Short and Sweet

They say, you drive a car the same way you ride a motorcycle. I’m not convinced, just yet.

I rented one of my instructor’s track cars during a private track day, held at The Ridge a couple of years ago. This was not a high horse-powered car. A 3-series BMW with track tires and track brake pads. I got within a couple of seconds his best lap time. It took me all day to achieve this. But on similar 1,000cc sportbikes, he is 15 to 20 seconds faster. That’s a big difference! However, I am comparing a low powered car vs. high powered motorcycles. If we were both on low powered motorcycles he would still be much faster than me.

Both vehicles slide. But recovering from a slide in a car is not dangerous, nor does it take any skill. Either you slide until you stop or you give it less throttle, or brake and/or steering and the tires regain traction. Finding the limits on a sportbike requires a tremendous amount of skill if you don’t want to get hurt. Even if you don’t mind getting hurt, like when I was young and didn’t want to go back to Japan, it still takes a lot of time. Either recovering from an injury and/or saving money to buy parts to fix your motorcycle. I was the limiting factor in my reference of getting hurt and not wanting to go back to Japan, not my tires.

Because of this you can learn the limit of braking and steering (trailbraking), and the limit of traction coming out of a corner (steering and acceleration) exponentially faster in a car.

I’m not convinced yet that you drive a car the same way you ride a bike. However I am open to seeing it the way they see it.