Lessons Learnt

Sometimes the biggest lessons you learn come from your biggest losses and not from your biggest triumphs!!

Really from my days of working as a freelance software developer till today, most of my knowledge about life, my work, my surroundings and every other things have come the hard way and I've learnt from my failures!!

Yesterday was one such occasion, but in a very light mood!! My friend Sushil Puri and I decided to go home at the same time and all of a sudden we decided to do a drag race on our way up from the Basement Level 1 parking. Sushil was pretty confident that I would easily beat him as I have a Pulsar 200 and he as LML Freedom 110. But somewhere within me I knew this wasn't that easy..... coz I'm always prone to do a showdown in the first attempt of what ever I try.
But still the idea was pretty interesting so, we thought LET'S DO IT!!

We decided on our starting point. We started our bike. Before starting I was trying get the engine warm as much as possible coz I knew, it might just shut down on me without any prior warning (and it actually did a couple of times as I was warming it up)!! Then the big moment!! We shot off from our starting point...... went crazy on the spiral upward ramp...... and in seconds it was done....... I lost the drag!!! :)

Both of our hearts were pumping like anything!! I was still in a mood for some more spin so I zipped off and passed Sushil.... and he in turn kept passing me!!! Then finally I stopped, we chatted and laughed for a while over what ever happened a couple of minutes back and then we were off in our separate directions!! BUT.......

I kept on thinking on what went wrong on my part, what went wrong technically ..... is there something I don't know about my bike yet.... what new things I need to know about biking on the whole......

What I did wrong during the Drag

• I shifted to the 2nd gear at the wrong time!! Sushil pulled his bike on the 1st gear to a greater extent than me and the high rpms gave him the required additional thrust. On the other hand, seeing my bike crossing 4k rpm mark, I decided to shift to the 2nd gear, and in the course I lost on my rpm, and consequently the thrust and consequently my ground.

• In order to get past Sushil I chose a wider curve as compared to him, resulting in more distance to cover than him.

What went wrong technically

• It's a known fact that handling the Pulsar 200 at slow speeds is a bit of challenge (because of it's high seat height and a longer swing arm), and an upward spiral ramp made things all the more difficult for me.

• The patch on which I was running had some patches of newly done plaster and had the gravel coming off, resulting in skidding the bike once when I was trying to pull.

• But above all, what I think (and I might be completely wrong in my analysis), since I generally choose to not to whack my bike during my day to day travel and keep the rpms low, around the 5k mark, I'm thinking the engine has still not opened to higher rpms, above the 6k mark. Therefore when I was trying to pull the bike on 1st gear and even on 2nd gear, the bike was not really thrusting itself above the 5.5k mark. The power was not really coming. On the other hand Sushil really zipped off and his bike was howling like a mad bull.

Yesterday, Sushil really thought me that I still need to explore the possibilities of my bike more.... there are a zillion things more to find about my Black Devil..... a quest is still on!!!