Weekend to the “Grand Trophy” motorcycle races at Mettet, Belgium

The Mettet “Grand Trophy” is one of the famous Belgian road races, with a long history behind it, and riders like Chas Mortimer, Takazumi Katiyama, Patrick Pons, Stephane Mertens, Eddie Laycock, Alan Cathcard, Steve Ward and Sebastian Le Grelle all putting their name on the winners trophy since 1971.

The race used to take place on the old public roads circuit that has been in use since the 30s and was a blistering quick (but rather dull for spectators) triangle, but safety considerations for the quicker bikes saw the last running of this race in 2005!

The race is relaunched this year on a brand new closed circuit situated inside the old public roads track, which features a “corkscrew” curve just like Laguna Seca. The meeting is on the 9-11 April.

Mettet is around 175 miles from Calais.

It’ll be very different from the usual BSB rounds over here, so is anyone interested in doing a ride over there on the Saturday morning, back on the Sunday evening? Should be around £26 on the chunnel, I’m intending to take the tent if the weather looks half decent, but can look into B&Bs if necessary… drop me a mail!

Spring Tour – the Peaks

Survival Skills is off on tour again!

We’ve got the promise of warm spring days ahead so I’m taking bookings for courses in the Peak District.

Training in the Peaks is centred on the village of Tideswell, which is known as the Cathedral of the Peaks. This exquisite little village lies in the midst of a network of excellent biking roads, perfect for learning the finer arts of cornering. The Peaks are easily reached from West Yorkshire as well as the Midlands.

I’ll point you at inexpensive accomodation with decent food and beer if you can’t get there and back easily.

Dates

Peak District 1: Sun 18 – Wed 21 April
Peak District 2: Sun 23 – Wed 26 May

Three takers for the Peaks at the moment:

Johan van den Dorpe
Hextal
Biking Badger

Any more??

Straight line -vs- trail braking

One of the questions that I seem to get fairly frequently is what do I think about trail braking.

First of all, it’s important that we understand it – in essense, when using the trail-braking technique the rider carries front brake into the corner, gradually trailing off the brakes while adding lean angle.

The classic technique is to complete braking before turn-in. This is an easier technique because it separates traction management into two phases, braking and cornering, allowing the tyre to use all its grip for one task OR the other, reducing the risk of overloading the tyre.

The big problem with trail braking is that because braking forces are using traction AT THE SAME TIME AS cornering, it’s easy to exceed available grip. Your tyres have a limited amount of grip that can be used for cornering, accelerating or decelerating. If you start to combine these needs you have to add up the total demand. If you are cornering hard, you won’t have much traction left for deceleration and vice versa.

Some instructors will tell you you should never brake in a corner. Me? I’d say it’s a skill you should know and practice.

So why do it? Well, two reasons spring to mind.

The first is simply advantage – since you continue braking into the corner, it’s possible to brake a little later, enter bends a little faster, and thus get in front of the rider alongside you, and thus block-pass in the middle of the turn. I think you will have spotted where this is going to be an advantage – on the track. Unfortunately, this “faster into a corner” reasoning also seem to make its way into magazine articles on better road riding with monotonous regularity.

In truth, there is a considerable difference between riding on the track and riding on the road. We’re not outbraking people on the track or trying to squeeze a fraction of a second off a point-to-point time. Do a risk-benefit analysis:

* the gain on the road in terms of distance and speed is small compared with mastering the basics of positive straight line braking, getting on the right line and carrying speed out of the corner
* it’s more difficult to apply than straight line braking and demands pin-point accuracy through the turn – keeping it simple usually pays dividends
* the bike doesn’t steer as quickly with the forks and front tyre compressed
* the bike can’t turn as tight with the brakes on because you can’t lean as far
* when you get it wrong, it bites – hard!

On the road, the main problem is the last. Getting trail braking wrong leads you straight into some of the worst situations you can find yourself in on the road, it’s definitely a big risk for a small effect.

On the road, braking hard and late is rarely the key to riding fast – it just unsettles the bike and unsettles the rider! If you’re fighting the suspension and trying to turn the bike into the bend on the brakes, you’ve got your hands full just making the turn.

If you see them at all, any nasty problems will be much more difficult to deal with!

For instance, misjudge your braking at then end of a fast straight or fail to spot a decreasing radius turn as you try to turn in on the brakes and:

* you’ll be off-line running wide – turning tighter is difficult when braking
* you’ll be pushing the limit of traction which severely limits both your braking and tighter turning options
* you’ll be suddenly aware of all the cars, walls and other hard objects you can hit, leading to ‘Target Fixation’ and freezing on the controls
* if you do make it out the other side, you’ll be late to get the bike upright and late on the power – everything and more that you gained by late braking, you just lost!

In my opinion as well as a number of other expert riders, in dealing with a bend the most important survival skill is getting your corner-entrance speed set early, or as Kenny Roberts says, “Slow in, fast out.” Getting the bike nicely balanced on the suspension and yourself relaxed on the controls gives you a huge advantage tackling a bend.

Setting your entrance speed early and looking into the corner allows you to determine what type of corner you’re facing, anticipate hazards and pick your line. On the track, you’ll already know exactly where you are going. On the road, even a bend you know intimately will have different hazards every time your ride it.

On the road, where no-one is going to outbrake you and pull a block pass, the deep entrances, late turns and quick steers of the Point and Squirt technique claw back most of the advantage of trail braking, as well as giving a better view of the road ahead before you commit yourself.

Being off the brakes allows you to get on the throttle early, preferably as you begin to turn in. The bike settles down and simply works better with the power on.

Getting the bike upright sooner allows you to put the power on harder, earlier coming out of the corner.

In short avoiding trail braking is safer, with more room for error.

I mentioned two reasons for trail braking. I’ve pretty much dismissed the first as a “must do” on the road.

But the second reason is a mid-corner hazard. But even here, do we really HAVE to brake? If we’ve already shed speed in a straight line to allow us to turn using a moderate lean angle, we could simply avoid the problem by changing line. Given a sensible entry speed, we can even deal with the rider’s nightmare, the decreasing radius corner, this way. Again, simply leaning further is the simpler, less risky option.

OK, we’ve said all that, but on occasion you might be forced to brake MID-turn (as opposed to braking INTO the bend); that nice easy looking corner tightened up on you, or maybe there’s a stray cow wandering around mid turn. Simply leaning further won’t get us out of trouble – we have to shed MORE speed or even stop. Now we are talking about an option to use the skill of trail braking that is of genuine use on the road.

The first thing to understand is that if you haven’t already fallen off mid-turn there IS grip available to brake, even at big lean angles, thanks to a cunning bit of maths involving vector forces!

I won’t explain the maths further here, but suffice to say that if you decide you have to brake then to use that grip brake application must be gentle and progressive – grabbing guarantees you lock the front or stand the bike up.

If you survive the initial application (and there is no reason you shouldn’t), then the joy of slowing mid-turn is that if you keep the same lean angle, the bike turns tighter; or if if you keep the bike on the same radius turn, you need less lean angle and can brake progessively harder.

One thing to be aware of is that if you brake hard straight away, the bike sits up and tries to go straight on. So to make the turn you will have to make an extra positive countersteering input. Once you’ve avoided the hazard, release the brakes progressively and slowly to avoid unloading front suspension suddenly – don’t forget, that additional force you needed to keep the bike steering on the brakes is still there and if you release the brakes suddenly, the bike will tend to fall into the corner equally suddenly when you release.

What about the advice you’ll find in some advanced books to stand the bike up, brake in a straight line, then carry on with the bend having got the speed down.

First, think how much space you need! If you have the room to stand the bike up, brake and get the bike back over again, you could have made the corner… almost certainly. About the only time I’ll do this is on a genuine double apex bend, where the second apex is MUCH tighter than the first. Second, if you’ve gone in with speed and lean angle in hand to stand it up, you have by definition got traction for braking in hand.

Having just said that, it’s still worth mastering the art of braking hard in a straight line – you can shed a surprising amount of speed in a surprising short distance – and with the bike upright, any skid that does occur is rarely much of a problem to correct. But it’s far better done before arriving at the corner. If you’re using the brakes upright on the way UPTO a bend, you can lose the same amount of speed MUCH quicker than you can if you try to lose that speed IN the bend.

One final comment. I’ve heard another advantage offered for trail braking. “The bike steers better with the forks compressed”. It’s another one that gets repeated in magazine articles.

You’ll find this on Freddie Spencer’s site and it’s hard to argue with a rider as talented as Freddie. It may well be that a race bike with race geometry and race tyres does steer better on the brakes, but I can honestly say that every road bike I’ve ridden has, to a greater or a less extent, tried to “sit up” and head for the ditch on the brakes.

As far as I can tell, the “sit up” effect is down to compression of the front tyre because of weight transfer. If the bike is leaned and the brakes are applied, the front tyre contact patch moves further away from the steering axis, and the increasing offset drag has the effect of magnifying the self-centering effect of the caster steering.

Racers probably get round this by ‘twitchier chassis geometry’ which doesn’t self-centre, and by using triangular front tyres so that at partial lean the offset isn’t so great and tyres with a much greater carcass stiffness so they don’t flatten so much.

The overwhelming feedback in one debate supported the sit-up effect on road bikes, with only a few dissenters. One correspondant suggested that if the front brake is only applied gently the bike may seem to turn in more easily but he pointed out this is almost certainly down to the fact that because the bike is slowing down, it tracks on progressivly tighter line for a given angle of lean. Makes sense to me!

Incidentally Nick Ienatsch, another US racer and writer for the US mag Sport Rider, who is a big fan of trail braking on the track, agrees in his “The Pace” articles about the place for trail braking as a road riding technique. He also argues that it makes steering more difficult and that it’s out of place on the road.

Conclusion? Ignore the racer-wannabe hype on trail braking, and ignore the doom-mongers too. Treat trail braking as another tool for the tool box, not one you use every day, but one that’s there for special circumstances.

“Another satisified customer”

Another satisfied “Spin” customer [Spin is my forum moniker!]

I had my corners smoothed off by Kevin on Monday; a one day Bends course now comes with the ‘Cousin Jack’ seal of approval.

Seriously, thanks Kev, it was surprisingly hard work and I was knackered when I got home last night but it worked. I rode home using what I had been taught and the difference, particularly on right-hand bends, was amazing. Even the ‘thirds’ bit is starting to make sense.

John ‘Cousin Jack’ Simeons, back in 2006!

 

All courses now booking for March dates in Kent and Oxford!

“Survival Skills on Tour” Dates to follow but contact me now for information about dates for the Peak District. Here’s a few recent comments on courses up in the Peaks

DDB: “Good course though – I feel vastly more confident about choosing the right line through bends and not getting caught out half-way round…”

Daesimps: “The course was very good and has improved my confidence no end. I’m also far more aware of road positioning when taking junctions/bends.”

BigJim: ” For anyone thinking of taking one of Spin’s courses “Just do it” What Spin showed us and went through really was what I needed after a year of riding after doing DAS. I’m a lot more confident and I’m now looking at my lines and planing my corners rather than going in quick, hard on the brakes, fling it round the corner then back on it.”

King756: “Another thumbs up from me, thanks Kevin. Really enjoyed it. I now know where I should be when on the road in town / corners. Just need it little more time practicing making sure my lines are right and being a bit more positive on the throttle/brakes.”

(and one from Kent!)

Melons: “Was also intending to bore you with multiple paragraghs giving a blow by blow account of my five & a half hours riding the twisties of Kent, but quite frankly what’s the point.

“Instead, I’ll just comment on how impressed I was with ‘Spin’, he’s a very likeable bloke, very calm/measured, patient and really puts you at ease, so at ease that I cant really remember riding any corners that afternoon – after an initial chat, coupled with ‘in ear’ commentary the Country twisties that normally make me feel so ill at ease seemed to straighten out, loose their manace and become extremelly comfortable, natural to navigate.”

SURVIVAL SKILLS SPRING TOUR AVAILABILITY

SPRING TOUR AVAILABILITY

Survival Skills is off on tour again!

We’ve got the promise of warm spring days ahead so I’m taking bookings for courses in the Peak District and mid-Wales.

Training in the Peaks is centred on the village of Tideswell, which is known as the Cathedral of the Peaks. This exquisite little village lies in the midst of a network of excellent biking roads, perfect for learning the finer arts of cornering. The Peaks are easily reached from West Yorkshire as well as the Midlands.

Montgomery is my Welsh base, on the borders with England that gives easy access from many parts of the Midlands as well as Liverpool/Manchester and Bristol/Swindon. WIth easy access to deserted mountain roads that provide all sorts of riding challenges, Montgomery is an excellent base for bike training.

I’ll point you at inexpensive accomodation with decent food and beer in both locations if you can’t get there and back easily.

Provisional Dates

Peak District: Sun 18 – Wed 21 April
mid-Wales Sun 9 – Wed 12 May

e-Mail me if you are interested (if there is sufficient interest, alternative dates can be arranged)

Scheduled Training

My regular, scheduled training resumes in Oxford and Kent for both weekend and weekdays. Kent training starts in mid-February (weather permitting) and Oxford training in mid-March.

Don’t forget the France training days either – I’ll be running courses over there when the clocks go forward again in April. Book now to grab a bargain crossing from under £30 on Eurotunnel and take advantage of the wonderfully surfaced, empty French roads, with a whole bunch of hairpins to enjoy.

Check out the website survivalskills.co.uk – advanced motorcycle rider training for all motorcyclists… because it’s a jungle out there for more information on these courses, which include:

• 2 day Survival Skills course will offer a broad overview of key advanced riding skills including cornering, urban riding and emergency techniques.
• 1 day Bends course. I can’t tell you how fast to ride a bend (that’s your choice) but by spending a day working on risk assessment and how to read corners, how to set up a good line and the machine control skills required to ride them well, you’ll be far better equipped to make your own decisions!
• 2 day Double Bends course adds an extra day to the bends course. We’ll ride more technical roads to really work out the skills learned on the Bends course, as well as exploring the pros and cons of techniques like popular techniques like body shifting and trail braking, as well as the extra safety benefit of braking IN corners.
• Confidence Builder 1 day (for newly qualified riders)
• Creaky Rider (1 day for returning riders)

Independent review of the courses here!

Booking

First come, first served. PM me for dates, I’ll hold a slot for all those who express interest for 7 days following enquiries pending payment of a deposit.

SPECIAL OFFERS FOR EARLY BOOKINGS!!

Contact me direct on survivalskills@clara.net for more info!

Survival Skills Online Shop e-Cart finally up and running

As I’ve had a few requests to make online purchasing a bit easier, I’ve had a look at the options and I’ve finally put together an e-Cart to handle purchases directly from the site, rather than via e-mail.

Head for the Survival Skills shop and you’ll find our recommended products are now available via Google Checkout.

And as an opening offer, there are extra discounts available – £1 on purchases between £10 and £19.99 (voucher code KSB1) and £2 on anything over £20 (voucher code KSB2). Just put the voucher code in at the checkout in the usual way.

The vouchers are also valid on our seasonal e-book and sunglasses promotion, giving you additional discounts!

One of each voucher per customer, valid until Wednesday February 10, 2010!

So pop along and see what you fancy!

Lost the “Print, Send and Link” buttons on Google Maps in K-Meleon?

If you’re one of the relatively few K-Meleon browser users you might noticed a few days ago that the very useful buttons that allow you to print a map, and copy and paste the links or embedded HTML code have disappeared from Google Maps. The ’send as mail’ link also vanished at the same time.

As I do use the first two functions quite frequently, I was quite miffed at this loss of functionality on Google. I mentioned it to a friend, and she reported they were still there.

So I checked a few other browsers! The odd thing is that it doesn’t appear to affect Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox or Safari – just K-Meleon.

However, I’ve just discovered where they have been hidden.

The initial Google Maps view is a split screen with the map on the right, and “Get Directions” and “My Maps” in the pale blue bar top left, and below it a white box that’s sometimes filled with other information on businesses, photos and a load of other stuff if you have arrived at the map via a search.

At the right corner of the blue bar, there’s a little [<<] button – its function is to expand the map across the full width of the window.

Click on that and the missing link functions reappear in the blue bar as the map goes full width.

 

As mentioned, this issue doesn’t appear to affect the mainstream browsers, so if you’re not seeing it, don’t panic!

Speed camera snaps parked car

According to stories in the press over the weekend, a man from Nottingham has been issued with a letter of intended prosecution for speeding offences relating to his parked car. Not once, but twice!

It seems his car is regularly parked at the side of the road, just at the point where other cars are snapped by the camera.

The latest incident occured on 13 December 2009 when Nottinghamshire Police claimed he was snapped while driving his Vauxhall Zafira at 37mph in a 30mph zone.

The worrying thing is that when Mr Buck demanded to see the photographs, police dropped the case, and apologised for the mix-up. In a statement they said:

“The software used to read number plates has captured his car’s number plate in the image.

“On both occasions the offending vehicle number plates were similar to those of Mr Buck’s vehicle registration number.

“We will examine the processes and see if improvements can be made to minimise the chance of this happening again in the future.”

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood the guidelines, but I thought that where two vehicles were snapped in the same photo from a speed camera, it was automatically rejected, precisely because of the risk of the innocent driver copping the fine. Clearly that’s not happening here!

Equally worrying is the clear admission that the software recognition technology can’t read the plate properly! How many other tickets are issued for vehicles with “similar” number plates?

Not very reassuring is it?

“I can’t ride any more”

I answered a query on one of the bike forums the other day. He said “I can’t ride any more.”

Clearly he could because he’d got home but in short, it had been a fraught ride with mistake after mistake, and the rider was wondering what had happened to his riding ability. He’d had a short lay-off of a few weeks, taken the bike out on cold and wet roads, had experienced a slide and his riding had gone to bits.

Not surprisingly, he was a little concerned about his missing skills, and asked for some advice.

First, tyres. Unfortunately, it’s become a ‘badge of honour’ with many riders to use soft compound tyres on the road. However, ask any tyre technician (rather than their marketing agency trying to increase their turn-over or the journalist trying to sell magazines!) and they’ll say that a modern ‘high silica’ sports touring tyre will give MORE grip in the cold and wet than a supersport tyre AND will work from cold.

This was exactly the advice given to the riders at the Rider Performance Day back in May at Castle Coombe – he took one look at the conditions (10c and wet), and said their sports-touring tyres would offer more grip even out on the track for all but the very fastest riders!

So if you ride all year round, just be honest, admit that you’re not Shane Byrne and fit some all-year tyres at the next change. You’ll get better mileage and better traction this time of year and outside of the track, you won’t notice the difference in summer.

I’ve got Conti Motions on the Hornet at the moment, and they offer all the grip I can use in the summer, and in the winter are a vast improvement over the previous Contis, Metzlers and OE Michelin HiSports I’ve used, with very neutral steering and lots of feel in the wet.

If you really want summer tyres for the summer or track days, think about investing in some spare wheels!

Second. Riders psych themselves out… one twitch from the tyres takes you by surprise… so you tense up and feel nervous… now you’re stiff on the bike, expecting another slide, looking under the front wheel and not where you’re about to ride, hit more slippery stuff… and the slightest twitch from the front feels like it’s slid a mile and your stiff posture makes it feel worse still.

It’s not an uncommon situation for any rider to find themselves in. It’s happened to me in the past.

Some years ago I met a bunch of buddies down in the Alsace for a riding holiday. Unfortunately on our first group ride it rained. Now, astonishing thought it may be, it had been a really dry spring and early summer and I hadn’t actually ridden in the rain for something like 5 months!!

Which is the third issue – being ‘rusty’.

Here I was out with some pretty quick riders, riding at a pace I hadn’t ridden at for some months, and thoroughly out of practice with the conditions. You don’t have to have had a lay-off to be rusty, just out of practice with what you’re intending to do.

I remember coming down the side of a wooded valley, and having to do an S bend over a stream. As I tipped into the first bit of the bend, the front twitched. I just managed to stop myself squeezing the front brake (at least braking practice paid off!) but froze on the steering, just missed the wall of the bridge, ran wide on the second half of the S and just avoided going in the ditch.

After that I was tense, made mistake after mistake, and generally rode like a plank. So much so, that one of the guys came over and commented on my riding.

After lunch, I deliberately dropped the pace, concentrated on doing the basics right and slowly got my act back together. Next day on another wet day the confidence was back too, and then back came the speed and the smoothness.

So that’s one solution for when you find yourself tensing up mid-ride. Slow down, don’t rush and go back to the basics. You wouldn’t try to set your fastest lap of the day on your first lap of a trackday, but you’d ease yourself back in.

Likewise on the road, don’t try to take tricky overtakes or filter, don’t try to take fancy lines round bends but stick to the centre of the lane. Brake early and gently, get the bike upright before trying to power out of corners. Back to basics till you relax.

The problem with what I’ve just suggested (apart from the tyres, obviously) is that you are fixing what’s already broken, and you’re trying to fix it on the fly as you ride. That’s not always as easy as it sounds.

So here’s an alternative solution.

“Pre-performance Preparation” and a “Psych Plan”.

These are lifted straight out of Sports Psychology. Before you even get on the bike, you take a moment to think through your ride.

Break down what you know you’re about to do. Mentally review the hazards you’ll come across, and the problems they will set you – Keith Code’s ‘Survival Reactions’ are worth looking at here.

You can do this for ‘general’ hazards (“what do I do if I come across a decreasing radius bend?”) or for specific hazards that you know you’ll come across (“the surface under that narrow railway bridge is always icy on a day like this – what if I meet a car head-on?” )

Think how you would normally deal with those problems in terms of machine input. That’s your ‘Psych Plan’.

If you do this whilst you are off the bike, it only takes a few minutes of your time but importantly you’re doing your thinking about the problem in a safe environment rather than trying to come up with solutions in real time on the bike when you are already a bit tense.

The idea of a ‘Psych Plan’ is that when you get on the bike a few minutes later, and you come across the hazard in real time as you ride, because you’ve already previewed the problems and solutions, the ‘data processing’ at the scene gets done very fast and it gets done mostly subconsciously.

By comparison, if you have to come up with the solution on the fly, your “real time” processing brain is very slow – too slow in many cases, as riders who have avoidable accidents unfortunately demonstrate. There’s more about this on the main website in the Riding Skills section.

So, the ‘Psych Plan’ lets you look ahead and think “oh yes, this is where the surface gets slippery” and drop automatically into your routine to deal with it – which could be relaxed arms, gentle application of brakes and throttle and moderate lean angles.

Sounds daft? Watch racers before a race. A lot of them have a routine to mentally get their ‘race head’ on.

It’s just the same. Before you ride, get your ‘road head’ on!

BSM slip quietly out of bike training?

In response to a question about which is the biggest bike school in the UK, I just checked BSM’s website to see if there were any details about where they offered bike training from their franchised sites.

Zip. Nada. Nothing.

There are links to car training and instructor training but the bike option isn’t there.

It seems that quietly and with no fuss, BSM have pulled the plug on their involvement in motorcycle training, barely 18 months after they launched a high-profile tie up with Ducati and Silverstone circuit. That threeway partnership was announced with a fanfare of press releases back in August 2008, allowing trainees to ride Ducati Monsters and train at the track.

This wasn’t the first BSM tie-up with a manufacturer. In 2006, Triumph Motorcycles and BSM announced a scheme for riders to learn to ride on a Triumph Bonneville, in Triumph protective gear, at BSM’s Birmingham site, with the carrot of a ride to the Triumph factory in Hinckley as part of the training.

These publicity stunts aside, it never seemed to me that BSM’s entry into the market was a particularly well-calculated one, mostly relying as it did on existing schools buying into the franchise at considerable cost, to access central booking and publicity.

I could never see how a school that was already operating successfully would want to spend money associating with BSM. Their only likely candidates would have been the schools with marginal profitability looking to pull in more trainees or new start-ups trying to gain a reputation without having to work for it.