Retrain your brain and save your life on a motorbike
Love riding your motorcycle? These tips from the experts might just save your life.
“Almost everything about riding a motorcycle is counterintuitive,” said Steve Brouggy. The expert rider, who set up and built California Superbike School (CSS) into a motorcycling phenomenon on both sides of the Tasman, ‘speaks fluent motorcycle’.
“Just take the basic fact that human beings are happiest either upright or lying down. There’s nothing about leaning over at 45 degrees or more that’s natural,” he said during a classroom session at the school.
This was just one of his insights on how to train the mind to do something extraordinary: pilot a powerful supersport bike around a circuit at high speed, while retaining complete control.
Take something as basic as the way a motorcycle steers. Until not long ago you couldn’t find a rider who could explain how they did it. The actual technique, known as countersteering, was widely rubbished when the founder of CSS, Keith Code, championed it in the late 1970s. It took decades to be widely accepted, and yet it’s absolutely fundamental to controlling a motorcycle. It’s counterintuitive, just like Brouggy said, and it’s instructive of why training, coaching, instruction – call it what you will – is essential to becoming a better rider. Whether that’s on-track or on-road.
Killer instinct
While many things about motorcycling clash with our intuitive responses and instincts, sometimes familiarity hides them. One stands out because it results in so many deaths and serious injuries. If you ride, you’ll relate to it.
You’re enjoying a ride in the country, either on your own or with your mates. You go into a corner, and something tells you you’re going too fast. It might be a corner you don’t know well that tightens unexpectedly. Or maybe once you’re in the turn some damp, debris or something else that looks slippery is on your intended line. In the back of your mind, you know you went in pretty fast. Now it looks like that could well be too fast. What do you do?
Peter Sowter, senior investigator in NZ Police’s Serious Crash Unit and an avid rider himself, explains what too many riders do instinctively. “They freeze up,” he says. “They might feel they’re too fast, they might feel they’re already leaning too far over. They could well be worried about losing tyre grip. So, what too many do is stand the bike up, often because they want to brake to scrub off speed.” The outcome is usually that bike and rider head either off the road on a right-hander or into the opposing lane on a left-hander.
Instinct leads to fear, and the fear leads to abandoning what the motorcycle needs in order to take the corner.
What to do?
Expert riding instructors, like those from ACC’s Ride Forever programme, know exactly how to deal with such problems. And it starts with not getting into the situation in the first place.
“I scan ahead, identifying there is a corner coming up and what the signs, markings and terrain tell me,” says Duncan Seed of South Island-based provider 2 Drive Safe. Not only does this reduce surprises, it lets the rider set up correctly for the corner.
“Wide entry, tight exit is the general rule,” advises Dan Ornsby of Ornsby Motorcycle Training in Christchurch. “This helps with maximum vision and opens up the radius of the bend.”
But what happens when things go off plan? Another Ride Forever instructor, Chris Smith of Passmasters, talks through the sort of things that will get a rider through. “How you use vision is critical,” he says. “We coach people on how to avoid target fixation and use visual flow to go where you want.”
Other instructors pitch in with advice on countersteering, trail braking, bodyweight. There’s clearly a lot for any rider to learn.
Dave Keilty, who runs the Ride Forever programme for ACC, sums up why coaching is essential for any rider: “Almost everyone who takes one of our courses, even the most seasoned and expert rider, says they learned something new. The coaching gives riders drills they can use that embed those skills into their riding. They become better, safer riders and get more out of their riding.
“When you understand how important it is to overcome the intuitive reactions that can cause us to crash, why wouldn’t you do it?” Why not indeed.
For details, visit rideforever.co.nz