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Andy Ibbott writes in "Performance Riding Techniques" that basically to become "bike-fit" you need to ride the real bike and goes on to quote a top racer about always ending up being knackered after the first test post-winter (I'm paraphrasing from memory here). But it sure helps having a good cardio-vascular fitness. Kai

You need to sign up to see the big pics, but not the thumbnails. Oh well, we have stuman's pics here

In my personal opinion, you don't need to do the 2-day camp as a starter. Booking just 1 day or 2 days in a row will be an excellent start anyway. Cheers, Kai

Rainman, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. My point was that leveling your eyes with the horizon will reduce the SR triggers, and that can't be a bad thing. So teaching riders to leveling their eyes can be used as a stepping stone - it's a helper, a tool to overcome a particular SR at a particular level of training. But it's not an end in itself to bike stability, like the throttle control rule. Kai

Sorry for coming back to this one, but could you elaborate a little on Keith's comments to this, as I'm rather puzzled by that comment? I find that keeping my eyes level with the horizon (or close to that) makes wonders for NOT triggering SRs, and I find that (street) riders that I talk to / work with on cornering all come back with an agreement to this statement after trying it out (on the road or track). Now, the guys in MotoGP are hardly our joe average rider, and their SR levels are clearly on an entirely different planet from us mere mortals: This make me suspect that they deliberately choose "the lesser evil" from their level of expertise, which is not to strain their necks etc, since they have internalized fully the non-horizontal eyes so much that not doing this doesn't impede their riding.

I learned the two-step some ten years ago, and have been using that ever since on the road and track, so going through the drill didn't make that difference to me, although I sure had (and probably still have) some bad habits that need corrections. Instead, I'm going to pick the knee-to-knee, because it gave me something that I couldn't find in TOTW2 or anywhere else. It still feels awkward to keep back from the tank, but I'm practising (but not right now when there's snow everywhere). Kai

I've had a blast for the last couple of weeks - spinning the rear wheels on the gas, making it slide even on the straights. And all in my dog-of-a-van Toyota HiAce, which is normally impossible to get to spin up the rear because of it's puny 78 ponies - of which several surely have moved on to pension. But come start of January, we have gotten another 4 inches of snow every week or so - like just this morning. And even with proper winter-tires, an underpowered, light, rear-wheel driven van can spin it up :D Awww ... I miss springtime so I can take out the bikes. Only comfort is that I giving the racer its proper amount of TLC at the moment (which makes me wanna go riding even more). Kai

Remember that a large displacement doesn't equate to a physically large bike. My R1 comes to mind :-) But heck, I happily rode my Polini DreamBike, which are around 16" long and the seat is 8" off the ground! But the point stands: what is 'comfortable' to you is highly personal. Kai

I'm not a CSS coach, but my advice would be to take Level 1 & 2, and go out and practice the things you've learned and let it sink in. Once you feel that you are ready for another 2-days of training, go back. Whether that's in 1-2 months or next year doesn't matter that much. For what it's worth, I did 1+2 and 3+4 with just 2 months in between (but that was because Keith was coming to Europe - my plan had been to wait for this season before going back to school). Hope this helps, Kai

I've never had anyone complain of it, they usually complain of mental fatigue or physical tiredness. I suspect some of the students may well be able to comment if they have or not. guys/girls, any comment? Never had blisters on my hands from riding a motorcycle. Other sports like running, taekwondo (even a double-blister once) and tennis/squash yes. Motorcycling no. But then again, I'm very far off from MotoGP level of riding - I might be able to qualify for a Rookie600 race, but that's all. Kai

From what I understand from talking to others and reading a bit about MX riding, the point of pushing the bike down under you is because the surface isn't exactly flat underneath the bike - there are big U-shaped grooves in the turns, and by pushing the bike down, they can better use the "positive camber" provided by the walls of the groove. Cheers, Kai

How is under lower arm positioned? Your lower arm should be as horizontal as possible, to get the maximum leverage from your push* on the handlebar. *) Technically, we should push perpendicular to the steering heads rotation axis, but that's would mean that the elbow should be even lower than the handlebar... Cheers, Kai

Welcome aboard Russel, Good to see Kiwis here. Kai, almost antipodean to NZ

Tell that to Gary McCoy - he was sliding everywhere, and its wasn't exactly the slow way around the track when he was riding GP500. On my small Polini "DreamBike" loosing the front (by putting too much weight on the knee) was quite undramatic - I simply noticed that I was going straight instead of doing a turn, so pressing the front tire into the tarmac would fix that instantly. Mind you, that the Dreambike weighs 20kg and I weight around 90kg including gear. On the big bike, sliding the front has been from vertical to horizontal in less than a blink of an eye (but slow enough to be able to think "oh ######, this will get expensive" before hitting the tarmac). I have slided the rear twice (both not on purpose) - both times it was the feeling of the bike just going sideways underneath me, with no warning. Probably very close to what Fajita Dave calls "falling out under me": The first time was because a cager in front of me was putting down a nice oil mist on the Nordschliefe. I came up to the next corner (taking it veeeeery easily) and suddenly the rear stepped left, moving my angle of direction maybe 15 degrees or so tighter in the turn. Second time was on the exit of a fast, heavily banked left-hand turn on Anderstorp Raceway. The bike stepped out, gripped, decided not to highside me, and wobbled a few times (meanwhile my mind went "ok lowsiding ... highsiding? no, lowsiding the other way ... no! it stayed upright (phew - let's go into the pits next time)"). A fellow rider said I had laid down maybe a 10m line of rubber in that turn. To my mind, I have absolutely zip feeling of when I'm close to sliding the rear and how to detect this. This clearly limits my laptime improvements, since I don't ride as hard as I clearly could in the turns (I'm doing 1:12 laps on Ring Knutstorp, where the lap record for bikes is just under 1:00)

As the saying goes .... 100 squillion fly's can't be wrong - eat ######! One of my favourite pet peeves: It's very seldom that the technically best product that wins the market - it's the usually best marketing of an inferior product that wins. Ahem; now let's get back to the riding business. I have more or less decided on the ContourHD 1080p. I just need to save up the cash for it

A couple of years ago, I was leading a group ride with the local university motorcycling club around one of our favorite haunts - a "golden triange" of great roads around 6 miles long. These roads not only have twisties, but also go fair bit up and down by Danish standards. We tend to have a lot of new riders in the club, since most members are student who've just gotten their first bike, so all group rides have an experienced rider in front guiding the way. I was coming up to a left turn where the inside was obscured by a patch of fir trees, shifted to hangout (as I usually do on non-commuting rides), the bike was fully in my own lane, but my head was across the centerline. As I was about 20m from the approaching turn I thought "Nah, it's better to stay completely in my own lane should some idiot coming in the other direction be too close to the centerline for comfort" - so I moved the bike a bit further into my own. After making my turnpoint, I found that a bus travelling in the other direction appeared from behind the trees - and we was 0.5m ACROSS THE CENTER LINE! Instead of triggering SR's I just pushed the outer bar, standing the bike up, moving the bike and me to the right side of the lane and out of harms way, pushing the inside again, and I continued my arc, but displaced a 1m or so to the right. Not exactly a heroic save, but it could have been really messy if it had been one of the unexperienced riders in the group who had to deal with the situation (we have a large disparity of riding skills in the club, because of the new riders).

Big congrats to all three of you! Kai

To the best of my knowledge, taking Level 1-4 will NOT entitle you to a race license. In order to get a race license in Denmark, you need to know the technical regulations regarding the bike, equipment and the flags. Being a fast or even consistent rider is not a prerequisite for getting the license I believe that the requirements are pretty close to that in most other countries as well.

Very cool indeed. But their words about "built-in webserver" and "runs on Linux OS" makes me wonder if it's just an elaborate prank. From the video they're linking to, it obviously isn't. The power pack isn't huge: the biggest is 11kWh and a MotoGP has around 240bhp, and uses on average, say, half the power for around 45minutes of racing. That's ½*240bhp*736W/bhp*3/4h = ~66kWh, ie 6x the energy of the TTX02. What am I missing here? That the TTX2 doesn't put out a lot of bhp?

Greg, Excellent, it was exactly this kind of info I was looking for. BTW did you see the waterproof case VholdR is coming out with? It's quire compact, but it looks more like for diving than anything. Sounds like that it's the same problem that my friend had with his 720p camera - the power would cut from the motorcycle vibrations. He had his battery replaced under warranty- apparently VholdR had a batch of batteries that were 0.5-1mm too short, resulting in this problem. With the new battery, he haven't had problems so far, when going snowboarding. Nice videos, and very fine riding too I presume the raw files are much better quality than what I see on youtube. Post-processing? Why do you like I've got a Full-HD LCD TV I've previously used Pinnacle Studio (about 6 versions ago), so I'll probably give that a go first. Thanks again for your valuable input, Kai

Thanks for the link. Looks really nice - but also rather expensive. I also like the idea of a totally self-contained unit. JTNYC, I think we're pretty aligned here Video specs: I've taken a look at the specs for the GoPro HD and the ContourHD 1080p, and it definitely looks like they are using the same sensor and encoding hardware: they have the same sensor size (5Mpix), can record in the same modes (1080p, 960p "Tall-HD" 4:3 format, 720p, 720p@60fps, etc), use the same codec (H.264 aka .mov/.mp4), and the videos consume the same amount of GB/hour. Audio: GoPro claims to have worked a lot on the audio side - a good thing, because you easily end up with a video that just has wind-noise as sound. VholdR says they have improved the audio side on the 1080p over the old 720p. The sound on the car videos at GoPro's homepage sounds very good. The sound on this YouTube video is OK, but it isn't track pace so it's a little hard to judge. Storage: VholdR uses microSDHC cards (max 16GB), whereas GoPro uses SDHC cards (max 32GB). VholdR is narrower and deeper, whereas GoPro is wider (has a bigger frontal area) but not as deep. Personally, I like the design of the VholdR better. GoPro can take still pictures (5Mpix). I'm not sure the VholdR software can do that. Mounting/alignment: A trackday friend of mine has the "old" 720p ContourHD cam, and he says that adjusting the ContourHD can be annoying, because it A) doesn't have a built-in screen and doesn't have a "webcam" feature so you can see where it's pointing. That means you need to take a small clip, stop the cam, plug in USB cable, review it on a laptop, unplug USB, adjust cam direction, repeat ad nauseum. Don't know about the GoPro. Stevo, can you get your trackday buddy to chime in on this? If others have info to share, please do. I'm not rushing out of the door to buy a cam next week. Thanks, Kai

I'm considering to get a video camera to mount on the racebike, so I can film what I'm doing during sessions in order to provide feedback to myself. I've previously used a Sony mini-DV camera but it takes up quite a bit of space on the tank and secondly, the helical-scan tape recording system is a fickle system that doesn't like a lot of vibrations. A fully-electronic solution (no moving parts) would be preferred. My question is twofold: First, what cameras have people tried and would recommend? - The UK school had an all-digital camera, but it had some problems with water entering it when I did Level 4 in July. Secondly, where should I mount it in order to get the best input into my own riding? The normal mounting position is on the fuel tank, pointing forwards and possibly seeing the instrument panel, but that's probably not the best way. I've been looking at the VholdR ContourHD 1080p. In 1080p mode, it gives a 110 degree field-of-view, compared to the 55 degrees of the old Sony miniDV (with a 0.6x wide-angle lens). Thanks, Kai

ECR - is that Eagles Canyon Raceway? Regardless of the track, I would recommend dividing that goal up in smaller, intermediate steps or goals - taking 18s out of 138s is my opinion A LOT, unless you are really 'coasting' along on the straights today. Consider it this way, if the track record is 1:46 (as on Eagles Canyon), you're today 30% off the lap record and 2:00 will be 13% off the lap record. Maybe you're just a lot braver than me, but to me ... wow, that's a big improvement you're looking to do.

...my 2 cents: BUY! You need this equipment anyway. But then it's easy to spend someone else's money. I agree with Kevin: Buy ... if you at all can find some leathers that suit you (no pun intended). If you cannot find leathers that fit you well, consider renting if you know you'll have a set made-to-measure (it ain't cheap). You should be able to pick up boots, gloves and back protector that fit you like the proverbial glove. If the first shop don't have stuff that fits you, visit other shops that carry other brands. Oh, and remember those earplugs! Cheers, Kai

It sure depends on how wet the weather is in general Since you're running on street tyres, they should work fine in the rain as well. Sure, you probably won't be able to ride with your knee down in the rain, but then again .... would you want to? Personally, I lived happily without extra wheels for wet weather from 2003 to 2008. The only reason I have extra wheels now is that they came with the new (used) R6 I bought a year ago. Hope this helps, Kai