Riding behaviours

I have always wondered to what extent the bike you are riding influences the way you ride. I have always been riding enduro-style bike, and I have always considered myself a very cautious rider.

I never lost sleep over how to cut the perfect corner…I am more interested in the comfort the bike has to offer for long journeys or for commuting, or in elements of the design rather than in the top speed or absolute power.

However, I found myself riding in a much more aggressive way with the Mana than I have ever done in the past.

The Mana is much more powerful than anything I have ridden before, and it is the first naked I have. And I am starting to appreciate why so many riders talk about the importance of cutting the corner in a certain way…when I enter the tunnel which takes me home, with a steep turn, I am smiling at my ever more daring attempts to find the limit of the bike, pushing down with my knee…

I have started to use a lot more my weight to incline the bike, and I am in general riding faster than I used to. Faster than I probably should. I discovered myself losing grip over my rear tyre exiting from a turn. Opening the throttle to the full with the Mana is not a good idea, I realized…nothing happened with the V-strom (even if it is a decently powerful bike), but a lot can go wrong with the Mana when you do it…

A few years back, I was driving a sports car, an Alfa GTV…and I was definitively driving faster and more aggressively than I am now that I have a different type of car.

Big deal, you might think. Well, for me it is. I always thought that I could control myself on any bike, that deep inside I was a cautious rider. I am realizing that maybe I was so cautious because I was always riding easy going bikes, and not powerful naked.

Again, nothing major, I am not racing on the streets. But I wonder whether a Harley 1200 Nightster or a Triumph Scrambler or Bonneville would have been closer to my traditional riding styles…

And I am definitively increasingly determined to take riding classes. Yes, I have been riding for 20 years now. But I feel I could benefit so much from riding classes. I will find out what are the options here in Belgium…