You are reading a single comment by @nick_h. and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@nick_h.
Bikes vs cars:
bikes lean. So you don't notice the G force when cornering. The contact patches are tiny, compared to 4 fat tyres on a fast car. So some cars can corner faster than a sports bike. Hence the Nordschleife record for cars is 20-30 secs lower than for bikes. The extra grip which cars have allows them to brake later for corners. So the racing line for cars is different from the one for bikes.
the main difference is that bike performance is useable on UK roads, whereas with cars it isn't. On a busy road a bike hardly ever has to wait to overtake (assuming a good rider.) You go from 30 to 100 and back again in a couple of seconds as a matter of routine. Not that you should...but people do. Plus you can filter past slow or stationary traffic. You can do fast filtering and undertaking on motorways and get away with it
riding a bike fast without crashing is ten times harder than driving a car fast without crashing. It's a very, very difficult skill to develop. If you don't work at it systematically, with training on the road, the track and in the dirt, you're taking a terrible gamble with your life and your spine. Hardly any riders put the work in. They blame crashes on car drivers, but almost all crashes could have been avoided if the rider was better at anticipation and/or got their road position right.
the electronic aids are great when you're learning and being cack-handed. But they don't make much difference if you're a good rider. You can do an emergency stop without skidding, which is great, and might save you, if you don't freeze in terror when a car pulls out in front of you. However good the ABS is, you still need to be so good at anticipation that you almost never need to do an emergency stop. If you're doing them often it's going to end in tears anyway. Good riders can often do better than the aids. They turn them all off at track days, because they cut in too soon and slow you down. (They generally work by cutting the throttle when they think you're going to lose traction.)
I love big bikes more than anything, but I would never advise anyone to take up biking, in case they die. It takes ages to get an unrestricted licence. A used superbike looks like dirt cheap high performance, but the purchase price, maybe 4k for a used Blade or something, is just a fraction of what you'll spend on safety gear, training, insurance, locks and tracker, tyres and servicing, new bodywork when some cunt knocks the bike over when it's parked....bikes are endless trouble. You must accept this.
Edit: I forgot to mention the law. In some ways the biggest dilemma is not being banned or sent to prison. How can you enjoy a sports bike on the road without doing jailworthy speeds? Answer: you can't. The enemy is the unmarked police car. They get most of their big wins on the motorway, with bikers doing 150 or whatever. They can't really get you on a busy road when you're overtaking because they don't have a chance to follow you enough to get adequate video. There are some unmarked bikes, but very few. They seem to be deployed on the famous roads where too many bikes go anyway, e.g. A272, Cat and Fiddle. But tbh there is no answer to this. If you get into bikes you can't help painting yourself into a corner. Yet another reason not to do it.