Fuck.
Had my first off this morning. Feel so stupid, was such a novice error. The roads were a bit wet, I was just 5 minutes from home, coming up to a mini-roundabout. All of a sudden a car suddenly indicated to come round the mini roundabout, I panicked and hit the brakes hard, too hard. Locked the front wheel and skidded down. Didn’t hit any other vehicles thankfully, or have any injuries, but I had the weight of the bike on top of me, scratched it badly and dented my confidence somewhat. Had to hit the emergency off and pissed petrol everywhere.
Put a nasty scuff in the fairing, bent a crash bobbin in turn cracking the belly pan and popped the can off. Not too serious, but the bikes’ perfect cosmetics are no more. Everyone says, as a learner you’ll inevitable drop your first bike, but it’s still bloody annoying.
Lessons learnt: be smoother on the brakes, weight the back brake more in the wet and I can actually lift the bike! Oh and put it back in neutral, before wasting ages trying to work out why you can’t push the bike to the side of the road…
One reply on “First Off”
Ah well, you’ve got it out of your system. I was lucky in that I only binned a GPz305 which was a doddle to lift.
I was OK with gears afterwards, but couldn’t figure out why the indicators wouldn’t cancel. Turned out that I was sliding the light switch on the RHS bar…
Curious things, brains.