Which young man are you referring too?

Anyway, I don't rate dirt bike experience as giving you much of an advantage when you transfer to the road.

It should let you use the clutch, but just about about every other aspect of riding technique is different, and riding technique in terms of bike control is a seperate thing to the techniques required to read roads and traffic, position yourself to see and be seen, and to make the fastest possible progress commensurate with staying alive and not pissing off other road users.

Rob

 

yup. you'll get people who are lucky and unlucky. i was lucky for almost 3 years with my first bike ( a suzuki cruiser). i hit leaves, went down real easy, and rode away after picking up my self, my bike and my mirror, in that order. lol

sold that, bought a ninja, trashed it got another because i thougt iwas superman. i had been dragging the pegs on the cruiser and i was overconfident.. at least in my wheelie abilities..

now, it's been several years since i've had an accident. i've never dropped my 7-R, yet even with riding gravel roads, snow, slick, nasty wet roads, ect, ect, i'm still learning. don't ever let your confidence become too much in your head. unless you're a natural valentino rossi or a local track star, tke it a day at a time and learn slow.

keep vigilant and take in everything you can! you'll do good on whatever you get on.

 

Rob, I was referring to "TwinkleToes", the young man that wrote the original post. The young man asking if a Ninja 650r was a good choice for a first bike.
I totally disagree with your statement "I don't rate dirt bike experience as giving you much of an advantage when you transfer to the road." One having owned a dirtbike, gives a major advantage on riding the public road. When riding a dirtbike, on dirt, woods, etc., every stop or turn or accelleration is exagerated with slipping, spinning, or sliding. How to handle a bike in a slide, and recovering safely from a slide will save one's life. Going around a turn, hitting some sand or diesel fuel, breaking the front or rear tire lose is something most street riders have experienced. Some have crashed because of it, many have not because of their experience in the dirt riding their enduro and motocross bikes. Learning how to break hard on a motorcross bike, is a major advantage that can be used on the street. Heck, even how to do the things we are not supposed to do on the street, that we did do in the dirt, i.e., wheelies, lifting the rear wheel braking, and such is all learning to control the motorcycle and learning the complete balance of the motorcycle. Yes, Rob, having experience riding a dirt bike is a major advantage. Of course, having a automobile license for a number of years also helps. The idea situation would be having the experience in both fronts.

 

I started out on dirt bikes well before I was old enough to ride street. What you say about the control skills you learn isn't wrong, but neither is much of it very relevant, apart from really good clutch control, although that isn't a great part of the dirt bike repetoire. Braking and cornering are both quite a bit different and to some extent you have to unlearn one set of techniques before you can properly learn the other.

For riding street, once basic control skills had been mastered, the skills learned riding street on a bicycle were of more use. Those skills covered the basic traffic skills.

A car licence is of little value either. We tend to do things the right way around and learn to ride a motorcycle before learning to drive a car.

What I really meant is that the ability to control a bike, however well you can do it, is only a very minor part of the skill set needed to ride street and cover distances at the fastest safe speed in traffic conditions.

Rob

 

I would have to agree - when you learn to control a motorcycle in low traction conditions like loose dirt/sand/mud etc it gives you a huge advantage when moving on to pavement.

 

yup - when you stop learning is when you make a bad mistake