Go straight for DAS?

I always knew I wanted to get a full motorbike licence and after I passed my CBT in September I spent a lot of time deliberating what route I wanted to go down to get it. There are two different options available after passing your CBT – you could go and get a 125 and ride that to get experience or you could go straight to the DAS and ride a big bike.

In February 2017 I went to the Motorbike show in ExCel and while I was there I spoke to a few people at the Lexmoto stall. Lexmoto are a new Chinese bike manufacturer and they sell brand new 125 and 50cc bikes at pretty competitive prices.  This, combined with the fact that the Lexmoto Hawk was one of the few bikes I sat on at the whole show that I could get a foot down on (5ft2 people problems) made me decide to get a Hawk when they came out in the summer. The plan was to ride that on my CBT licence and then when I was confident enough to take the Direct Access Scheme (DAS) and get my full licence I would trade it in.

This would mean paying money for a bike and insurance, riding it for the summer, then selling it to try to get as much of my money back as possible to pay for my DAS course (which would hopefully be shorter as I would have had more experience). I would then buy a bigger bike.

Now, I’m not made of money and with the Hawk launch date getting pushed back by a little bit I started to look at the other option. I asked a few questions on forums to try to gauge what most people did and see if there was an option that worked for me.

There are a lot of people online who feel that the CBT does not provide enough of a grounding to allow people to jump straight on a bike and this resonated with me. Although I had been on a moped when I was younger, I didn’t feel confident enough on a geared bike to get straight on the road, which is what I would have done if I bought a 125. I knew that I would benefit from more instruction before getting on the road and this led me to choose to do a DAS instead. 

With new plan and a new mindset, I started looking around for a DAS course.