Blah.Blah.Blog

The transition has been an interesting one and not without it's moments of increased blood pressure on both my part and my long suffering girlfriend and passenger. I had in mind a number of things which concerned me when planning my move from controlling a high power sports motorbike to a relatively low-powered SUV - some of which were legitimate concerns, some of which were not:

• I was pretty sure braking would be an issue. I was used to my bike's rapid braking and was pretty sure the car would prove an innertial slug by comparison.

• Sheer vehicular dimensions were my other major concern. On my bike, I look straight down both sides of my vehicle, thereby enabling fairly precise manoeuvering between objects. Conversely, in a car I figured I'd need to "project" my mind 5 feet to the left to work out exactly what the left side of the car would hit/miss on it's current trajectory.

In the end, the former has been far more of a nuisance than the latter. The car takes an eternity to accelerate and even longer to brake. No sign of the engine braking I so love on the VTR, which will pull me up without the need for brakes on most occasions. The direct effect of this difference has been a few extreme braking occasions, although I'm getting a much better feeling for the car now.

Even more of an issue has been the lack of acceleration. I'd been taking for granted how much of a safety feature a powerful, torquey engine can be when changing lanes - a flick of the right wrist was always enough to quickly get me out of the way of any impending danger. Now car bound, I've got to plan these things so much further in advance and have been stranded stationary behind blockages in the road because of my lack of confidence in the car being able to react quickly enough in time.

The only other major issue I've had so far has been the very strange sense of disconnection you get in a car compared to a bike. Apart from the caged nature of driving in general, I've found the level of abstraction the steering wheel puts between it and the turning of the wheels to be somewhat perplexing. I'm used to handlebars directly connected to the wheel and a 1-to-1 correlation between the turning of one and the other. Now I'm having to mentally map n amount of steering wheel turn to m amount of wheel turn. Ironically, I tend to oversteer rather than understeer and still have a bit of work to do in that direction.

Apart from that, it's been quite fun seeing how the other half lives and very interesting charting the progress of my newly-found skills. The 10+ years of road experience on the bike has certainly put me in a better position confidence wise that the last time I attempted to join the rest of the 4-wheeled world, so fingers crossed it will be 4th time lucky!