been incredibly rewarding thus far. My guess is that be it consciously or subconsciously, VLJ is already making a number of adjustments to his driving control inputs to compensate for his injuries. Yet even the manner in which he makes those adjustments impacts his smoothness and efficiency.

I find it entertaining watching just how instinctual Motoharu Kurosawa's (a retired Japanese race driver nicknamed "Gan-San") inputs are in this video of him driving the S2000 prototype. How hard he can push the car in for him what amounts to a casual drive impressive. Only the speed is not what I'm focused on here so much as the coordination and casualness of his inputs as it relates to the car's handling. These things can be applied at practically any speed and I find this type of thing incredibly rewarding when done right.