e-BOOK ORDERS – CDROMs to be replaced by Download option
Because of the postal disruption and until further notice, Survival Skills e-books will be delivered via download, rather than posted out on CDROM.
There have been long delays on a couple of packages that have been posted, already and delays look set to get worse.
If you’ve recently ordered e-books from me to be posted out, please contact me via email, with your order details and I’ll get back to you with the download details.
From the Doctor’s Surgery Archives:
Q I am finding myself more and more apexing right handers. Must be the racer in me!
How can I avoid this ? Any pointers welcome as I have had a few near misses.
A The reason most riders turn too early is because they are trying to ride too fast into the bend in the first place, so turn to what feels like safety. The danger is you’ll run off the road in the second half of the bend (if you don’t hit something midturn!)
To fix the problem, try this… you’ll need to slow right down – and I MEAN right down, knock 20mph plus off your normal speed to give you the time, space and by far the most important, the spare attention to do it… because initially it feels as if you are going to run off the road.
First check you can actually steer a smooth line round the bend; without being rude, not all riders can! Start by riding parallel with the kerb, in the middle of your lane.
If you can do that accurately, then just shift the line sideways half a meter at a time until you are going into bend on a wide line but DON’T cut across to the inside of the corner. Simply follow the radius of the bend and stay there for as long as it takes for the view to open up and reveal the next straight (or the next bend!). That’ll get you round the bend.
Now, if you want to try cutting across the lane, the bit of the corner you need to know about (because it controls where you cut across the lane) is the exit. The exit is where the bike is UPRIGHT on the way out of the turn – defined by Keith Code as the bit of the bend where you can do whatever you want with the throttle.
So when you can see the exit from mid-turn, THEN and ONLY then, turn tighter using a bit of extra countersteering effort to aim for the exit. This is Code’s Quick Steering (which is not in the least jerky or sudden).
The result is that your apex is way round the turn. You avoid cutting across to the inside of the corner before you can see where the road goes and you stay well away from oncoming traffic.
Because you turn later, you can go deeper into the corner upright. Because you go into the corner deeper you hold your speed longer on the straight and be later on the brakes (or you can brake where you normally do but more gentle on the brakes).
Lower mid corner speed means the bike changes direction more easily and puts less stress on the tyres mid turn where you need grip. Because you use a quick steer and the bike is going slower you change direction faster.
Because you change direction faster you get the bike upright sooner. Because you get the bike upright sooner, you can get on the power earlier (or more gently).
Once you have this off confidently, you can pick you speed up a bit again.
As I’ve said before, the default “follow the kerb line” will always get the rider round a bend if he’s gone in at sensible speed. It’s the moment we start using fancy terms like apex that the trouble arises. Worrying about finding apexes just isn’t relevant on the road.
I came across this one in the archives the other day. Although it’s now a seven year old story, it’s worth repeating, as it’s a mistake that’s repeated over and over.
I was trundling along in my white van when a couple of bikes pulled out in front of me from the side of the road, and took up what looked suspiciously like the observer / observee positions. Ahead was a white Luton “Buy Direct” van.
The lead bike (looked like a VFR) closed right up on the back of it to around 2-3m behind it and started looking round it for an overtake… which would have been fine had a) the speed limit not been 30 and b) the road not been bending left at the time.
From my position futher behind I could see clearly round the inside of the van that the road ahead straightened up and went through a national limit sign.
On we go and the van barely accelerates past 35.
By this time I’m amusing myself by sitting behind them straddling the white line for a view ahead – I’d have overtaken the Luton myself if the bikes hadn’t been in the way.
Eventually VFR guy twigs that the road has straightened up and pokes a nose round the corner of the van to get some kind of a view…
…unfortunately by this time, the straight road is now heading gently uphill toward a blind crest.
I’m sure you know what’s going to happen next.
VFR guy has been trundling along in a low gear (ready to make progress, clearly ), and of course nails it. No rear observation that I could see, certainly no lifesaver… and just about squeaks in front of the van before cresting the rise.
I’m sitting there chuckling to myself thinking about the b*llocking he’ll get from the observer, when after a moment’s hesitation, the second bike goes for it too!!
I hope that he was just far enough ahead and sitting that bit higher that he could see over the crest that the road ahead was clear… but I’m not convinced – particularly as a moment later I could see ahead myself, and the view revealed a right hand bend not far ahead with an oncoming car rounding it forcing the second bike (an R6 I think) to move fairly sharply back to the left on completion of the overtake!
I passed ‘em both in a bus stop about 5 mins later, and they had just about caught me up as I passed Harley’s Diner at Dorchester, where they turned in.
I nearly stopped too, to give them one of my Survival Skills cards.
As I had a course cancellation and it was a sunny morning, if a bit windy, I thought I’d head out on the bike to a charity bike event over at Rochester.
The bike proved reluctant to start, and actually needed some help with the jump leads off the car, but I got it going and was on the way over to Rochester vaguely musing on the limited life of the chloride gel batteries over the old lead acid ones, when the trusty old Hornet started misfiring mid-overtake on the motorway.
Fortunately, I was just approaching an exit, so got off the motorway straight away. As the rev counter needle was jumping all over the place and the neutral light was visibly flickering when I stopped, it was clearly something electrical.
Then just as suddenly, the problem went away and the bike started behaving itself again.
However, it seemed wise to turn round and head back rather than risk breaking down further away still. So I turned round and got home with no further drama.
I checked the voltage output using the diagonostic setting on the GPS which handily shows the external voltage! It was a bit low at idle, the wrong side of 12v, and jumped around a bit erratically as the revs went up. When I checked lights on, the headlight was visibly flickering too.
And the bike wouldn’t restart as the battery was nearly flat, despite the 15 mile run.
Off with the tailbox and seat, and I checked the rectifier/regulator – a previous misfire/voltage problem proved to be the plug not fully seated in the unit (my fault after vaselining up all the connections a few autumns ago), but it didn’t appear to be that on this occasion.
I checked the main fuse and connector block to the starter for corrosion, pulled various other plugs on the loom apart looking for corroded connections between the alternator and the battery and everything looked fine.
I was running out of ideas. I had the battery out but as it’s sealed, I couldn’t do much other than check the resting voltage with another voltmeter (a bit low – but not surprising as it wouldn’t turn the engine over), so just popped it back in, pending purchasing a new battery and fitting the new plugs that have been sitting on the worktop for the last few months.
For some reason I pressed the starter again, and to my surprise, the engine spun over reasonably fast and restarted almost immediately, much more easily than it had in the morning.
On checking again, the voltage problem had vanished too. Nice steady voltage on idle just over 12v rising smoothly to around 13.2 as the revs picked up. No more flickering lights, either.
The only thing I can assume is that the earth connection on the battery, though tight, wasn’t a good one.
Ho hum!
At least it happened on a day off, and not in the middle of a course!!
One of the things that’s a red herring when looking at bike accidents and near misses is the concept of “lack of attention” or “loss of focus”.
It’s a woolly concept, usually spelled out as the need for riders to “concentrate at all times”. You can’t.
Fact.
Attention span is 20-odd mins for an adult. 24/7 focus is simply not how the brain works.
Besides, it’s not how we ride.
We don’t “concentrate” and think about the vast majority of what we do on a bike.
Most of riding takes place below the level of consciousness, not only purely mechanical stuff like gear-changing and gentle braking but also some of the things we make a decision over, like where to put the bike and where we are looking. None of this is the result of real-time decision making, we just “know” where to put the bike and where to look.
The important bit is to understand that when we’re riding the bike, many of the things that seem to be second nature aren’t instinctive (our remote ancestors didn’t ride motorcycles) but learned responses.
The concept that much of our riding is happening below the level of the conscious mind (and thus we’re riding perfectly safely when we’re not concentrating) is an area that causes a lot of riders some doubt, but ask yourself – do you have to think about the difference between a red or a green traffic light? Or do you just react to the colour of the light as second nature?
So automatic responses cope with much of our riding. However, on occasion the situation become complex enough to demand some real-time thinking to help us find our way safely from one side of the hazard to the other side.
The question is how we switch from our built-in autopilot to our wide-awake “thinking” mode. The answer is that the brain is actually responding to ‘cues’ which produce the “wake up” reaction.
These ‘cues’ are mostly visual but also auditory and occasionally olefactory, things we see (or hear [siren?] or smell [diesel?]) that make us sit up, take notice and think “I need to do something about this”.
The cue is identified in the mid-brain, which decides if it’s something that can be dealt with in the subconscious as part of our automatic riding, or whether our neo-cortex (the thinking, reasoning, decision-making part of the brain) needs to be woken up to deal with the problem.
As I said we don’t have to think about the colour or meaning the traffic light, but we will need to think about complex questions such as what colour that traffic light will be at the moment we get there – that’s the complex, real-time reasoning problem we carry out, NOT spotting the traffic light or what colour it is at the moment we see it!
As we put in time on the bike, many different cues that need real-time decision making are learned.
Will that car pull out?
How tight is that bend?
Can we safely overtake?
We may learn the cues without being aware we’re learning (often we’re learning by repetitive experience so people think they must be “instinctive”) or fully consciously, because someone has shown us what to look for or we might have reasoned it out for ourselves.
In either case, if we ‘miss’ a bend, don’t react to an emerging car, or make a mess of an overtake, assuming we are competent to deal with the hazard under normal circumstasnce, the problem is not “loss of focus” or “lack of concentration”, it’s because the cue system didn’t work properly;
The problem is that once we’re into a situation that spells “this is going to HURT” then an even more primitive part of the brain takes over – the so-called lizard brain that controls basic instincts like fight and flight! One a bike, there are typically two reactions now:
Anyone familiar with Keith Code’s “Survival Reactions” will recognise what’s happened!
So how do we make sure we don’t miss the vital cues that wake us up? Well, one of the biggest reasons for missing them is, quite simply, riding at our limits.
There’s a finite amount of processing the brain can manage, in terms of:
If things are going wrong, slow down! It’s as simple as that – and let your brain start processing information in the subconscious again.
So when we make a mistake, the key point is not to blame “lack of focus” or even dissect the precise riding error itself – but to look backwards in time, and find out what we missed that should have warned us of the mistake we were about to make!
(Rewritten for clarity Monday 14 September 09)
Picture this…
At which point I spot the thread on www.kentandsussexbikers.com.
There are several well-intentioned “come for a ride with us and we’ll look after you” posts, but as she isn’t far away, I suggest a short ride, with radios, so I can look over her riding. She jumps at the chance and we meet up the next evening.
Before we even get onto the bikes, she mentions that one of the big problems is that she finds it very difficult to operate the clutch. It is something I’m planning to look at in any case, but I take the invitation. I see she’s tried to do something about the problem – she’s gone to the trouble of fitting a rather trick dogleg clutch lever, but the essential problem remains; with small hands, she simply can’t reach the lever to operate the clutch cleanly.
Why? There’s no free play. I spin the cable adjuster round, and wind in some slack and invite her to try. With a couple of cm’s free movement at the end of the lever, we check that mod works when she starts the bike up. Suddenly she finds she has more control over a slipping clutch.
Just before we set off, she reminds me: “I can’t do right turns and I’m really slow” she said. “OK”, I thought to myself, “we’ll start with some easy left turns, an open road and see what you CAN do.”
Off we go. The first thing I notice is that even though we’re stopped and tucked into a quiet corner of a petrol station, her foot goes straight up onto the rear brake. Once the motor is running and in gear, because the clutch isn’t biting quite where she expects, she hops along few paces like a one legged bird to maintain balance.
Hmmm. Memo to self – remember that for the debrief.
Once we get to the exit, she manages the pull-away (left!) reasonably well, given the clutch wasn’t biting where she expected it. Out through the town and off down a nice road towards Rye. She negotiates the junction quite cleanly if a little bit hurriedly in the foot and handwork department as she decelerates and turns, then surprises me with a fair turn of speed out on the open road; on one or two bends she knows she’s little quicker than me, but on the awkward downhill bends she doesn’t know so well, I have to click the radio on and suggest using the rear brake to control the speed and to keep hands off the front.
We arrive at Rye, with me reasonably happy with what I’ve seen so far, and set off on a lap of the town, which involves two right turns at mini-roundabouts and another couple where bits of the one way system merge. She runs very wide on each and is clearly tense. “Ah yes… I see what you mean.” Her take-offs from a standing start are also awkward and unbalanced; she’s keeping her left foot rigidly on the peg at all times.
So we stop and have a chat. First of all, I ask her about the ‘Safety Position’. “You mean, when you keep your foot on the brake at all times? I try to make myself do that.” Uh, right, thought so. That’s been drummed in so hard on basic training – and on her refreshers it turns out -that it’s seen as a ‘RULE’ and more important that balance and sensible control of the machine.
I tell her, to her palpable relief, that she can put both feet down if she wants!
I explain that the ideal use of the rear brake round town is to stop the bike smooth and level after you’ve used both brakes to slow down; but once stopped it’s of limited use except on a hill. We have a further chat about the brakes in general. She’s happy about the use of front and rear brakes, but it seems no-one had mentioned that particular use of the rear brake, nor that it’s a useful brake when going down (as opposed to pulling away on) hills.
Second, I explain that moving all the decision-making about brakes and gears can be moved back 10 or 15 metres giving her the chance to get the bike balanced in plenty of time and freeing up her concentration away from the controls, so that when she arrives at a junction or a bend, all she has to do is negotiate it. That makes sense to her.
Third, I suggest if she’s having trouble with right turns, angling a pull-away from a side turning slightly towards the direction you want to go will help – there’s no need to stop at 90 degrees to the white line.
Then I mention counterweighting. Blank look. I remember she did her test on a 125, and we didn’t talk about that much back then. But what about on her refresher training; “did you practice tight turns?”. It appears so but with no mention of counterweighting, and she had lots of problems with them.
I’m not surprised if they didn’t mention or use counterweighting.
Given that we’re just out on a ride, and not doing my course, we’re not near a handy carpark, but I briefly explain the theory and make the best use of a wide factory entrance to demonstrate.
Anyway, I then suggest we try that on another lap of Rye, as she’s now got enough new stuff to think about; feet, rear brake, getting the gears/brakes sorted earlier, angling stops and counterweighting. Thank heavens for the radio!
Off we go back to the town and she practices the counterweighting on the way in, then with prompting over the radio gets all the gears and braking sorted early so she can concentrate on a bit of counterweighting on the tight corners.
Qualified success. Not perfect but much tidier turns, not running nearly so wide. Not bad for ten minutes discussion and five minutes riding!! We stop briefly and she’s happier.
We leave Rye behind and enjoy one of the roads across Romney Marsh, at which point the only car that caught us up passes us. So not too shabby in the speed department either.
Though her steering has been pretty tidy, I felt there was an underlying hint of nervousness about getting round unknown corners, translating itself into a slightly hesitant approach. Nothing awful, but not very positive at times.
So I mention countersteering. Blank look. This is getting predictable unfortunately. Not her fault at all, she can only repeat what she knows. And clearly she doesn’t know about countersteering.
Again, as we’re at the side of the road, I don’t have my diagrams, models or videos, but I do my best to explain, and although she struggles a bit to follow, she’s prepared to put it on trust and give it a go. I also mention the differences between dropped bars and the flat ones on her training bikes and the need not to lean on them when trying to steer.
The first attempts to use countersteering on the move only elicit a tiny wiggle from the bike, but by careful use of an analogy of sliding a drawer in, she gets the idea and suddenly the bike’s turning faster and zipping across the road. A mile or so down the road and there’s quite a nasty little S bend over a blind crest. She whizzes round and with no problems deals with another sharp bend at the top of a long straight road where there had been a fatal bike accident only days earlier. That had clearly worried her. The little bunch of flowers at the side of the road are mute testimony to a rider who didn’t survive his ride.
A few more awkward bends, including a nasty decreasing radius turn that caught me out years ago are put behind us and we’re almost back at our meeting point. We pull in, doing a “dreaded” right turn nice and smoothly onto the forecourt, and pull up.
Almost her first question is “do you think I should sell the bike?”
I reassure her that she’s ridden quite well, and that her speed is quite OK – she’s not a mobile chicane by an stretch of the imagination. The ride wasn’t perfect, there are faults to sort out, and skills to build, but she’s safe enough and now knows what the worst of her problems are and what to do to fix them.
I point out that “too slow” is relative. Relative to being able to stop in an emergency. Just because some riders are faster, it doesn’t mean they’re making the right choice about speed.
By now it’s 9pm, and getting dark, so we head off in our own directions, she with a big grin on her face, me with an impromptu gift of a chocolate bar!
I ride back, having on the one hand a good feeling about having helped keep an aspiring rider on the road, and on the other I’m having an internal rant about the “training” schools that took her money for “refresher” training and failed to fix her problems.
Neither took her out on her bike, as I understand it.
One of them stuck her out with a bunch of learners, I think on 125s, so I very much suspect that will have been with a CBT-only qualified instructor, and quite obviously his main job would have been to look after the new riders.
But she’d also been on a 500cc school bike, presumably with a DAS-qualified instructor.
And… not to mention counterweighting when she can’t do even moderately tight turns? Appalling.
And countersteering? I know it’s not officially sanctioned by the DSA but it’s a key technique for DAS and a “must know” in my book, particularly when someone is having steering issues. Unbelievable.
I’ve always defended CBT/DAS instructors when the argument has cropped up about who is best qualified to fix what are actually fundamental and basic riding faults in riders with a full licence – some advanced instructors certainly aren’t!
But I have to say this experience has left me wondering about the quality of training from the local schools. It quite clearly failed this particular rider badly. It’s likely the school simply making a fast buck by bunging her on a part-filled 125 course, but the wider question is whether the instructors were up to the job. It doesn’t look like it. And if not, why not?
None of the faults were obscure – they would be something a DAS instructor would see virtually every course – and a hangover from learning on a 125.
Rather more worryingly, both schools are offereing instructor training. Are they simply churning out clones of their existing instructors?
And the really scary thing? DAS instructors from these schools will no doubt use their DAS card to get onto the advanced instructors register (RPMT) at some point, probably persuaded to do so by the school itself so they can offer advanced training. So much for the DSA’s claims of quality control.
The worst of all possible worlds.
Last Wednesday (May 13) I gave a presentation on behalf of Somerset Road Safety Partnership at their ‘Rider Performance’ Day at Castle Combe race circuit.
For me personally, it was a very interesting day; a chance to meet fellow professionals in the field of riding skills and to interact in a classroom format with a large group of mixed abilities, a rather different day from my normal 1:1 training out on the road!
The 40-odd attendees were split into two groups, based on their riding experience, so as to make better use of the facilities and to allow for the Avon tyre guy to do his two sessions back to back in his lunch break! That meant I got to do the first session of the day at around 9:30 after the initial briefing, and then the final “graveyard shift” at around 4pm!
The basic brief I’d been given was to run a “workshop” about defensive riding and try to show that many motorcycle accidents are avoidable by the rider; in other words to approach riding with a defensive mindset.
It’s not the easiest topic to approach, not least because biking is about having fun and defensive riding doesn’t sound fun, but also because many riders firmly believe that they had nothing to do with an accident involving another vehicle, because it “wasn’t their fault”. Legally that might be the case but it takes two to tangle – do they have to drive into the accident that someone else is about to cause?
The answer is “no” of course – with the right knowledge of where accidents happen, and a basic understanding of why they happen, it’s possible to put in place relatively simple strategies to avoid dangerous situations.
Slowing down in hazardous places is the most obvious – with more time, you can look around and spot the issues more easily, as well as having a better chance of dealing with them. The key point to get over here is that “slowing down” doesn’t mean slowing your whole ride – it means being more selective about where you add your speed.
Seeing and being seen is another key strategy. It should be obvious that if you can’t see something, you don’t know it’s there. A good rider will consider what they can see, and from that work out the areas they can’t see and take a long hard think about what might be hidden out of sight. But for many road users if you can’t be seen, you’re likely to be out of mind. So positioning is as much about allowing others to know you are there as gathering your own information.
Some instructors hate the expression “expecting the unexpected”; they suggest that if you expect it, it’s not unexpected any more, and they have a point. Thus perhaps a better way of thinking is to look at any situation and ask “what can go wrong here?” Planning for disaster rather than for everything to pan out exactly as you hoped means you’re far less likely to be surprised when you DO have to take evasive action. I firmly believe a pragmatic approach to understanding why other road users and ourselves get entangled with each other is a far better solution to improving rider safety than teaching them the “Holy Grail” of the zero error Perfect Ride!
Now, I could have approached all this in a 1960’s “chalk and talk” classroom session or worse still “Death by Powerpoint”, a style of presentation for which I personally have an attention span very slightly longer than an extremely bored goldfish.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to go the equally dire “team building” approach to my session!
So I used a mixture of approaches, based around the rather excellent “Perfect Day” video. It’s a short two minute video showing a rider avoiding a number of hazards along the way, and as such it’s an excellent teaching tool for illustrating that common accidents that have potentially nasty consequences.
What the video demonstrates nicely is that not only are the potential problems the result of easily avoidable errors, but the rider also has plenty of clues that the things are about to go pear shaped, and has simple solutions to staying out of trouble.
I took out three of the scenarios the video painted for further study. I split the group up into teams and then asked each team to look at various aspects of each situation – what the problem was, what the clues were, where the rider could expect to find the potential hazard and what they could do about it. Each scenario asked the same questions but gave them a different way to approach it.
Final conclusion? If I’m not scaring myself witless as I ride, I have more fun! Defensive riding works!
With only 50-odd minutes for the entire session, it was quickfire stuff, but watching the body language of some of the attendees I’m confident I got the point over to some that didn’t show much interest initially, and I got some good feedback from some of the people sitting in, particularly after the first session when people had a moment to talk to me over a much-needed cuppa!
Certainly, there were some teething problems. Jim the organiser had brought along a projector but it took a while to find the screen to show the movie, and I was expecting a whiteboard or flip chart, neither of which materialised, but on the whole I think it went well for a first run of a new format presentation.
In between times of course, I was free to wander round and see what else was going on.
Martin Hopp and his team of instructors from Hopp Rider Training were out on the track doing a subset of their normal training from up at Cadwell Park, with a “machine preparation” session, a frank talk about crashing and the consequences, slow riding and braking exercises, and plenty of track time.
I was interested to see that Martin got the trainees to actually lock the front brake in a straight line.
This “lock and slide the front” thing is something I’ve been demo’ing for years on the “urban” section of my Survival Skills 2 day course and the City Riding / Collision Avoidance courses but perhaps I need to do it on the Bends course too. For the time being I’ll stick to demos rather than getting trainees to do it but hard braking is clearly an area that many riders with cornering problems are weak on, not least because many riders never practice emergency stops.
Martin’s instructors also worked on the exact same approach I suggest for smooth stops – modulate the front off as the speed drops down to walking pace, and finish with just the rear, stopping left foot down, something an IAM rider commented was the way he used to do it before he joined the IAM!
I have to say the ability to do braking exercises on a track is useful, but I do have slight concerns about the difference in grip between a wet track and a wet road; the only surface on the road that is equivalent to a wet track is the ‘Shellgrip’ anti-skid surfaces. You need to go away and practice on the surfaces you normally ride on, not rely on what you think you have learned on a track!
To my mind possibly the most interesting presentation of the day was by a chap from Avon (tyres, not beauty products!).
He was obviously extremely knowledgable about tyres – I got a chance to chat over tea and he was off to talk to a government committee on bike safety about bike tyres the following day, so clearly knew his rubber.
The most thought provoking observation he made was that in the conditions (13c, and wet) the tyres that would work best on the track would be the high silica sports touring tyres, NOT the supersports tyres.
Yes, I said on the TRACK, not just the road.
He said the sports touring tyres would offer just as much outright grip as the softer tyres under the wet conditions, and furthermore wouldn’t need warming up but would work from cold. The supersports tyres would need to be worked hard to get them up to temperature, and worked hard to keep them there!
The obvious conclusion is that for anything but dry, warm roads on a sunny mid-summer day, you’re better off on a sports touring tyre! Go back to this “Don’t crash on the gas” post just a few days ago and see the relevance of this expert opinion, and the danger of running too sporty tyres in the wrong weather conditions.
There’s another one scheduled for September. Contact:
Jim Newman – Road Safety Coordinator (motorcycles)
Somerset Road Safety Partnership, Somerset County Council, County Hall, The Crescent, Taunton, TA1 4DY
Tel: 0844 980 00 28 Fax: 01823 423439
e-mail roadsafety@somerset.gov.uk
Personally, I’m available for available for talks to clubs and groups throughout the year! Drop me a mail.
The ‘Winter Riding Season’ usually kicks off with a series of spills at junctions, where riders usually report that “the back end just came round on me” or something similar.
The accident is particularly likely where riders are turning right out of a side road – the distance you travel encourages trying to power through the turn, plus the fact you’re crossing two lanes of traffic (so generally fewer gaps on a busy roads) leads to riders who are in a hurry.
In this case, it was coming off a roundabout late at night in spring on a wet surface. The back end came round and the rider went down on the low side. It seems it’s a roundabout the rider uses all the time so why did it happen?
First of all, let’s get the usual excuses out the way.
Cold Tyres. Do motorcycle tyres need to be warmed up? There are all sorts of stories going round about how you need to warm up tyres before they’ll offer proper grip, some riders are even resorting to using tyre warmers in the garage before they go out for a ride!
Is this likely? If street tyres needed warming up before use to the point where they offered dangerously low levels of grip when cold, the riders all over the place would be crashing and able to point the finger directly at the tyre. Where would be the first place they would be running to?
It wouldn’t be the tyre warmer shop, it would be the compensation courts, particularly in the USA! Think about it. Even road legal trackday tyres have to produce a reasonable level of grip on the road from cold; it’ll just be a lot less than they would on a sun-warmed race track!
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[EDIT] 23 May – I’m going to change my opinion on this somewhat.
At the recent Rider Performance day at Castle Combe where I was giving one of the presentations, I got to listen to a tyre expert who’d come along from Avon Tyres. The most thought provoking observation he made was that in the conditions (13c, and wet) the tyres that would work best on the track would be the high silica sports touring tyres, NOT the supersports tyres.
Yes, he said on the TRACK, not just the road.
He said the sports touring tyres would offer just as much outright grip as the softer tyres under the wet conditions, and furthermore wouldn’t need warming up but would work from cold. The supersports tyres would need to be worked hard to get them up to temperature, and worked hard to keep them there!
The obvious conclusion is that for anything but dry, warm roads on a sunny mid-summer day, you’re better off on a sports touring tyre!
I still think a rider with reasonable feel and understanding of how the bike is performing under them could ride round the issue, and tyre warmers are clearly a fantasy, but if you’re a bit ham-fisted it does throw some light on the annual rash of cold-weather crashes! [/EDIT]
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Diesel. Fuel spills do happen. But generally they’re thin streaks or drips, and you might slide as you hit it, but you’re soon off onto clean tarmac and the tyre grips again, after a twitch and a wobble.
Very occasionally there is a BIG spill you can’t avoid – I have had to negotiate a couple over the years, including one that caused three other riders ahead of me to crash. But a spill that size you can see and even smell. Police accident analyses do not point to diesel and petrol spills as a major cause of crashes in the UK.
So what does cause slides that the bike can’t recover from? Simple; it’s lean angle and throttle! At the same time. To excess.
I have lost count of how many times I’ve explained this on the bike forums I contribute to, yet people still read magazine articles which bang on about feeding the power on as you start to pick the bike up out of the turn. What they discover is that if you feed in TOO much power, you end up picking the bike up out of the ditch instead!
The short answer. Get the bike upright THEN feed the power in. That way if you exceed the available grip, you get upright wheelspin – no big deal.
The long answer. Why is this “feed the power in” technique a poor one? It’s basically down to road surfaces. We’re not on a track. For starters roads don’t grip like a track, but in the wet they get much worse. A GOOD CONDITION wet road (shellgrip excepted) will deliver around 15% less grip than it will in the dry, a worn surface considerably less.
The tyre can deliver a certain amount of grip, depending on
a) how grippy the tyre is
b) how grippy the surface is
Let’s look at the first part – tyre grip. If you’re leaning over, you’re asking the tyre to grip to keep it turning. If you’re adding throttle, you’re asking the rear tyre to deliver grip to drive the bike forward.
Now, let’s factor in what happens as you feed in the throttle and the bike speeds up whilst you’re leant over in the middle of a corner – you need increase your lean to keep the bike on the same line. So you’re now asking the tyre for MORE grip to keep the bike turning at the same time as you’re asking for MORE grip to keep it driving! This split of grip between acceleration and cornering is sometimes known as the “Traction Pie”.
It’s not rocket science to see that by twisting the throttle mid-corner it’s easy to try to carve off a bigger slice of the Traction Pie than is available – the grip the tyre was delivering quite happily a moment earlier suddenly isn’t there any more. In essence, it’s the reverse of the problem of applying brakes mid-turn, and riders are quite aware of the danger of that.
The second issue is road surface – it’s half the deal – if the surface can’t deliver its half of the grip, then the tyre won’t stick to it if you try to bite off a big chunk of the traction pie!
Just like a soft compound tyre will allow more throttle and lean angle than a hard compound tyre, so a high friction road surface like ‘Shellgrip’ will offer more than worn out and slick surface; you can brake and lean almost as hard in the wet as you can in the dry on Shellgrip.
The difference is that surfaces aren’t consistant and constantly change. You don’t change tyres half way through a bend! (Though come to think of it, someone will no doubt mention dual compound tyres, but note these offer more grip at bigger lean angles, not less!)
In particular, high grip surfaces are often laid where cars are turning or braking, but these surfaces are rarely extended far out of the junctions or corners, and motorcycles with their wider lines can run off the Shellgrip onto the ordinary tarmac whilst still leant over. Consider the potential consequences!
OK, having explained at some length why bikes lose traction mid-turn, why do riders continue to do it? Two reasons:
Neither is a good justification for using the technique when even newly qualified riders are buying 100hp 600s. I’ve wheelspun a CG125 in the wet, so it’s not difficult with a 100hp bike.
So why can’t you shut the throttle and get it back?
You need to understand how tyres deliver traction – unfortunately the sums don’t work the same for losing and regaining traction. It’s just the way tyres work beyond the normal friction rules (which incidentally is why you can lean over more than 45 degrees without falling off) – once you break traction you have to reduce what you’re asking the tyre to do in terms of the traction pie beyond what it was offering when it lost traction.
It’s a bit complicated to explain without resorting to graphs and equations, but trust me that it’s much difficult to regain grip lost during a slide than it was to to lose it in the first place.
If you’re on the throttle, once a tyre has broken traction, you’ll find it difficult to keep it from wheelspinning. And if it’s wheelspinning, it’s delivering next to zero grip. In a straight line, you just shut the throttle and the tyre stops spinning and you regain traction. No big deal
But if it spins up at the same time as you’re leaning, then the tyre slides out sideways at an angle to the front wheel, because of the design of a motorcycle as two wheels with a hinge in the middle.
Now you have a big problem. If you try to reduce the throttle imput to regain grip, the bike is sideways on. When the tyre grips, the next stop is usually an aerial exit from the machine in the form of a highside. If you were watching British Superbikes from Oulton Park on Easter Monday, you’d have seen some excellent examples of bikes losing traction, getting sideways and being unable to regain it, with the riders being thrown off – one of them even crashed behind the pace car!
Alternatively you try to steer the bike upright to take away some of the lean angle. At least, that’s what riding manuals will say; “steer into the slide”. There’s a clear disadvantage there because there’s a reason you’re leaning over – to get round a bend. Steering into the slide takes you off the road or worse into oncoming traffic.
In reality, once the back end has gone mid-turn, it all happens far too fast for the average rider (me included) and if you stay on at this point it’s divine intervention. Those not so blessed will go down lowside if the tyre continues to slide, or highside if the tyre gets broadside enough for the contact patch to “grow” and grip again.
And incidentally, this is why it was very unlikely to be diesel that caused the crash – as soon as he got back on the non-diesel part of the road, the level of grip would have gone right up and the bike would have snapped back into line. As that didn’t happen and the bike continued to slide out and down, it’s far more likely his combination of throttle and lean angle just outrode the wet road surface! Police accident investigations don’t find diesel actually causes many bike crashes – but it’s an easy excuse for the rider!
So, how to avoid?? Two suggestions.
The first one is to use “Point and Squirt” cornering. Rather than try to use big lean angles, sweeping lines and feeding the power on whilst turning, use the Point and Squirt. Slow down upright, get mid-turn speeds down, square turns off by turning tight, get the bike upright again and THEN put the power on.
Second, look at the tyres. Many people fit soft compound tyres that are really designed for trackdays in the belief they’ll give more grip on the road. They do allow bigger lean angles than touring tyres.
Or rather, they do on a CONSISTENT surface.
Just like any tyre, if the surface can’t deliver its half of the grip, then the tyre won’t stick to it – but now because of the confidence offered by the soft compound tyre, the rider is leaning the bike further, feeding the power in harder…
…all the conditions that make recoving a slide more difficult if not downright impossible.
Touring or Sport-touring tyres don’t deliver the outright dry grip (though I’ve got my knee down without too much bother on the old Mk 111 Avon Roadrunners in the past) but they let go more predictably in the wet – you usually get a series of warning “slips” before they slide.
Final point. A slower, squarer turn gets you upright again sooner. And because you’re upright, you can get on the power harder and make a quicker getaway than the rider who’s still leaning getting round the corner!
Sorted!
Yana (AKA Quicksilva on Visordown) has done a couple of courses with me over the years. This is her write up of the first course she did with Survival Skills, a Confidence Builder course where we sorted her basic cornering issues out, which had been troubling her for months since passing her test.
“Decided to go and spend the day with Spin before I ended up decorating a lorry!
“First off clearly I knew even less than I thought I knew because the stuff he showed me about hazards and road signs had just never been on my radar before. Road positioning for better visability of the road ahead was also new.
“But here’s where I now have to accept that whilst the good lord blessed me with a face that won’t scare small children or grown men, he clearly forgot to hand out common sense.
“Basically when following a right hand corner and you’re over on the left you gently countersteer right – the KEY BIT is to STOP applying pressure to the countersteer to STOP you CONTINUING to lean further and therefore [crossing] over to the white line.
“If you apply a gentle pressure it will turn the bike enough to do the job – CLEARLY this is common sense to EVERYONE ELSE so WHY OH WHY has it not registered with me in ten months of riding!!!
“You can imagine Kevin’s face when I was describing how in the middle of a right hand bend I was having to countersteer left to keep the bike to the left —- it was at this point that the penny dropped, even if it had taken all day because I couldn’t articulate exactly what I was doing!!
“My only defence is that i have never understood the dynamics of two wheels (pretty poor i know!!)
“Anyways – tried it out again when I got home and am delighted to say I enjoyed a great ride on some twisties that have always scared me due to my poor road positioning – and this time i never once tried to use left countersteering on a right hand bend!
“So many thanks Spin for the advice and training – it was well worth it and I am very glad that I followed the advice of VDErs on Survival Skills about training to get it sorted.”
Yana worked very hard on the day so I was extremely relieved we finally got to the bottom of it!! It was a case of both of us listening to the other – and then asking the right questions!!
After passing her test, Yana had heard all about countersteering from other riders and read up on the technique, and understood the general idea of pushing the bar in the direction you want to turn (push left, go left / push right go right).
Unfortunately because the dynamics are not often fully explained (or recognised by riders for that matter), she hadn’t fully grasped that there are three stages of countersteering:
What she was trying to do was to push all the way through the turn – so the bike leaned beyond the angle she wanted and in consequence turned harder than she intended, and part way through the turn, she was countersteering in the opposite direction to correct the oversteer.
The result was a weird zig-zagging line round the bend that was as disconcerting to watch as it must have been to ride!
And the training paid off – towards the end of the session, she was able to take prompt avoiding action by means of countersteering to dodge a cluckwit rider on a red VFR who was on the wrong side of the road mid-turn… excellent reaction!!
In many ways this was one of the tougher courses I’ve had. It’s the weird problems like this that are really difficult to identify. It reminds me of another woman who’d had an accident on the brakes and lost confidence.
I could see something wasn’t right about her braking, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It took me around 45 minutes of following her and trying to get a view from different positions before I spotted it – she was braking rear first / front second and doing most of the braking on the rear brake. It turned out she’d been braking like that since CBT – she’d clearly mis-heard or mis-understood her CBT instructor and it hadn’t been picked up by either her DAS instructor, or the DSA examiner!
Half an hour’s chat over a cuppa explaining the dynamics of braking half-convinced her she had got the wrong end of the stick, and another 30 minutes spent doing every type of stop from gentle drifts to a halt to full-on emergency stops showed her how to use the brakes effectively in al situations.
It’s incredibly rewarding when a course like those two gives a good result.
Right, saw the doc and physiotherapist (as well as some research online).
What I’ve done is a biceps tendon tear at the elbow. Pretty rare injury apparently but the symptoms are classic; a “pop” in the elbow as the injury occurs, initial swelling in the front of the elbow, and weakness when bending the elbow. The bump in the upper arm and the gap I can feel nearer the elbow is caused by the biceps muscle and tendon recoiling and shortening.
Although repair is best effected by an operation within 24 hours, there’s a window of some weeks before the muscle and tendon stiffen up and make a repair difficult or impossible.
The bad news is that as I’m not a top class international sportsman the NHS is likely to say live with it, as there are other muscle groups that pick up the load and so 80% or so of the strength should come back in the next three months or so.
However, I’ve got a referral to the consultant, though that will no doubt be some weeks away, and will make a point of emphasising the need to lift heavy weights (ie motorcycles!) as part of the job. If it can be fixed, I’d rather it was than rely on a partial recovery.
Ho hum!
Still, in the meantime I can at least start taking bookings again!
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