On The Pegs May 2020 - Volume 5 - Issue 5 | Page 47

On The Pegs
VOL. 5 ISSUE 5 - MAY 2020
47
on. Then if it’s pouring down rain and I got to run back home or run somewhere
and it’s raining and the roads are wet, you can still run the ABS and then run the
throttle even less in off-road mode when that happens.
The traction control works off a sensor on the wheel. So, that stuff really opened
my eyes. Like I said, my whole background is dirt bike and then I switched to the
Adventure. I still want to be able to take it places when I race my 1090 at national.
I raced the 790 this past year at the Ohio enduro. I still have to remember the
weight, but other than that, it’s really close. It’s a lot closer than what people think.
As far as riding in tight woods or an enduro, you have to set up in-between some
tight trees, for sure. Not only the width of it… The turning radius varies slightly, but
the width of the bike at the bottom where the skid plate is, the gas tanks and stuff
like that, the skid plate instead of being probably twelve inches wide, you’re talk-
ing twenty-four inches wide at the bottom. So the gas tank comes off of that. So
that’s where I notice the ruts at the enduro and turning. It’ll stay into the rut, but if
you lean it over a lot you have a lot more tendency of rubbing the ground with the
foot pegs and both sides of the motor cases.
Standing up on that bike, you can stand up through some trials. Sitting forward
or back, you just got to remember, like my weight isn’t going to do a lot to help the
way it rides and so forth. It’s not big changes there. It needs more of a respect of
the motor of having so much horsepower in the dirt, is the hard thing with all the
weight. Are you really going to pay attention to sliding your butt back to get more
traction? No, because this thing’s got so much horsepower, as long as you have a
decent tire it’ll find traction no matter what, because it’s got an ungodly amount of
horsepower.
When it has the pro components in the Rally setup with longer travel, you can fi-
nesse and use a little bit more of the travel, like pushing down on the front end be-
fore a log to pull up as you give it gas. You can do that more. The bike has so much
weight where if you just hit the front brake it’ll dive because of all the weight that’s
on the bike. Then you just give it gas, rather than worrying about a 200-pound
bike that you can push down on because you’re 200 pounds and you can feel that.
This, you got to use the weight to work with you, I guess you’d say. So 460 pounds,
you’re coming up on a flat surface and you want to go over a log, you can tap the
front brake. All that 465 pounds is going to dive. Then you give it gas as the front
end starts to come back from the suspension, then you start giving it gas. So you
more finesse with the weight of the bike than you would manhandling it like you
would a dirt bike.
With the pro components in the Rally version, they stay up and they don’t dive.