General ramble ... @Shawn McGinnis will be happy to hear that, yesterday at trials practice at Nambour, the chap with the Vertigo was there again - I was admiring the bike and he asked if I'd like to try it. YES!!! Of course! I had a good ride on it. Extremely nice - no surprises and it felt very much like my TRS, but much more noise from the air intake and the fan is a lot louder. But I like the engineering niceties on the Vertigo - the exhaust under the guard, the fuel injection, the customizability of the mapping etc. Everyone started joking "ooh Andrew's thinking of a new bike!" but actually I'm not planning any upgrades ... and I suspect that when I do, it will be an electric bike. A couple of our guys have got EM bikes recently and I had a good ride on them. I expected to feel uncomfortable on such a different bike, but I was blown away. So easy to adapt to. And they were the ones without clutch, and TBH it seemed to free up the brain a lot, dropping the "clutch/ throttle control" out of the CPU overload. There are so many advantages with the elec bikes once you try one in the flesh. No noise obviously - and that's a big advantage not just for the neighbours but also for the ability to converse with each other. But also ... no need to warm the bike up. No need to change oil. No air filter cleaning. No radiator fluid to watch. No fuel spillage - you can leave the bike upside down if you like. No fumes (you really notice that!). But the biggest thing I liked was no gear changing! You can creep over rocks and then just zip up to full speed smoothly. There's a club event on Sunday ... hoping that I can get there and that family things don't get in the way. End of ramble.

Posted by Andrew von Berky at 2021-08-25 21:41:23 UTC