The 1% moniker has taken on some new meaning of late. Formerly the exclusive province of outlaw motorcycle gangs, it now includes the richest of the rich. I’m not going to talk about either of those groups. I am going to talk about something far more exotic: high school kids who drive stick shift.

I taught my older son how to drive on my old B5 wagon. The hydraulic clutch and super short solid linkage make it so easy to drive, it’s like eating cake. It spoils you, but you love it. A friend of his was learning to drive at the same time and that kid’s parents had coughed up a Dodge Dart with a manual trans. Exactly two other kids in his class of 300 had any experience with the old ballet á pied, and neither of them had routine access to a shifty car. Going out to lunch was fun because it nearly always involved the Dart and it also nearly always involved the kids who could drive it. The four of them morphed into a sort of teenage boy stick shift clique. Who knew?

One weekend when I had the wagon in the air, my son asked me why more kids weren’t interested in cool cars.

I had to think about it, because being interested in cool cars was is such a natural state for me that the idea of not being into them is completely foreign.

We worked out the population of the school parking lot.

40% of the kids had the latest and greatest safest car

8% of the kids had the most expensive car (it’s a pretty well-off place)

Another 40% had a recent hand-me-down

11% had a cheapo CL special

1% had cars that could maybe be described as interesting. Ok, it was one car. An old Bronco that a kid was working on. And a Ruckus.

We talked about his friends and what they wanted. Most did not want a car at all, but needed one to go to their jobs and back and forth to school. Some wanted nicer cars, some wanted faster cars. Only a precious few kids were actually interested in cars because cars.

I suggested that he survey kids and school and ask them what car they would have if nothing stood in their way. He said most kids just stared at him. He got some good answers, heavy on the AMGs and Teslas, but still more than just “something nicer”. More than a few wanted a car with a better stereo or better conectivity. A small handful, less than ten, wanted an older car for one reason or another. He asked why they didn’t have one, or weren’t trying to get one.

My son loves Initial D and all of the 80s goodness it features. Midway through his senior year, he discovered the cars&trucks section of Craigslist and began the hunt for an early Toyota MR2. I admit that my heart fell, I’m a Honda and VW girl. But the AW11 has pop-up headlamps, and I always allow pop-ups. Especially 6054s.

I set some rules out. It had to be running. It had to be reasonably straight. It had to have a clean title. It also had to be watertight. We looked at a lot of MR2s.

So why weren’t more kids rocking classic iron? We uncovered a set of conditions that had to be met for kids to have cool cars, and they turned out to be a high hurdle in these times. The first one is money. Fun cars tend to soak it up. Even cheap fun cars, ask any LeMons racer. Many kids cited not having the money to buy their own car as a key hurdle. The second is space. You have to put it somewhere. If your parents already got you the latest in hybrid technology, that is already taking up your allotted room. Quite a few kids were concerned about having that room, particularly garage space. That brings up part three: parental acceptance. You need parents who can feel the love. Without that, you are fighting an uphill battle against everyone, even those who should have your back no matter what. Nearly every kid said that their parents would support a hobby that they (the parents) were into, but didn’t see value in old/interesting cars. A major thread was safety. Kids keyed in on the fact that older vehicles are simply not as safe as modern ones and this was a huge barrier for their parents to overcome. The last part is tools and knowledge. If you have car-people parents, this one usually isn’t an issue. If you don’t, then you are looking at investing even more of your precious money in the hobby, money you already don’t have because you spent it on that AE86 or urQ that fills up every corner of your brain. The knowledge part is no small hurdle either, learning cars from scratch without a mentor is not something I would really wish on anyone. Here, take this complicated machine that is trying to set itself on fire and is made of about four thousand parts and sort it. Before your dad gets home so he can have the garage back. Kids felt this was the least significant barrier and felt that they could learn. As long as their parents were open to the idea to begin with.

It’s just not that easy to enable the car thing in kids, and the barriers to entry get higher every day. The kids who do pick it up are unique, their own version of 1%ers. Like the OMGs, they have to find a sponsor, commit, and do the deeds required to get in.

My son has a rusty MR2 now. I’m grudgingly learning how to read the big green book, and quite grateful that Toyota uses a slightly modified version of Bosch notation for their wiring diagrams. I’ve learned that MR stands for midship runabout. I’m reminding him that this is just his first one, so he needs to get all of the practicing out of the way so he’s ready for the perfectly clean one he dreams about. MY SON IS LEARNING RWD.

The college version of the high school stick shift club is the autocross club, and there are apparently quite a few kids in it. More than the high school survey would predict. It’s nice to know that there are more of these kids out there. I think I want to meet their parents. We can trade notes.

Every year I add to my motorcycling story. I learn something new, or I reinforce something that I knew, but didn’t use enough or forgot or just never really understood. This year, it’s that thing with the knee. A catch, though – I don’t mean my inside knee.

Some years ago, I was rounding a hairpin in the Alps and was headed for a wall. I managed to jerk my head around at the last minute, put some weight on the outer peg, and force myself to relax and let the bike do its thing. Of course, the moment I did those things, the bike magically came around and I went on through the curve like I was supposed to. There was one peculiar sensation that I felt that had me thinking – as I relaxed on the bike, I felt it holding me up. As I came out of the turn, I felt the bike stand up under me, pressing into my outside knee. My first thought was that this must be what hanging off feels like! Not that I was off the seat or anywhere near hauled over, but that the bike was doing the work for me. I was just piloting.

I made a lot of assumptions there, but the thing with the outside knee has been a point of interest for me since then. This year, I tossed up my riding calendar quite a bit and put a long, twisty trip at the start of my season instead of waiting until the end. Instead of spending my summer commuting on Michigan’s boring, straight A-to-B roads, I pushed myself into the fun stuff right away. The (wonderful) result is that I remembered that thing with the knee and have been (and will be) playing with it for my whole warm season this year, instead of only remembering it at the end. 

Technique is important to every rider, on the GP course or a sandy trail or anywhere in between. Clearly, it is not sufficient to relax and drape oneself over the bike and pray. This is effective, but kind of scary. One must control not so much the bike, but one’s body position relative to it. I learned early on about gripping the tank with my knees instead of deathgripping the bars. That is nice, but what about when you don’t want to go straight or sit in the same position all the time? How do you grip the tank with only one knee? There is way. It requires good boots and a little sense of geometry.

Gripping the tank is important because it stabilizes your lower body on the bike and allows your upper body to relax and freely move while still maintaining some form of referential position to the steering head and bars. It extends the frame of the bike up through your hips. Simple geometry reminds us that there is now a triangle of femur, femur, and tank. Triangles are very stable constructions! Additional fixture points are your feet on the pegs (more triangles!), as any dirt rider who prefers to stand on the bike will tell you. One your body is fixed to the frame, you can move around quite a bit up top and still be sure that you will not have any wierd steering inputs. 

Fixturing to the bike frame with one knee is not so obvious, unless you are the aforementioned dirt rider. I start by insuring a solid grip on the outside footpeg. This is where decent boots come into play – if you cannot gain purchase on the footpeg or your boot slides under force, you will struggle with this. Both hooking (your arch on the peg) and balling (up on the ball of the foot) are just fine for this, although balling allows you a bit of finesse that hooking doesn’t. It’s your outside foot and you won’t grind it off. The goal is to have a solid contact point with the structure of the motorcycle. Once the foot is in place, press your knee (of the same leg, natch) into the tank. Hard. This forms a triangle of lower leg, footpeg, and frame (ok, motor/frame/tank, it’s a solid thing, ok?). You are fixtured to the outside of the of the motorbike. From this point on, it’s what you do with your top and inside halves that makes the riding magic. The fixturing is the base you build on.

The fixing to the bike in this case has the same goal as gripping the tank – fixing your lower half to the bike in a manner that allows free motion of the body parts that will impact steering geometry (shoulders, arms, etc) in the desired way. Once the outside knee is solidly mated to the tank, even the outside femur is free to move (!). This, of course, leads to that other thing with the knee, the grinding off of knee pucks, when motion of the outside femur results in sideways displacement of the hips from the motorbike’s seat. 

This one-sided fixturing technique is hardly rocket science, but it can lead to more confident riding in all conditions. It forces the rider to put pressure on the outside peg – a key component of pro cornering. It encourages the rider to move around on top of the bike, improving balance skills. And it gives the rider a more profound sensation of what the bike is capable of by transmitting more of the bike’s willingness to both drop in and stand up to stand up to the rider’s body. Instead of moving the hips – a somewhat disconcerting feeling to many newer riders – this moves the knee and imparts the feeling that the bike is supporting the rider, not the other way around.

I’m enjoying it, even in Michigan, on our profoundly boring roads. What few turns we have are more interesting and more engaging. I might even get around to hanging off one day, who knows. You know, do that other thing with the other knee.

The venerable Ninjette gets a re-do and earns its place in the books all over again. Photography by Ronald Ahrens.

I was headed to LA for some work training, so I started calling friends to see who wanted to hook up and hang out for a while. One thing led to another and the prospect of borrowing bikes got floated. Then, a chance meeting with the US rep from Schubert and a ride plan started to take shape. This is where it sometimes goes to hell, instead, it went closer to heaven: 2665ft closer, the notch at the top of the Ortega Highway in California.

The newest bearer of the Ninja name is a little parallel twin displacing 300ccs of volume. There is nothing about this bike that is big – from the exhaust ports that are barely an inch (25mm) in diameter, to the seat height at about 29″, to the standard riding position is almost sitting up for my 5’6″ frame. Even the graphics are small. The whole bike screams starter. And you know what? That is entirely ok. Because small means party time in Kawasaki-speak.

I admit up front that I consider myself a sort of lover of small bikes. I used to own a CBR250R that I considered illegal levels of fun, and currently turf my lawn with a beat-up old KL250G Super Sherpa. Smaller is lighter, more nimble, and easier to overpower. I am in charge of the bike, not the reverse. The little 300 is a logical step forward on the itty bitty bike path.

Kawasaki lent me the Ninja 300 through the Motorcycle Industry Council and I put 200 miles on it over the course of a day, exploring the Ortega Highway and Temecula wine country. Schubert North America lent me a C3Pro Women helmet to test out while exploring the desert on the Ninja.

The Ninja 300 is, despite its very sporty looks, a standard. The rider takes a slight lean forward, just enough to feel your core working to hold position. It’s a natural fit for my 5’6″ frame, my 32″ legs are more than enough to have both feet down and some air under my butt when standing over the bike. This means sure stops and standing while waiting for lights to turn green. The controls are sized for average to smaller hands, although my big mitts are not the best measure – I wear a men’s XL glove simply to get the length I need in the fingers. The seat is surprisingly comfortable for a stock plank, far better than the foam brick on my old CBR250R and wide/shapely enough to offer decent butt support and comfort for longer (2hr+) rides.

The transmission is a weak point – the six speed has the traditionally smooth shifting I associate with Kawi and their wonderful positive neutral finder, but first gear is completely useless and the entire range could do with a drop and new top cog to take the green machine up to modern highway speeds with a bit less buzz. Riding home, I became convinced that I’d broken something when I was unable to shift up at the behest of the upshift light – it’s apparently not locked out in sixth. I eventually had to downshift and figured out that everything was fine in the gearbox.

Schubert’s top-of-the-line ladies’ lid is an engineering marvel. Lighter than my RPHA-Max from HJC and closer-fitting, it is also quiet and cool. Several vents and a visor that will remain cracked open provide excellent air flow. The wide and tall eyeport has plenty of room for glasses. I’m stretching to find things that haven’t been said about this great helmet – even at the price, it’s as good as it gets – if it fits, of course. The inverted cheek pads modify the interior shape, bringing it closer to the female bone structure. This helps to keep the helmet in place on the rider’s head. Proper fit is best assessed by a professional, and after fitting by the Schuberth rep, I found that I wear a different size in Schubert than HJC. No surprise as head shape does more the determine helmet fit and comfort than head circumference, which is best used to size the shell.

The instrument cluster is offset and features a huge tach with a digital speedometer and assorted warning lights. The lights are clear and bright in daylight and easy to see. The information on the panel flows and is clear and legible. A multi-bar fuel gauge does require the bike to be mostly level to read properly – tilted back down a hill leads to false full readings. The bike returned roughly 60mpg in spirited riding.

The wheels are cast and painted to match the bodywork, in this case, black. Colored deco strips add some attractive and sporty highlights. The wheels are fit with IRC tyres that I was never comfortable with on my CBR, on the heavier and slightly more powerful Ninja, they performed satisfactorily and I would consider leaving them on for the wear cycle. They lent reasonable plant on the dry pavement and were generally predictable under load. I didn’t push them to breaking loose, my previous experiences with them weren’t good enough to test that out. Regardless, the interface with the road is competent and fully acceptable for the power generated by the 300cc mill.

The motor is free-revving and buzzy, with the drama-free response typical of parallel twins. The engine suffers the transmission poorly – it’s eager to go and the gearset does it no favors with 1st gear hitting all of 20mph at 9K. The torque is more than sufficient to give up on first completely and treating the drivetrain as a five-speed rewards the rider with a very willing bike. A major plus are the brakes – I needed nearly no adjustment to my rote braking behaviour to bring the Ninja to heel. Smooth and effective, they held up well throughout the whole trip and during several runs up and down a steep section of the Ortega where my co-riders and I stopped for pictures. I place a lot of stock in braking, and it was quite a relief not to have to even think about it.

The entire experience is pure Kawasaki and that’s a very good thing. The need to differentiate in the small displacement segment is high and the CBR300R is serious competition. Honda’s absolutely drama-free entry is just as capable, but lacks some of the little quirks that make the new Ninjette more of a family member than a hired hand. BMW and KTM leverage their more exotic packages to cater to smaller segments of the small bike market and are not ready for prime time in the starter bike market. The baby Kawi is a solid entry and should be considered by all small bike buyers.