Twisting Asphalt is the blog of a fellow Los Angeles motorbike rider. This guy is one of the more proficient moto bloggers I’ve run across and I enjoy his posts a whole lot. He’s an insightful rider who obviously truly…

Anyway, it was no problem to go through say 1/3 of the pucks per trip on those roads. I have since learned that its not really the road that gets the knee on the deck, but the bike. I have ridden some 8000 miles of twisties on a Mille and have touched the asphalt once. That’s right…only once. I actually forced it to happen just to see. It was on the canyon section of 58 on the way to Laguna from LA for the ’02 WSBK.

I think the Italian beauties are simply narrower bikes…so much so that while the lean angle necessary to carve a turn is likely the same, your knee is much closer to the ground on the Jap bikes.

The other thing is not to sweat it too much. I was dead-set on grinding my pucks for a whole trip one time. It was some of the worst riding I had done ever. The following trip I just let it happen and I was SO much faster, smoother, and in control.

Yeah, I understand the mojo (heh – lack of) of having new pucks, but I’m sure you’ll find it easier to touch on the track and once their good and scuffed, let it go. If it happens it happens. You’ll have that more brain-power to focus on the turn at hand.

Next time you’re at the Rock Store, take a mental inventory of the Italian bike owners versus Jap bike owners for scuffed pucks. I’ll bet that the Italian owners have less.