Rain And Lean Bike?

[Guest Jennifer]

Greetings,

I have a date booked for Sears Point on Dec 6. for Level II training and am very excited about it. However there is always a possibility of rain in Northern California during the winters months. I'm not afraid of riding in the rain, but I want to make sure I get the most out of the class I paid for and getting comfortable leaning the bike over is an area I want to work on. So question "Do you do Lean-Bike training at Sears Point if its raining?"

 

Thanks,

Jen

[Keith Code]

Hi Jen,

 

We can't run it in the rain. The problem is that riders trust the outriggers too much and just lean it over too far. It is still a motorcycle and will lose backend traction just like a real one. THat is far less likely to happen in the dry.

 

Riding it in the wet was one of the very first experiments we did with it on the skid pad at Willow Springs back in 1998. We had the water truck come out and put one of us on it. Probably not a fiar comparison to real conditions since it hadn't rained for a while and the asphalt was slimey but we found later that with cold tires and a wet surface it acts a lot like a normal bike.

 

Keith

 

PS: OVer the past few years the weather has been good for us at Sears, we only rained out part of one day and still got all the track time in.