GP800 - The First Thousand Miles

I've now covered just over 1,000 miles on the GP800 and I'm starting to feel more "at home" with it. This of course tranlates into more spirited riding and I have managed to both lock up and wheelspin the rear wheel on slightly damp road surfaces. Although the power delivery of a big auto makes it easy to ride in the wet, it doesn't mean you can ignore surface conditions entirely and the two incidents acted as a timely reminder to treat a 260 odd Kilo bike with a bit more respect.

Fuel consumption has averaged a shade under 50mpg in varying conditions and combined with the 200 odd mile range to tank makes this one of the strong points of the bike.

Now we've got a few miles under the wheels I've been opening it up a bit more and performance is impressive both off the line and roll-on acceleration at speed. I think the speedo is wildly optomistic (especially if the GPS tracking by Nokia Sportstracker is accurate) but the bike is quick by any standards - and perfectly stable at speed.

Low points, I still hate the speedo, the mirrors could be better and I'm beginning to wish the saddle was a touch narrower and lower -but that's a problem with my body shape rather than any actual failing of the bike. The only other slight downer is the centrestand tang is sometimes difficult to reach and it's definitely a bit slippy when wet. Having said that, I am finally getting to grips with the sidestand/handbrake combo.

I may have found an aftemarket screen made by Sedcem but I'm awaiting confirmation of availability from Baglux who are the UK importers for Sedcem. If the price is sensible, I'll probably go for it even though the standard screen is better than I first thought.

"Practical and exciting" is a phrase that may have been applied to the Skoda Octavia VRs - but Gilera should have claimed it for themselves. The GP800 remains a winner.

Nokia Sportstracker - The GP800 and the E90 get it together

I was aware of the existence of Nokia Sportstracker but I noticed it again recently when I added Nokia Communication Center to my PC Suite from the Nokia Beta labs. As I'm trying to cycle to work at least once a week I thought I'd give it a go.


Of course it works however you're moving so I've been testing while riding the GP800 and it provides a datalog that you can very easily upload to the Nokia Sportstracker website at http://sportstracker.nokia.com/ directly from the phone. It's a pity the E90 takes a while to lock on to satelites so I may take to carrying my Navman B10 external bluetooth receiver in my pocket to speed things up. Once locked on it stays running in the background even on the one and a half hour trip from Ashford, Kent back home to Stanmore, Middx.

It can save "routes" so you get a comparison of your performance over time and it includes "altitude" which will be usefull when cycling to see where the hills are. It plots both against distanc eand time on the graph and map as well as identifying the fastest, slowest highest and lowest points on the journey.


This is a useful piece of software from Nokia and best of all, it's free.