In a motorcycle, why is the neutral position typically above the first gear and below the second?
In: 1946
Most of the responses that it’s because “safety” – harder to unintentionally neutral – sound like it makes sense.
But the actual answer is that the most common transmission and shift drum design has neutral between every gear – the shift dogs must free wheel between gears to be able to engage, and putting the extra clearance and neutral detent between 1 and 2 is simpler and more compact than extending the shift drum and transmission to accommodate a neutral elsewhere, e.g. N-1-2-…
In fact MotoGP bikes which use reverse “GP shift” going up 7-6-5-4-3-2-1 … N – but they must activate a lever (or switch these days) to be able to engage neutral. They do this so the shift gap between gears is absolutely minimized and completely consistent, for that little bit of competitive edge, and that makes it worth designing a more complex transmission/shift drum/neutral.
It is a nice feature, though, that you can’t just hammer the shift lever down into Neutral on most bikes, but that’s not the primary reason.
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