Me and a bunch of guys from the club went for a ride through the back roads of Ventura County farmland Sunday. There were about ten of us, including a couple of prospects riding at the back of the pack. One of these prospects is a kid we’ve been hammering on to work on his riding skills.
He’s not a very strong rider, which is a problem. First of all, it’s a problem for the club in general: We ride hard and fast, side-by-side and butts-to-nuts on the straights and in a tight single-file in the twisties, and having a guy in the pack who can’t hold his line is a danger to everyone. Secondly, it’s a problem for him: When you’re a prospect, there’s a lot of self-imposed pressure to look good, to keep up with the pack, to not be “that guy” who rides like he’s on a tricycle — basically, to ride over your head. We always tell the prospects to ride their own ride, to ride only as fast as they feel safe doing, to not ride outside their abilities — but there’s that pressure to do exactly that.
I took the kid out once to give him some pointers and help him work on his cornering, and he said afterward that it helped. He’d never heard of counter-steering before I showed him how to do it, and by the end of our session he was scraping his floorboards through the turns. Of course, he’d then immediately swing wide and cross over the double yellow into the oncoming lane on the next turn and scare the shit out of me, but it was a start. The thing he needed most was saddle time — just going out and riding, eating up the miles and gaining experience. I noted his odometer reading once and told him that when I saw him a few weeks later I wanted him to have added 1,000 miles to it. He didn’t make it, but he came close. So the kid was learning.
Unfortunately, he forgot it all on our ride. He was doing just fine for most of it, keeping up with us pretty well — and we were cooking and booking, so he had to be riding well to keep up — but then came a sweeping left turn with a few dried-up dirt clods in the road. It was a simple, shallow corner with a nice long straightaway leading into it, no reason at all not to make it. But there were those dirt clods to make him worry about traction, and there was a nice wide shoulder covered with sand on the outside of the turn to make him think about crashing… So he looked right at it and never looked away.
Seasoned riders already know this truism for motorcycling, but newbies or non-riders might not: On a motorcycle, you look where you want to go, because the bike is going to go where you look. When you’re carving through a long sweeping left hand turn, you don’t look out in front of you, you turn your head and look at the turn’s end. You don’t look at a curb you’re afraid of hitting, because that’s exactly where you’re going to go if you do. Look where you want to go, not where you don’t.
Unfortunately, the kid looked at the sandy shoulder with a laser-like focus, so that’s exactly where he went. Once he was in the sand he then compounded his error by grabbing a bunch of brake and it was all over. The back end broke loose, the front end washed out, and the bike tossed him and started cartwheeling. Fortunately, he survived. Didn’t even really get hurt too badly — banged up a bit, but nothing broken.
The scene of the crime
Same pic twice of the scene. It’s hard to see the skid marks, so I circled them.
I felt kind of bad for the kid. First of all because he hasn’t even had the bike for a whole year yet and he totaled it. Second because he was embarrassed to have gone down on a club ride in front of all of us. But mostly because of the utter lack of sympathy he got from us. Once we knew he was okay, that’s when the lectures started: You shouldn’t have looked at the sand. You should have counter-steered. What’d you crash for, you could have made it! Who gave you permission to crash, prospect? Etcetera.
And then we went all pick-your-part on his bike, with guys calling dibs on his wheels, his exhaust, his seat, his floorboards… “Hey, your bike’s totalled anyway. Can I have your calipers?” Etc… (Okay, I’ll admit that was me with the floorboards.) The poor kid’s laying there in the dirt, bleeding, with his beloved motorcycle in pieces, and he has all these hard-asses yelling at him and cannibalizing his bike. But it was all done out of love and he knew it. And once he realized he wasn’t hurt too badly he started joking around and laughing along with us.
He was released from the hospital later that night with nothing more serious than a swollen knee and skinned elbows. He got lucky; it could have been a lot worse than it was. We all got lucky…
