By: Dave Abrahams
Cape Town - After 14 years, one of the more striking features of Wheels Motorcycle Club’s annual Skills Campaign was that several of the younger riders participating in the latest edition were in fact the children of riders who had helped kickstart this initiative in 2001 – and that provided a satisfaction all of its own.
More than 70 riders, ranging in age from 18 to sixty-something, turned out for the first phase at the Parow Traffic Department’s grounds on Sunday 11 January. Their bikes varied from 125cc scramblers to massive Harley-Davidson tourers, including a number of big trailies and sleek sports bikes, but they were all there for the same reason - to learn, or refresh (some had attended before) the riding skills and street smarts that help you survive when somebody else does something stupid out there.
Biker Basics instructor Lloyd Castle put it bluntly in the theory segment of the day’s proceedings: You are solely responsible for what happens to you on the road. You cannot assume that anybody else knows what they are doing, that they are skilled drivers, wide awake and concentrating on the task at hand.
You can’t even assume that they have seen you and your brightly coloured motorcycle - the only things over which you have complete control are the direction and speed of your bike: you can steer, you can accelerate and you can brake.
REAL-WORLD STUFF
After a (rather scary) presentation from the SA Paramedic Service on what to do – and, more importantly, what not to do – when one of your riding buddies goes down, and a straight-forward rundown of what you as a rider need to do to keep your machine running reliably and safely, the riders moved outside for the hands-on segment.
This was real-world stuff, simulating the danger points in every ride - cornering, emergency lane changes, how to ride safely between the cars in heavy traffic (most car drivers are astonished to learn that lane-splitting is not only legal but also safer than trying to make believe your bike is a car).
Some exercises reinforced basic machine control, others challenged perceptions; each challenged the rider to recognise danger far enough ahead to do something about it, and to react correctly without having to plan their move in advance.
Things got a whole lot more scary the following Saturday, when 50 of the riders pitched up at the Killarney racing circuit to start practicing avoidance techniques at real-world speeds, starting with the giant slalom.
Most motorcycles are capable of changing direction more violently than their riders will believe; it’s not comfortable, but it could save your life. Soon even the Harley riders were flip-flopping between the cones at 60km/h, while the sports-bike riders learned that, for them, throttle control was even more crucial than accurate steering.
SLIDING ALL OVER THE PLACE
There were more surprises in store when the riders moved on to the braking exercises. At first they were told to use the back brake only; many riders of older bikes slid all over the place, while the later machines with ABS simply took forever to stop as the system released the brakes to prevent rear-wheel lock-up
Then they used the front brakes only; the improvement was radical, at the cost of at least one sphincter-clenching unplanned stoppie and some more mutinous behaviour from machines with ABS.
It was when the riders began using both brakes together to settle the bike, keep it in a straight line and stop as quickly as possible, that the advantages of ABS on motorcycles with ABS became apparent - but all the riders, no matter what they rode, were dismayed to find out how long it took them to stop even from a conservative 60km/h.
The instructors then positioned traffic cones to mark out the turn-in point, the apex and the exit point of Turn 2 and Turn 5, the most difficult of Killarney’s corners. This was not a racing exercise; positioning your bike precisely on the road for a smooth and accurate line through corners is a lifesaver in traffic, especially in a country whose car drivers are renowned for their seeming inability to steer through a corner.
A frequent comment through the years from riders who’ve been through both segments of the Skills Campaign has been that they’ve learned as much about themselves as they have about their motorcycles.
But that perception check, as Lloyd Castle pointed out a week before, is what makes you a safer rider - the rest is just practice.