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\u2019ve been hammering on to work on his riding skills.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s not a very strong rider, which is a problem. First of all, it\u2019s 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\u2019t hold his line is a danger to everyone. Secondly, it\u2019s a problem for him: When you\u2019re a prospect, there\u2019s a lot of self-imposed pressure to look good, to keep up with the pack, to not be \u201cthat guy\u201d who rides like he\u2019s on a tricycle \u2014 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 \u2014 but there\u2019s that pressure to do exactly that.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d 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\u2019d 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 \u2014 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\u2019t make it, but he came close. So the kid was learning.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, he forgot it all on our ride. He was doing just fine for most of it, keeping up with us pretty well \u2014 and we were cooking and booking, so he had to be riding well to keep up \u2014 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\u2026 So he looked right at it and never looked away.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re carving through a long sweeping left hand turn, you don\u2019t look out in front of you, you turn your head and look at the turn\u2019s end. You don\u2019t look at a curb you\u2019re afraid of hitting, because that\u2019s exactly where you\u2019re going to go if you do. Look where you want to go, not where you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the kid looked at the sandy shoulder with a laser-like focus, so that\u2019s 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\u2019t even really get hurt too badly \u2014 banged up a bit, but nothing broken.<\/p>\n