Have a crack at flat track and improve your bike control
Sliding a bike used to be a skill strictly for racing demigods, but now everyone can master the art
We’re all used to motorbikes feeling like secret magic, but this is another world: I’m leaned over so far the footrest is dragging on the hard-packed clay soil. My left leg is juddering up and down over the bumps, skating with remarkable ease thanks to a steel shoe cable-tied to my boot. And the throttle is on that knife edge where one extra millimetre of cable will make the back step out. Time to open it up.
Of all the things I’ve learned to do on a bike in 40-odd years, sliding is the best. Wheelies, stoppies, knee down are all cool. But sliding is the definitive ‘look-at-me,’ feeling.
If bikes are all about excitement and control, this is triple-distilled helpings of both.
Now I know what you’re thinking.
Making a motorcycle behave like this requires vast testicles, an unhealthy fondness for hospital food, or a bottomless pit of god-given talent. But here’s the truth: sliding a bike is within reach of anyone with £159 and the desire to learn. And I mean anyone. I picked up my enthusiasm for riding sideways at the Champions Flat Track school, run on Tim Neave’s farm in Lincolnshire by multi-discipline racer and former UK flat track champ Peter Boast. Happily there’s an indoor and outdoor track, so even if it’s raining you can get a full day’s riding in. I must have been to Boasty’s ranch five times now, but I still remember the first time when, to my total amazement, I started sliding within ten seconds of letting the clutch out. Back then I was so tense I had to lie on the floor gasping like a tortoise every time I got off the bike. Now I can ride all day. Being fit and flexible helps, but being relaxed (it comes with experience) helps more.
Pro flat trackers like Boasty juggle their technique depending on line, race position, humidity, and who knows what else. Just watching their body position change to cut into a turn or make the back hook up is fascinating. Most of all they obsess about the dirt surface, whose traction varies depending on moisture, grading and how much tyre rubber everybody else has already smeared onto it.
We ordinary riders don’t worry about any of that nonsense. We have our work cut out with the basics: body position, mental calmness and being smooth on the throttle. It’s tempting to grab a handful and slide wildly, but this sport is all about feel and finesse. As Guy Martin, another flat-tracking enthusiast, said: “Treat the throttle like it’s made of glass.” At first you learn to slide the back: tip the bike over and provoke the rear to break traction. Later – and this is the really good stuff – you learn to slide on the way in too. It’s hard to explain on paper, because
you achieve the slide by balancing entry speed, lean angle, weight through your steel shoe and a sniff of rear brake. “You’re braking, but the slide comes mainly from your lean angle,” is how ace instructor Adam Marshall puts it. Like Boasty, he has a supreme gift for coaching middleaged blokes with fragile egos. Even when he shows us how to push the front, a mind-over-matter challenge even at 15mph, we all try it.
Do these skills make you a better road rider? It’s great for confidence and feel, but you’d have to be riding at elite level to use flat track skills directly. Here’s Freddie Spencer explaining his dirt-track-based GP riding technique: “For the average rider, you start leaning into a turn and it’s grip, grip, grip. You feel like you can’t go in any faster. Well you can – at speed. The way is to put it on its side so it breaks traction. At that moment it’s beyond what the tyres’ grip level is. But by loading it and the speed decreasing, by the time it breaks traction, you’re okay. You’re at the edge of adhesion and a little beyond. It’s drifting, drifting, and then it loads and grips, and rotates.” Still not convinced? Think of it this way. A track day is about finding the discipline to join the dots. Flat track, by contrast, is continuous improvisation. It’s break dancing vs ballroom, jazz v classical, analogue vs digital. Every lap is different. A bit like real life, really. But with hoots of delight. And a very sore left leg the next day.
O
O‘Treat the throttle like it’s made of glass’