Getting the best from riding British B-roads
-ROADS ARE THE most challenging routes to ride well because the view can suddenly go from a mile down to 20m, you get lots of elevation change, some bits are well-signed and others aren’t, and of course there are lots of corners. By comparison, A-roads are easy because they’ve had so much money spent on them to engineer out the dangerous sections – on the whole they’re straighter, flatter and more boring. Another advantage of B-roads is you don’t have to ride at silly speeds to have fun. You can have a challenging ride at 60mph, whereas you would have to be doing three figures on an A-road to get the same buzz. On a B-road you’re aiming for flow – linking one corner to the next in a smooth sequence. Do that and the pace is there automatically. B-roads reward you if you set out to ride well, rather than setting out to ride fast. The most common mistake I see is down to familiarity. Because we’re often on roads we know, we ride as we expect them to be rather than what we can see. We assume that as there wasn’t anything round this corner last week there won’t be anything today. Familiar roads can bring out the laziness in us, so we don’t look as hard as we should do. By contrast, if you’re riding a new B-road your eyes will be out on stalks looking for hazards and you can end up riding much better than a local would. On these roads it’s an advantage to know your agriculture – farm vehicles are one of the most dangerous things you’re likely to encounter. They’re always moving slower than you think, they always seem to position themselves round blind bends and they have a habit of turning right into fields. As a crash investigator I see quite a lot of problems with people overtaking tractors because whichever way an agricultural vehicle is turning, it always turns right first – they need the whole road. When you’re thinking about
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