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75. Apex or Exit – what’s important when cornering?

I have little to add to add to this except to say that twenty years on from penning this article, riders are still obsessing over finding the apex on the road, when that’s really not what matters. Waiting until we can clearly see where the road leads beyond the bend is what allows us to select the line that copes with mid-corner threats and avoid the classic ‘turn-in too early, run wide later’ cornering error.

Apex or Exit – what’s important when cornering?

Back in the summer of 2006, I was seduced by a magazine’s big cover splash promising “Twenty pages on cornering faster”. Despite reading it cover-to-cover, I could only find a couple of pages on cornering technique. The remaining eighteen pages were thinly-veiled adverts for expensive aftermarket accessories or services to get the bike tweaked. Anyway, cynicism aside, the two pages on riding were the valuable content because the best bolt-on accessory on any bike is the rider, and the most cost-effective tweaks we can do are to our own skills. A good rider can still corner well on a wallowing hippo of a machine. But all the bolt-on bling in the world won’t turn an incompetent owner into Valentino Rossi or Marc Marquez. It’s depth of wisdom, not depth of wallet, that helps us to good cornering out on the road.

So what did the article say? Well the writer spent a lot of time talking about “finding the apex”. You may be wondering what the apex of a corner actually is, because it’s a word bandied around with some freedom when talking about corners. Think of a triangle – stand it upright – the pointy bit at the top is the apex. Now, connect the three points with a smooth curved line and the point at the top is still the apex. If we now give that curved line some width, so it becomes a road, the apex is where the point of that triangle touches the inside of the corner halfway round.

On a race track, where we can use all of the surface, if we start on the OUTSIDE of the corner and if we also exit on the OUTSIDE of the corner, by just touching the INSIDE of the track halfway through the turn – the apex of the triangle – we take the maximum radius (and thus the fastest) ‘racing line’ through the corner. So if the corner is a nice symmetrical one, the apex is ‘mid-corner’, halfway round the bend.

What about ‘early’ or ‘late’ apexes, two more terms you’re likely to hear in any discussion about riding a track? An early apex comes before we are half-way though the corner, and generally indicates an increasing radius turn – the corner opens out. A late apex comes after we are half-way through the corner and may indicate a decreasing radius turn – a corner that gets progressively tighter. On the track, we learn our lines by going round and round until it all flows nicely. Even on a blind corner on the track, we learn to use marker points (which is why they put cones out on track training sessions) to guide us round.

But the road is not a track, and this ‘racing line’ which may be the fastest way around the track, is not a great idea on the road where we have to deal with a number of other problems. For starters, we don’t get the chance to learn a bend by going round it over and over, and we don’t get markers (at least, not handy cones). We have to ride it as we see it, which isn’t easy when most of the corners on UK roads are blind – that is, we can’t see all the way through them from beginning to end. Aiming for an apex where we cannot see out the other side of the corner isn’t a great idea – we could end up turning-in too early, which inevitably leads to running wide later in the corner.

But even when we can see right through the corner, cutting into the apex on a right-hander brings us into close proximity to oncoming vehicles. And on a left-hander, cutting into the apex puts us close to where there might be hidden turnings and driveways on our nearside.

As it happens, the way to learn a track (if the handy cones are absent) is to work backwards. We start by finding the direction we want to be headed on the way out of a bend – the ‘exit’. Keith Code’s definition of the exit is a good one to work with – it’s where we can put the power on as hard as we like. Once we know where we want to be pointed at the exit, then we can find the line backwards to the ‘apex’, and from there back to the ‘turn-in’ point where we would cut across the track to clip the apex, and ultimately back from the turn-in point back to the ‘entry’ which is where the corner forces us to steer or run off the track.

On the road, as I explain in the articles on ‘Point and Squirt’, the solution is to delay turning-in to the corner to the point where we can clearly see through the exit and where the road goes BEYOND the end of the corner. So if – as is likely – our view around the corner is obscured, we simply stay on a wide line around the outside of the curve until we CAN see the exit – where we’re pointed where we want to go next and can accelerate in a straight line, remember. Only when we reach this point do we decide if we should turn-in tighter, aiming to cut across the lane and exit the corner in as straight a line as possible, and this is the key to corners on the road – staying wide in the turn till we can actually see the exit.

Get this right and we avoid almost all ‘running wide in the corner’ errors whilst the apex looks after itself – it’s not something we need to worry about. In fact, far from being an aid to cornering on the road, the apex is a red herring and even a distraction from focusing on the exit and the mid-corner hazards I mentioned a moment ago. For good cornering on the road, simply ignore any debate about the apex.

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74. Overtaking on left-handers – experts only or best avoided?

Some things don’t seem to change. And how motorcyclists kill themselves is one of those things. I said in the article that “half of out-of-town fatalities result from overtakes that go wrong” is valid, and the data that the UK’s DfT continues to collect reinforces this point. Overtaking generally is rarely ‘necessary’, and overtaking around a left-hand bend is even less so. Remember, in most cases a better, safer opportunity will appear within moments.

Overtaking on left-handers – experts only or best avoided?

Back in 2005 and 2006, one of the best series of articles on advanced riding techniques was penned by Andy Morrison from Rapid Training, and published in Bike magazine. But when he talked about the technique of overtaking in left-handers in February 2006, I think he went the proverbial ‘bridge too far’. He stated plainly enough that it’s dangerous but then goes on to assert that it’s a manoeuvre within the grasp of the expert rider. The article gave the impression that all that’s needed is a high level of technical skill and judgement yet whatever dissenting voices might say, there is something every one of us should understand: contrary to claims elsewhere, overtaking is NEVER, EVER ‘safe’. Even if we can be reasonably sure WE won’t make a mistake, when overtaking there are always other humans involved and one thing we can be sure of is that humans can and DO make errors. An overtake ALWAYS exposes us to the risk of someone else’s mistake.

I read the article and the first thing that struck me was that it focused on technical execution. Yet to my mind, understanding that the skills to carry out a tricky overtake are complex is far less important than developing our understanding of risk and our ability to see that technically complicated manoeuvres are more likely to go wrong. It’s our ability to make a realistic risk assessment that allows us to place a manoeuvre on the risk / benefit scale. To my mind, for a relatively limited benefit, this one is far over towords the risky end. We really need to understand the difference between ‘need’ and ‘nice’.

Overtaking generally sits further towards the ‘nice to do’ end of the spectrum than the ‘need to do’ end – it’s very rarely an absolute ‘must-do’. You may have heard people say that “if I didn’t overtake, I might as well not be on a bike”, or that “I overtake because I want to demonstrate I can make progress”.

Personally, I think they are deeply flawed reasons. My own thinking – based on that risk / benefit calculation – is that we need to balance the risks that might arise through making the overtake, with the risks of staying put. If there’s no particular problem with following – for example, when moving in a steady stream of traffic – the less-risky option is nearly always choosing NOT to pass.

I’d suggest that overtaking only begins to move towards the ‘need to do’ end of the scale if sitting behind a vehicle puts us at greater risk than making the overtake. Maybe we’re following a tractor on a rural road, when a queue of traffic begins to form behind us. If a relatively straightforward opportunity to pass arises and we don’t take it, we are now part of the problem. The chances are that someone will try to overtake both the tractor and our bike. That makes the overtake more difficult for the driver, and potentially increases our own risk. So if we can see a way to set up an overtake in such a way to minimise the risk, does that tip the balance? Perhaps. The crux of the matter is “if we can see a way to set up an overtake in such a way to minimise the risk”. Too many overtakes are assessed from the “what do I gain” perspective first, with risk trailing a very poor second.

And so we come to overtaking out of left-hand bend. Compared with setting up a pass out of a right-hand corner, overtaking out of a left hand bend generates a lot of “What ifs…?” that aren’t easy to answer.

We start by setting up the overtake by sitting to the nearside, looking up the inside of the vehicle ahead. The article pointed out problems of dead ground (that is, the areas that are blind to our search) but however thorough our search, we need to be absolutely clear that if we cannot see over the vehicle, there’s a blind spot ahead of it on the offside. As we move out to the right to commit to the pass, that blindspot doesn’t go away – it simply moves. There is ALWAYS this blind spot.

Some years ago, I watched a rider set up exactly this pass around a sweeping left-hand bend from the car. His line-of-sight up the nearside was good, but he couldn’t see what I could, thanks to my driving position offset to the right. It was the local postie climbing into his bright red post office van that was pulled up in a layby on the other side of the road. As the rider moved across behind the truck, the post office van started to move forward. The rider came out from behind the truck just as the PO van moved into the road.

And of course, if a vehicle could pull out, the one we’re overtaking could turn in, and we may not be aware of the turning for the same reason. This is another point I always make – overtaking ALWAYS relies on the driver we’re passing to do what we predict. Setting up an overtake where we’re visible in the driver’s interior or right-hand door mirror means that there’s at least a chance the driver will know we’re there. But sat to the nearside of the vehicle we’re about to pass, not only are we far more difficult to see, few drivers would expect to find us overtaking around the outside a moment later. We really do need to hang back long enough to clear the view right along our path and eliminate any openings.

And there’s a further problem. It’s the pesky extra warning about making sure the road not just clear but that we can “expect it to remain clear”. The neatly-drawn diagrams in the magazine showed how the rider would need to ‘visually sweep’ the road ahead of the lorry before attempting the overtake. Although the text talked about “far enough ahead” the diagrams showed a distance of just a couple of lorry-lengths. I know the diagrams were drawn distorted to make the point (rather like the ones showing how a wider position gives a better view in ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’), and Andy did mention the danger of meeting an oncoming car head-on, but what wasn’t emphasised was just HOW far ahead we need to see.

Let’s do a few quick sums. Let’s assume the truck is travelling at 45 mph. That’s 20 metres per second. Let’s assume we pass the truck at 60 mph – we’re thus travelling 15 mph faster than the truck (6.7 m/s). Assuming a typical HGV (16.5 metres long), it’ll take us approximately 2.5 seconds to travel from front to rear. In that time – whilst we are riding at 60 mph or 27 m/s remember – we’ve travelled no less than 67.5 metres.

But of course, we have to move out and move back again. The total distance travelled during the entire manoeuvre is not going to be less than three times 67.5 metres, so to accelerate, pass and tuck back again, we’re looking at a minimum total distance of around 200 metres.

Except we need treble this distance.

Why? What about the effect on other road users when we pop out from behind a truck and the oncoming driver suddenly sees us? Assuming the car is coming the other way at the same speed we’re making the pass and we want to move out, make the pass, then manoeuvre back with a minimum MARGIN FOR ERROR between us, we actually need to COMPLETE the overtake in around one-third of the total “distance we can see to be clear”. So the minimum distance we actually need FROM THE MOMENT WE COMMIT is AT LEAST 600 metres – that’s over one-third of a mile. And we’re now mentally juggling with speeds and distances at which the human brain struggles to make accurate computations.

Of course, to make up for the lack of forward view, the temptation is to nail it. But the faster we attempt to make the pass, the more difficult it is to bail out when it starts going wrong.

My take on this is not to hurry into such an overtake. We definitely shouldn’t underestimate the the difficulties of seeing far enough ahead and the blind areas. Technical ability is NOT a substitute for sound judgement. In practice, I’d suggest only the shallowest left hand bends with the very best views allow a reasonably risk-free overtake past the slowest-moving vehicles, which brings us full-circle to whether an overtake is ‘need’ or ‘nice’.

What was left pretty much unsaid was that a better opportunity will probably come along in a minute. I intensely dislike this ‘take every available opportunity’ approach to riding. It may be appropriate to police riding, but I doubt the validity for civvie riding, even at ‘advanced’ level.

Most of all, I was concerned at its publication in a magazine, where Andy had no control over the riders reading the article. It’s an issue I’m very aware of when writing my own riding tips of my own, and even when delivering my own Survival Skills advanced motorcycle training courses. It’s why each tip tends to have exhaustive discussions of the risks as well as an explanation of benefits.

Statistics show that around half of out-of-town fatalities result from overtakes that go wrong, so to my mind we should be eliminating the technically-tricky ones with the highest potential for going wrong. I’m certainly not going to say I’ve never overtaken in a left-hander but I can definitely say there have been a few times I wished I hadn’t bothered.

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73. Improving our riding – and coping with a block on self-development

The “Ladder of Learning” framework is a classic from teaching, but aligns well with rider development. But modern riders have new tools such as on-bike cameras and performance-tracking apps to allow objective looks at how they cope with the roads and develop skill at braking and leaning. Focused sessions targeting one skill at a time—the Salami Principle—remain highly effective as does deliberately broadening experience. A fresh challenge can reignite development, but remember that skill is never ‘complete’; each plateau is just the level ground before the next climb.

Improving our riding – and coping with a block on self-development

Riders can get stuck in their development. Some years back I took on a trainee who felt that his riding development had reached a plateau. He had several years of riding behind him after passing the bike test, and had starting on a course of advanced training. But after some initial improvement, the feedback being given to him after his observed rides wasn’t showing any further development. He knew there was more to learn – after all, that was what his observer was telling him – but his forward progress had stalled and he didn’t know why, nor how to resume forward development. His observer had been telling him he needed to develop some ‘gloss’ on his riding, but he felt he’d peaked. His enquiry email asked: “Is this kind of normal – learning a bit, levelling off for a while, learning a bit more, levelling off even more etc or am I right in thinking I’ll just never be better than I am now?” So here’s another question. Can we identify the barriers that stop our development in its tracks?

The first thing I’ll say is that ‘advanced’ training does not replace what we learned when we started out as a motorcyclist. The fact is that basic training teaches us 90% of the skills we’ll use 90% of the time. So post-test training supplements, but does not supplant, what would better be termed ‘core skills’. And if that’s the case, there should be a couple of obvious reasons for a levelling-off effect:

  • each new level of learning produces less-dramatic results because we’re increasingly ‘improving’ rather than ‘adding’ skills and knowledge- the improvements are ever more subtle

  • each new level of learning is usually harder work – we’ll only see results if we’re prepared to put in the effort and that may push us outside our comfort zone

Putting in the effort emphasises the need for practice. ‘PRACTICE makes PERMANENT’ (and not perfect). In other words, if we want ANY learning to stick, we need to keep going out and using what we learned. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a new language or riding a motorcycle round bends. It’s often LACK of practice that stalls development. It’s a point I make several times during one of my advanced motorcycle training courses, but I cannot make riders go out and practice.

Practice must also has to be targeted. Simply going out riding isn’t the answer, because it’s “the same day’s experience, experienced one thousand times”. We have to spend time working on what we learned.

So when progress has stalled, it may well be a failure to spend time working with the new skills.

Here’s something else to consider. Learning occurs in a series of sequential steps starting from the point where initially, we don’t even know what we don’t know.

UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE: This is ’16er with a CBT on a scoot’ syndrome – not enough experience and not enough knowledge to know what we need to know.

CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE: after a while, we begin to recognise we have issues and that we don’t know how to deal with it. This is roughly the level the DVSA hazard perception test aims at – the ability to click a button when a car might cause a SMIDSY collision, but no understanding of how or why it happens is needed, nor any strategy to deal with the problem.

CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE: maybe more experience or after training for a DVSA test pass, we’ve learning, but it’s still a ‘work-in-progress’ – we have to constantly remind ourselves to what to do. It’s good developmental stage, but it’s essentially still a ‘reactive’ one where we respond AFTER a hazard develops and prone to lapses where we forget.

UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE: ride long enough or take the short-cut of some post-test training and with a bit of luck our ability to read the road, analyse what we see, and respond to hazards has all become ‘proactive’ – we no longer have to think our way through problems, it’s become a smooth, well-practiced drill.

These four sequential steps are sometimes known as the ‘Ladder of Learning’.

The first two stages impose serious limitations on safety which is why basic training aims to push us straight into the third ‘conscious competence’ phase, and post-test training aims to take us beyond. The trouble is that learning is hard work. As we try out the new ideas or techniques, we’re consciously processing what we’re doing and using our real-time thinking brain in this way is exhausting. We simply can’t keep it up for long – it’s a real problem with day-long CBT training – and that can lead to two mistakes:

  1. trying too hard – just as with my own advanced coaching sessions, we’ll achieve far more from short practice sessions than by going out for long rides

  2. trying to do everything at once – tackle one thing at a time, it’s the way I teach riders and it’s the way I advise them to practice. I call it the Salami Principle. Why? Slices of salami eaten over time are delicious and digestible. But if we try to eat the whole thing at once, we’ll be sick. The same applies to skills – sliced up, we can practice and achieve the result we were looking for, attempt everything at once and we’ll be overwhelmed with the task.

And simply mastering any technique isn’t enough either. Longer term, we have to work to embed what we learned into our regular riding. Just ‘knowing’ what we should be doing isn’t enough. The moment I hear – as someone wrote on a forum recently – “I have to concentrate too hard when I’m riding advanced”, it means they haven’t worked at making the techniques so automatic that they have become an unconscious part of everyday riding technique. If we don’t USE it, we LOSE it.

What’s far less obvious is that once we get to the top of one particular ladder, we’ll be at the bottom of the next – there’s always something we don’t know. But of course we don’t know that. Another way our development can stall is if we only ever do the same riding with the same group of people or ride the same kinds of roads. With no new benchmarks, we’ll never discover if we need new skills – we’ll assume we’re good enough. If we want to continue to develop, we need to understand that the learning process doesn’t end.

So if we’re feeling comfortable with our riding, it could be time to push ourselves out of our comfort zone again, to head back to the level of conscious incompetence where we’re ready to learn new ideas and skills. And just possibly, a change of perspective is needed. Perhaps a Survival Skills advanced rider training course may be just the change you need to kick-start development again.

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72. Anger Management – dealing with road rage and red mist

This article explains the important distinction between red mist (self-induced risk-taking) and road rage (reaction to others) and the advice to recognise anger, avoid the victim mindset, and give control back to the reasoning part of the brain is entirely consistent with safety psychology. The core principle remains the same: control your response rather than the road, by anticipating situations that might provoke anger and giving our reasoning brain the opportunity to override instinctive reactions and avoid escalation.

Anger Management – dealing with road rage and red mist

From time to time I get asked if I have any solutions to what the issues known as ‘red mist’ and ‘road rage’. Of all the questions I’ve tried to answer, this one is probably the most difficult. Although my background is in science, I’m not a psychologist. Mostly what I’ve written here is what I know works for me on the occasions I feel myself getting a bit carried away with riding or acting aggressively if someone makes me angry. What I do know is the one thing we simply cannot do is let it take control. In particular, anger needs to be recognised for what it is – we are never far away from behaving like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. We never grow up, we just learn how to behave in public, yet there’s a limit to self-control. If we bottle anger up, it will simply build up until we ‘kick the dog’. Some unsuspecting and innocent party bears the brunt of OUR resentment.

First of all, we need to try to identify the problem. Whilst because ‘red mist’ and ‘road rage’ are both psychological states we might develop whilst riding, they are not the same.

Red mist is a state where we are no longer assessing risk realistically. Perhaps we begin to ride at higher speeds, pull off more overtakes, or corner with bigger lean angles than we would normally. Instead of this increasing our stress levels, as it would normally, we can actually get a ‘buzz’ from this kind of riding when everything seems to be ‘in tune’ and effortless. Maybe we begin to enjoy the thrill, maybe we start to justify our behaviour because we’re out to impress others – perhaps riding in a group, or even on an assessed ride. It’s a state that racers, and even professional drivers such as police or ambulance drivers can get fall into in pursuit of the ‘noble cause’ of responding to an emergency call. It’s something the professionals are warned about, but nobody tells the average rider how to look for the warning signs, we just get castigated when we fall into the trap.

Road Rage is a somewhat different psychological trap, and has been around since Daimler first stuck four wheels round an engine. If you want a classic literary example of a driver with road rage, think of Mr. Toad in “The Wind in the Willows”. Essentially, it’s aggressive behaviour around other road users, particularly when someone does something that irritates us, perhaps by impeding our progress. According to research on what annoys drivers, the main triggers for driver anger are:

  • tailgating

  • being cut up

  • inappropriate overtaking

  • undertaking on motorways

You’ll notice the word inappropriate. It’s nearly always a subjective view, where someone does something someone else doesn’t think they should have. Not too long ago, I was rounding a fairly gentle left-hander positioned around half-a-metre from the centre line when I spotted an oncoming car. I moved inward to the centre of the lane – a completely unhurried manoeuvre that in no way inconvenienced the driver coming the other way. Nevertheless, he found it necessary to swerve aggressively towards me, sound the horn and make rude gestures.

Road rage can be relatively low-level ‘shouty’ behaviour such as unnecessary flashes of headlights or use of the horn, or hand signals that aren’t to be found in the Highway Code so if we find ourselves doing those, it’s important to recognise what’s going on.

The problem is escalation. Hopefully we can shrug it off when others display that kind of behaviour towards us, but if we respond in kind, then the situation can rapidly move into aggressive tailgating, swerving towards other vehicles, or brake-testing the vehicle behind. Bikers have been known to kick cars or knock off mirrors, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the one who will come off worst in any argument of four wheels -vs- two is the rider.

Of course, our own view of what we just did is usually completely different. My position on the bend was – compared with a lot of advanced riders – rather restrained. I always aware that motorcyclists often appear impatient to other road users because of our ability to accelerate and overtake, or by taking up positions which a car driver finds inexplicable. Have a read of this:

“Aggressive drivers are careless drivers who want to get ahead of everyone on the road… [who] put their own convenience before anyone else’s safety. Other drivers may develop road rage, potentially violent anger, in response and retaliation to the violations they feel other drivers commit.”

Anybody here ride a bike because they think it allows them to make ‘better progress’ than “everyone else on the road”? Hmmm. We must never forget that when we share the roads, we are judged by everyone else’s standards of behaviour. What seems perfectly good and sensible riding to us may not appear that way to the driver we just passed or coming the other way. Simply because think we are a ‘better’ rider than they are a driver is not an adequate reason for ignoring what ‘the other fellow’ thinks about our riding.

So who’s right? The biker? Or the driver? If there IS an answer, it’s probably “neither of us”, but what I would say is that a really advanced piece of riding is not one that necessarily gains us ‘advantage’ but one that’s almost imperceptible to other drivers.

What really doesn’t help are smug statements like this next one:

“The truth is that no matter where you go, no matter how safe, careful, and considerate a driver you are, there is going to be someone on the road who is not. They’re going to challenge all the patience you have built up, possibly putting your life at risk… a road rager feels a certain degree of superiority over all other drivers on the road. They feel it is their duty to punish bad drivers and teach them “lessons”… their behaviour is equally selfish, immature, and dangerous.”

It’s positively complacent: “it’s not me that’s the problem, it’s everyone else”. This positively hinder our understanding. The fact is that road rage is not something ‘other people’ suffer from – anyone with a human brain is a potential road rager.

So, how do we keep ourselves under control when provoked? How do we detune ourselves when the buzz starts to get the better of us?

There are plenty of helpful-seeming articles online which usually start by saying something like:

“The best way to keep yourself from flying into an uncontrolled rage on the road is to remain calm and keep perspective. When someone does something you feel is careless or stupid on the road, you have to just let it go.”

Errrrr… but HOW??

I did some reading around the topic and it seems that at the most fundamental level, the issue is at least partly down to how the human brain has developed. The most primitive part of the brain, sometimes called the ‘reptilian brain’ because we share it with crocodiles, is designed for survival rather than reasoned thinking. It’s around 300 million years old and its basic programming is ‘react or die’. The first mammals with more advanced brains only appeared around 100 million years later, and the human brain which gives us our flexible reasoning capabilities is only around 200,000 years old. But even in our human brain, that primitive reptilian brain always on the alert and it cannot distinguish between a real threat demanding instant action and a scary surprise that turns out to be nothing significant when we have had a moment to think about it. Whenever we’re shocked, there’s a conflict as the ancient, hard-wired fight and flight response of our reptilian ancestors is pitted against the flexible reasoning responses of our ‘new’ human brain.

So when we react instinctively and without thinking – and sometimes violently – we’ve let the reptilian brain take control.

Now, if you’ve read any of my other writing on the so-called ‘survival reactions’ – the totally inappropriate reactions that kick in when we suffer SURPRISE! on the road, you may begin to see something of a connection.

Not only do we need to try to defuse our own responses when we feel provoked, but we need to understand how not to provoke road rage in others.

I’ve long stopped looking at the road as a place where everyone should “do the right thing” because I’ve learned the hard way that when a dangerous situation arises because someone does something wrong, that’s guaranteed to make me angry. And no-one using the roads is perfect. Not you and not me, and not even the most highly trained riders. We all make mistakes, and many of the dangerous situations really are the result of a simple error of judgement. There but for the grace of god, etc..

So I’ve learned to try to predict the situations where drivers could put me at risk – the classic SMIDSY near-miss is a good example – and to see it coming before it happens. If we’re expecting something to happen, our reasoning brain deals with the fall-out and won’t give the reptilian brain chance to take over – we’ll simply say to ourselves: “I saw that coming”.

And what if we’re the unlucky rider greeted with an inexplicable display of aggression by another road user, like that driver who didn’t like my cornering line? Maybe we were behaving in a predictable manner. Maybe we’ve just surprised them. Or perhaps we’re on the receiving end of some ‘second-hand anger’ after the previous rider triggered the response we just saw. It doesn’t make the driver’s aggression right, but it does make it a little more understandable. Try not to get riled.

Most importantly we need to get out of the ‘victim mindset’ where we believe that all other drivers on the road are out to get us. They aren’t. Drivers are mostly relatively careful around motorcyclists – it’s just that our reptilian brain is far better at noticing the rare occasions when another road user puts us at risk than our reasoning brain is at spotting the far more common moments that drivers keep well clear of us.

If we do start to slip into red mist or aggression, we need to recognise it for what it is. We MUST acknowledge it. Only then will the reasoning area of the brain re-establish control, and decide what, if anything, we are going to do about it. But don’t ignore red mist or anger. Once we realise we’re not acting like a grown-up, breath deeply, count to ten, think it over and move forward.

And if I had to sum up my advice in one phrase? It would be:

“Start looking for the positive on the roads, tune out the negative.”

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71. Off-siding – a technique that crosses the line?

The crucial decision here is to balance risk versus benefit, the potential gain in situational awareness versus the real possibility of putting ourselves in a dangerous position. The perception of our manoeuvre from the other driver’s perspective is all-too-often completely overlooked. However, that doesn’t mean we should never consider taking up a position on the other side of the centre line and hazards such as narrow single-lane bridges can create real vision problems if we don’t exploit the full width of the road.

Off-siding – a technique that crosses the line?

I originally wrote this tip as an expanded response incorporating questions being asked by a nearly-new rider. With a year’s experience since passing the bike test, he was shown the technique of ‘offsiding’ on a riding assessment. If you’re not familiar with the term, offsiding is positioning to the RIGHT of the centre line (here in the UK) to improve the view ahead, rather keeping within our own lane. I remember being told many years ago that “you’ve paid to use all the road – so do so”. I’m not implying he was being encouraged to use this position but many riders do, myself included on rare occasions – I’ll explain the limited circumstances in a moment. In the time I’ve been involved in rider training offsiding seems to have gone from a technique that was generally accepted “but do it carefully” to one that’s generally frowned upon as “controversial and we really shouldn’t”. So what’s the right answer? Is there ever a time when it’s a good idea to cross the centre line to gain a view?

Before we go any further, we need to sort out if it’s legal. So long as the centre line is broken – that is, we’re looking at crossing either the short lane divider markings or the longer hazard line, it’s not illegal – we can cross a broken centre line. But we could end up on the wrong side of the law if we’re seen to be riding carelessly or even dangerously – in the case of a longer hazard line, the Highway Code says we can cross the line “if safe and necessary to do so”. Much will depend on who is interpreting ‘safe and necessary’. My view may not be the same as that of a policeman or magistrate.

If we can say “yes, it’s legal”, my approach on Survival Skills advanced motorcycle rider training courses is always to get trainees to ask two questions in order to perform a basic cost / benefit analysis:

  1. what are the benefits

  2. what are the risks?

The usual benefit that is proposed is extra vision – the further right we move:

  • the further we can see ahead around a blind bend to the left

  • the more we can open up a view into a blind area on the left

  • if we can see further, we may also be seen from further away

Let’s start with the the blind bend, and the idea that we can open up the view from riding right of the centre line. What about the risks? The most obvious one is in riding along the ‘wrong’ side of the carriageway, sooner or later we WILL meet someone coming the other way. As we’re on the same side of the road, we’re on a collision course.

It should be fairly obvious we need to be able to return to our side of the road WELL BEFORE the other vehicle gets anywhere near us. But if we have this kind of clear space, isn’t it likely we’re already seeing a long way ahead? What exactly are we adding? As I’ve said elsewhere, the practical reason for extending “the distance we can see to be clear and expect to remain clear” is nearly always to carry more speed. Whilst speed might be essential as part of a police rider’s pursuit activities, it’s NOT part of the remit for an ordinary civvie rider.

If there’s a bit of a question about the advantage, what about the disadvantages? A bit more thinking should reveal some real problems:

  • the shock experienced by the oncoming driver who finds a motorcycle on the wrong side of the road in front of him

  • the need not just to get back left of the centre line, but to shed any extra speed too

Let’s reverse the position. If we were rounding a right-hand bend and suddenly found a car approaching on the wrong side of the centre line, how would WE respond? Would we be thinking calmly: “ah, advanced driver doing a bit of off-siding”? Would we be thinking at all? What’s the chance we’d respond with a WTF and a panic grab of the brakes? I rather think it would be the latter. And what if we panic-swerved too, to our right into the other lane and away from the car? What happens next? This confusion alone is a very good reason to avoid offsiding into a blind corner – we should always avoid putting ourselves into situations where our safety depends on other road users behaving reliably. Even if we don’t scare the bejasus out of the driver, we still have to return to our side of the centre line. A typical response is along the lines of: “I only off-side at a speed that allows me to return to my side of the road in time”. But what if the other driver is going a bit quicker than usual? What if the oncoming driver has cut the corner to straighten it out? Check out the worn paint on the middle of a lot of fast kinks – the reason it’s worn is vehicles straight-lining that bend.

And if we were carrying more speed towards the corner to exploit the better view, we now have to get rid of it. Have we got enough space to do so? And if we’ve had to cut back to the left closer to the bend, does that means we’ve just turned into the corner too early? And is there a risk we’ll now run wide later in the bend? ‘Turn-in too early, run wide later’ is a classic bike cornering crash accident so why take a line that could actually precipitate this error? About the daftest ‘benefit’ to offsiding I’ve heard is that “you get a longer braking distance because you’re not directly behind the vehicle in front”. Eh? Have a think about that for a moment. What if something comes the other way? Could we now safely return to our side of the road and slow down before running into that vehicle going the same way? I’m baffled by the thinking here, and if I feel my braking distance is being compromised by the vehicle ahead, I’ll open up space ahead, and probably slow down too.

If the argument FOR offsiding towards a blind left-hand bend is that we have plenty of space to deal with the above problems, then we can make an argument AGAINST offsiding that our view around the left-hander probably isn’t that bad in the first place. And the sharper the left-hander, the less the benefit but the greater the risks.

However, there is a time I will CONSIDER offsiding approaching a left-hand bend, and that is where an off-side position will MAINTAIN a view that I already have – that is, I can already see clearly and by crossing the centre line I avoid losing the view ahead. It’s sometimes possible that as we exit one corner – typically but not always a right-hander, we can see round the following left-hander, usually because it’s a gentle kink.

For example, on one of my training routes we encounter a narrow single lane bridge. As we exit the previous right-hand bend, we actually have a long view ahead, across the bridge and for around 400 metres further down the road. So if we turn IMMEDIATELY onto the ‘wrong’ side of the road we MAINTAIN the view that we already had, as we ride up to and over the bridge, and we can see if there are oncoming vehicles we might have to give way to.

But if we don’t offside, and do the conventional thing and remain in the left-hand lane, the view ahead gets cut off by the hedge. Now the bridge is blind, and we have to ‘pop out’ from behind it to GAIN the view over the bridge at the last second. In this case, the long forward view beyond the bridge more than compensates for any potential hazards from oncoming vehicles – we have ample time to ‘see and be seen’ and we can move back if necessary – there’s also a chance the driver coming the other way will give way to us.

So if by moving to the right of it we can MAINTAIN the view we already have, then there is an argument for offsiding. But early planning is essential. What I nearly always see in this kind of situation is that riders take too long to work out the lines-of-sight, then move too late, often only when they realise they have lost the view. Now we are attempting to REGAIN it. It’s risky because even if it’s only takes a couple of seconds, that’s a couple of seconds we’ve been riding blind. Sometimes, riders will anticipate a right of the centre line position could open up a view and move to GAIN it, but move far too late. Now the risk is we might gain a close-up view of the front of a Scania – something we didn’t really want to see.

There’s one last case. I mentioned that crossing the centre line can open up a view into a blind area on the left, and that may help someone see us coming:

a driver about to pull out of the blind area to see us coming. The roads are littered with blind driveways, entrances and side turnings, and sometimes I will spot a particularly risky one. I could slow right down just in case a vehicle started to emerge, but I could also slow down AND move to the right if the view ahead and behind shows the road is free of traffic

approaching a left-hand bend with a car parked on my side of the road on the corner. It’s a situation not dissimilar to the bridge I mentioned earlier – by moving right early, I MAINTAIN the best possible view around the parked car, and give the oncoming driver the best chance of spotting me coming. What I don’t want to do is pop out jack-in-the-box style, and GAIN a view only to meet someone head-on

So, to sum up…

…there are some occasions when I will cross the centre line. But it’s always tempered by the realisation that whilst I am in control of my own speed and position, I cannot control how the driver coming the other way reacts. I also have to distinguish between the advantages of ‘maintaining’ a view and the risks of attempting to ‘gain’ a view.

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70. Overtaking, lifesavers and following distances

Crash stats don’t lie. Overtaking continues to be one of the most hazardous manoeuvres a rider can perform. The core message that mirror checks alone are insufficient and that well-timed blind spot checks can provide critical and complementary information remains an important one. The coming trend towards technology such as blind spot warning systems may assist us, but I very much doubt they can fully replace these fundamental techniques. Since overtaking is inherently high-risk, anything that reduces the threat should be considered.

Overtaking, lifesavers and following distances

My position on ANY technique that we use whilst on the bike is that it should IMPROVE safety by reducing risk. Or to put it another way, if a technique increases our exposure to risk it’s worth asking if we should be using it. Overtaking is inherently high risk. However good we are, we can only reduce those risks, we cannot make overtaking ‘safe’. Think about it. It’s about the only accident we’d ever accelerate into. But we’re also involving other human beings, and humans don’t always behave predictably. Ovetakes often go wrong when the driver we’re planning on passing does something we didn’t expect. And now we’re carrying a lot of speed. And of course, no matter how fast we think we are, there’s always someone quicker. And they might just possibly be planning on ovetaking too. We need up to date situational awareness before we commit ourselves to an overtake.

A regular ‘advanced riding’ debate is: “should the rider perform a ‘lifesaver’ before pulling out to pass another vehicle?”

As with any question like that, the answer revolves around what we’re attempting to achieve. As explained in another article, the ‘lifesaver’ is a final over-the-shoulder blind spot check that we make before moving sideways into a position where there might possibly be another vehicle.

The debate hinges on whether or not we can rely fully on what is sometimes called ‘mirror history’. The theory is that if we check our mirrors often enough, we’ll have spotted another vehicle catching us, and we’ll know that there is nothing in our blindspot.

Here’s the issue as I see it. Here’s the upside. If we DO check, and there’s something there, we can abort our manoeuvre. And if there’s nothing there, we’ve taken our eyes off the road ahead for a second or so to take the look. Does that really matter? Not unless we’re very close to the vehicle ahead, or we’re trying to squeeze the pass into the tightest possible opportunity.

But what if we’re relying on the mirrors? However often we look in the mirror it can only tell us what’s behind us, not what’s alongside in the blind spot.If we spotted something in the mirrors, then we abort the manoeuvre. But if we didn’t spot the vehicle in one or more of our mirror checks, WE DON’T KNOW IT’S THERE. Now the danger is that we commit ourselves into the overtake and put ourselves at risk.

The real problem is that we have limited attention, and the busier the road gets, the less likely we are to make our mirror checks frequent enough to fill in information about what’s catching us from behind. As one contributor put it:

“I find there are some situations where I think a shoulder check is essential and some where they aren’t needed. It all depends on the complexity of predicting the future. If you have gathered a stable but dynamic, developing ‘picture’ of the space around you from the information gathered in the period before the manouevre – other traffic, behaviour, speeds – and can confidently predict that nothing will adversely affect the manoeuvre… then you make the move without a shoulder check. If the situation is one of high complexity then you make the check.”

In essence, I agree. But given the human propensity for making mistakes, I’d have to be very, VERY certain there was nothing around me NOT to do one. Positions of vehicles change very fast and we need up-to-the-minute situational awareness, and it’s debateable whether mirrors alone can ever provide this.

Look at it this way. We wouldn’t rely on three or four glimpes of the road through a tall hedge before deciding it was safe to drive straight out of a minor road. We’d take a final look before committing ourselves. Mirror checks give us the rearward equivalent of these glimpses. Only a shoulder check can show us directly what is actually IN the blind spot.

On a single carriageway, at least we know where the danger’s coming from – behind us. But on multilane roads, it could be from either side. In the middle lane, a vehicle will come up fast on the nearside, then swoop across behind us, switching to the outside lane. There’s a significant risk that any checks in the right mirror will not have spotted this vehicle. Even if we’ve made mirror checks to the nearside, it’s unlikely we’ve spotted what’s happening unless we look at just the right moment. This can also happen as we pass the ‘on ramp’ on a motorway or dual carriageway. And drivers also move up into, then sit in the blind spot so we can’t see them either in the mirror or peripheral vision. The only way to see is via a blind spot check. In either case, all that’s needed is a quick ‘chin-to-shoulder’ glance into the blind spot before we commit ourselves.

So if looking into the blind spot can only have positive effects on our situational awareness, what’s the objection?

“It’s potentially dangerous if the car ahead suddenly slows down.”

That’s easily answered. If the car ahead slowing down instantly puts us at risk, we’re too close. No arguments. No “if’s”, “but’s” or “maybe’s”. If the car ahead slows and we are instantly put at risk, it doesn’t matter where we’re looking – it could have been in the mirror. We should have been further back, no matter we’re looking to be in the ‘overtaking’ position. If we can’t look away from the car’s brake lights, we are too close. And what’s less obvious is that if we’re in the least bit worried about running into the car ahead, we’re not going to be giving our overtaking planning full attention! It’s a form of target fixation.

“A lifesaver takes too long.”

Someone once quoted two seconds as “the time it takes to look behind”. That shows a bit of a misunderstanding about WHERE we’re looking. There’s more about this in another tip, but we’re only looking into the blind area, not ‘behind’. If we combine our final mirror check (and you ARE going to make one, aren’t you?) with the over-the-shoulder lifesaver, it doesn’t actually take all that much longer than the mirror check alone – try it.

You may see it as a ‘belt and braces’ approach, and you might argue that if we’ve got a good belt, we don’t need braces. Maybe, but belts do slip and then we might be very glad to have the braces to hold our trousers up.

One of my least favourite expressions is “if I didn’t overtake, I might as well be driving a car”, as if a motorcycle is an automatic licence to overtake.

It’s hard to Personally, I believe that there’s nothing more dangerous that we do on a bike than overtaking.

So I tend to think that everything we do that decreases risk when overtaking is a good idea. And one of those good ideas is knowing what’s behind you, which is probably the area that most riders forget to check! “After all”, they reason – “if you are overtaking you’re going faster so the hazard must be in front of you, no?”

Well, actually, no! If you’re thinking about an overtake, so will someone else be. The most obvious candidate is another bike but there are plenty of cars out there these days with stunning acceleration – ask Jeremy Clarkson!

Given the ever-more crowded state of the roads, the chances of an overtake being completely free of oncoming traffic is going down every day – you need more attention AHEAD of the vehicle you’re planning to pass and behind you too, not less by worrying about running into it.

It’s been claimed that looking behind takes too long. Some quoted two seconds

Half the reason for this argument on the issue is that many riders still think that a lifesaver is a long look behind. That was what riders were supposed to do until fairly recently, thanks to the DSA’s reluctance to acknowledge bikes had mirrors till the late 90s, but it’s really not necessary. A lifesaver is simply a chin-to-shoulder blind spot check timed before an important change of position, into a potentially dangerous position. In other words, it’s the timing rather than the action.

It’s simple enough to combine a mirror check and follow through straight into a blind spot glance. Your head check has now filled in the entire picture alongside and behind. I really cannot see why people are so against the idea of doing them. If it’s timed correctly it’s no more dangerous than looking in the mirror.

Whilst I’m on overtakes, I’ll comment on the habit of moving up to a very close “overtaking” position behind the vehicle ahead when looking for an overtake. It’s recommended by police instructors and can be seen demonstrated on the Bikesafe 2000 video. For my liking, that position is far too close – at one point on that otherwise excellent video, there is barely a single hazard line between the bike and the car ahead. Even their safer “following” position is about half the distance I’d like to keep between me and another vehicle.

So, I’d double the distances shown in that video – my following position would be around the 2 second minimum safe distance, and my closer up overtaking position around 1 second back.

Whilst it’s true that the holding a more distant 1 second “overtaking” position means you are accelerating from a greater distance, with good timing you don’t need to twist the throttle so hard because you can get something of a “run” at the overtake. Hanging back further allows you to catch up in the final part of the corner, and often makes it easier to pass without excessive speed or any wasted time. If you are too close, it’s hard to accelerate before you are wide and clear, which tends to lead to big throttle openings.

In reality, if you overtake from further back, what you have to avoid is carrying too much speed into the overtake. If a situation starts to develop that looks awkward, you may have to pull back in. If you can’t pull back in, you are passing with too much speed. You should pass slowly enough that you can bail out if you need to. I can’t begin to say how many times I’ve been in the middle of a pass and something goes wrong that I’ve had to brake to avoid, and I don’t just mean misjudgements on my part – but brain out manoeuvres by the other driver.

If you yo-yo between the close “overtaking” position and the more laid back “following” position, you need to think how incredibly distracting that can be to the driver you are trying to pass, particularly if you have lights on. And something else that’s rarely mentioned is that as soon as you move up, the car behind YOU maintains their own “is that a fly on that bike’s numberplate?” following position, so dropping back becomes problematic, if not potentially dangerous – another reason for not getting too close in the “overtaking position” and finding yourself the meat in a sandwich.

Following too close through a bend is a mistake too, as most drivers decelerate until they can see their way out of a corner – if you’re too close, that means you decelerate too and end up at lower revs than you meant to.

Slow + high gear = longer time to make the pass when you finally go.

Another factor which is frequently ignored is that cars are massively more powerful than they were even 10 years ago. Even something that looks like it ought to trundle out of a corner like a massive 4×4 can often accelerate pretty quickly. Yes bikes are faster too, so we end up using ever higher speeds to make up the pass.

Even a good overtake is potentially dangerous – so it makes sense to make them as safe as we can, not to risk all on a hurried and botched pass.

There are two problems, if you discount the obvious one of failing to look often enough. Working out speed and distance – and then deciding when that vehicle will arrive along side you. to do this

You’ll need to look into the blind spot to see the bike or car that comes up so quickly that you don’t spot it between regular checks. Do some sums. At 60mph you’re travelling around 27 metres per second. Say you check your mirrors every 5 seconds (and that’s pretty enthusiastic mirror checking, too) – in that distance you’ve travelled around 130m.

Now, what if there is a bike (or possibly even a police car) doing 120mph coming up behind you? If you check your mirrors four times at 5 second intervals, with the final check when it’s along side you, the first time you check it’ll be over 500m back – more than a quarter of a mile. There’s not that much chance you’ll spot it – think about how mirrors make things look further away!

Second check and it’s now 270m back – that’s still more than the length of two football pitches – there’s a pretty good chance you still won’t see it if there is a lot of other traffic in the lane.

Next check will be when it’s 135m behind you. Sounds easy enough to spot, but if it’s in the same lane, and there is another vehicle close behind you, will you see it? And even if you do, if you didn’t see it in either of the two earlier checks then what you don’t know is how fast it’s going.

On your fourth check, the car/bike is alongside you. Scary.

Another problem with mirror history that you may find on a

So, things can change very fast indeed on motorways. Even if you think you know what’s there and it’s going to stay there, you might be wrong. Read this:

“The dangers of the assumption above were brought home to me when I was being observed a few years ago. We were on our way back and it was getting dark; my observer was riding a Pan and another Pan had caught up with us which I hadn’t seen; this second Pan had gone past the observer who had moved over accordingly, so the lights I saw in my mirror weren’t his at all; thus there was very nearly a meeting of fairings when I pulled out to overtake, thinking that my observer had anticipated the overtake and was ready to follow me through, when, in fact, it was the “foreign” Pan overtaking me.”

So, given the safety benefits, why are some riders and instructors so dead-set against them?

 

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69. Where does Point and Squirt come from?

It’s the cornering technique that pulls everything together but I didn’t learn it from Motorcycle Roadcraft. If there’s one topic I’ve always felt UK-based training at basic and post-test level has been seriously lacking, it’s a comprehensive approach to cornering that goes beyond the mechanical inputs and positioning, but covers hazard recognition, risk assessment and risk management. In short, I picked up the various elements from a number of different sources, tested them via trial-and-error, then combined them into a system of cornering that I used personally. When I started post-test coaching, I taught riders what I’d learned and called it ‘Point and Squirt’ for the “slow in, late apex, quick steering, delayed and upright acceleration” combination that seemed to me to work best on awkward bends. It remains a highly practical and, adaptable approach to cornering.

Where does Point and Squirt come from?

Although I’m often told that what I teach on my Survival Skills post-test training course is the same as you’d find if you read the police handbook ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’ (the most recent critic called it “Roadcraft with lipstick and blusher” which made me chuckle), that’s not actually correct. There are plenty of areas of commonality, not least that the aim of ‘Roadcraft’ and Survival Skills is to try to keep riders upright and that there’s nothing any rider can do with a motorcycle except change speed and direction. But Survival Skills is most definitely not ‘Roadcraft’ under a different name’. The Survival Skills approach avoids seeing ‘progress’ as the goal of advanced riding and changes the ‘do it the right way’ approach to riding to a more pragmatic ‘have we prepared for things to go wrong’ approach. And in particular, Survival Skills has always offered a far more organised approach to cornering. In the mid-90s, the current edition of ‘Roadcraft’ barely covered the topic – steering wasn’t even in the book. Even now, with a much-improved updated edition, it’s my opinion that the Survival Skills Performance: BENDS and Performance: SPORT course go way beyond ‘Roadcraft’s’ new content. Read on, and decide for yourself.

In the UK, and with just a few exceptions, most advanced training – whether it’s delivered by the IAM, RoSPA-certificated instructors, or even in a watered-down form by the ERS (thanks to the connection with the DVSA) – has its roots in UK police practice – the police handbook ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’ is recommended background reading and they all apply the ‘Police System of Motorcycle Control’ as a core component of their training.

However, whilst I make USE of ‘Roadcraft’ as well as the IAM’s offerings and various books from the DVSA, my training certain ISN’T ‘Roadcraft-based’.

Looking further afield than the UK, there are other training schemes around the world and many writers with valuable things to say about riding, so I have drawn heavily on outside sources. I’ve looked at the work of US rider coach Keith Code (of the California Superbike School) and his concept of cornering reference points. There’s David Hough’s huge amount of work, the laid-back approach of Nick Ianetsch, as well as ideas from Lee Parks (Total Control) and Reg Pridmore (CLASS) all to be found in my courses. I’ve obtained training material from contacts with the US-based MSF which have influneced my thinking. I’ve incorporated techniques from the Australian ‘Ride On’ programme. Even more recently, the internet has allowed me to swap ideas with and ride with trainers and other motorcyclists from all over the world. And I also have my not-insignificant time as a courier to draw on, something that taught me how easily things can go wrong on the road.

Survival Skills cornering courses have always focused on three aspects of cornering:

  1. hazard awareness, risk assessment and risk management

  2. a system of ‘reference points’ that allows any rider to navigate around any corner

  3. a method of mapping machine inputs – braking, steering, throttle control – to the reference points

Put together, Survival Skills has delivered the unique ‘Point and Squirt’ approach to cornering since 1997. So, is my Point and Squirt approach to corners “Roadcraft with lipstick and blusher” as that critic claimed? Not in my opinion.

Almost as soon as I bought a bike – a lovely little Honda CB125S – and set off on L plates (no compulsory basic training back then) I wanted to find out more about cornering. Just a few months into my riding career, I got hold of the old ‘Blue Book’ police manual. I soon added an IAM book, and progressively added more – who remembers ‘Superbiking’ by Blackett Ditchburn? No? I thought not!

Unfortunately, despite learning about the ‘Police System of Motorcycle Control’, trying to apply it to corners didn’t help much when nobody had told me how to steer – it wasn’t in ‘Roadcraft’ back then. I actually discovered counter-steering thanks to a magazine article whilst I was at college. Turn the bars the wrong way? Madness! But it worked. I taught myself to ‘push right, go right’ and ‘push left, go left’. Even though it wasn’t in ‘Roadcraft’, it got me round corner and also I realised it could help me swerve out of trouble – something that saved me a number of times when I became a courier.

I also learned about how I should use “acceleration sense”, matching the throttle opening (and thus speed) to the radius of a corner as judged by changes to the ‘Limit Point’. Opening and closing the throttle as the radius of the bend changed worked OK on a 12hp 125, and reasonably well a couple of years later on a 37hp 400-F with stiff suspension when I passed my test. But when I added a CX500 to my collection of bikes in 1982, a bike with 50-odd horsepower and a shaft drive, I found any on-off throttle round corners destabilised the soft and relatively long-travel suspension. By trial and error, I found the best way to keep the bike going where I wanted was to slow down a bit earlier, then to keep the throttle steady all the way through the corner from entry to exit. If the bend changed radius, rather than try to change speed with the throttle, I changed lean angle instead. It also worked better on my 400-F, and the technique I’ve continued to use successfully on every bike from a Husqvarna 610TE enduro to a GSX-R sports bike. In short, it works on anything.

Another learning experience was that using a ‘maximum radius’ line that “works the tyres less hard” (that’s a quotation from an early 2000s West Midlands BikeSafe video, one I have in my collection) could have its downsides. When I started riding, the advice in the Highway Code was that riders should still ride three feet (just under a metre) out from the kerb. But more and more riders were rejecting that. So what to use instead? Well, there were lots of magazine articles about the ‘maximum radius line’ where we exploit the width of our lane by riding a ‘wide in, clip the apex, wide out’ racing line. Even if not explicitly suggested, it was definitely hinted at in Roadcraft – just to check my memory was correct, I recently dug out my old ‘Blue Book’ edition of Roadcraft and it does indeed show near-symetrical maximum radius lines worked into the full width of the lane.

So I started using it. There’s another article which goes into more detail but suffice to say, I discovered its drawbacks on the road when I nearly had my head removed by an oncoming police car in the middle of a right-hand bend. In retrospect I suppose ‘racing line’ should have been a clue. The driver didn’t seem too impressed with it either. I’d also discovered that if I got it a bit wrong on a left-hander, I would (and did) end up in a field, I started to use less-aggressive lines that avoided both grass and oncoming police cars. Nevertheless, it’s still being talked about in that much later BikeSafe video.

Although I was still reading anything I could lay my hands on, my cornering skills stagnated through the 80s, mostly because nearly all my riding was as a courier mostly in and around London. But then in 1990 I moved back to Kent. And now I was doing a lot of cross-country courier runs and clocking up a LOT of miles on twisty roads. By coincidence, a series called ‘Survival Arts’ began appearing in the old ‘Motorcycle Sport’ magazine.

In April 1990, the article on cornering jumped out at me. The diagrams showed the rider going much deeper into a corner, then turning tighter later in the bend keeping well away from the centre line (right-hander) or the kerb (left-hander) before exiting on a far less extreme line. It was very different line to the line I’d seen before. And yes, I still have that source too, to double-check.

I remember the day I tried out the Survival Arts line. I was on a run out to Wales on a nice sunny day, and finding it difficult to pass a tractor on a twisty road. I suddenly realised that taking a line on right-handers which went a little deeper in to the turn gave me a good view on the way up to the bend, kept me away from oncoming traffic mid-corner whilst using a quicker, more positive counter-steering input to square off the corners helped me get upright and lined up with the straights sooner. Coming out of a right-hander, I turned the bike tighter onto a straight long enough to pass the tractor. Having got past, I kept trying it, and found it made riding the twisty road a lot easier on left-handers too. It was an absolute revelation. I’ve got some notes dating from 1992 when I actually started to write up the ‘on the road’ benefits of what would become ‘Point and Squirt’. Why Point and Squirt? Because that’s exactly what we do. We wait till we see where the road is going next, then turn sharper, ‘point’ the bike at the exit and turn the throttle harder to ‘squirt’ the bike out down the road to the next hazard.

Soon after, I borrowed a buddy’s copy of Keith Code’s ‘Twist of the Wrist 2’ because I was about to do my first track day. Although a lot of the book was irrelevant to the road (and some almost incomprehensible on first reading), I did take away some postives. Code confirmed my ‘open the throttle all the way through the corner’ approach was right, and his thinking on stability issues and the need to keep the bike upright as much as possible, also confirmed the benefit of the Survival Arts deep in, quick steer approach. He also said “turn only when you see the exit” which I realised is what I was doing with my Survival Arts line. Code’s “steer once” advice and his definition of the exit (“where you can do anything you want with the throttle – pull a wheelie if you want to”) all made immediate sense given what I was already doing.

Code supplied a crucial missing link with his concept of ‘reference markers’ (repeating and easy-to-recognise points in bends). You won’t find this in ‘Roadcraft’ or any of the books based on it. Yet Code’s ‘Two Step’ technique (in short, an approach which gets us to search for one reference point, then when we see it, move our eyes further forward to look for the next) explained when to look, where to look, and what we are looking for. Code provided some crucial missing links and by putting Code’s quick-steer approach, the ‘Two Step’ and the reference marker concept altogether, we have a way of timing braking, steering and acceleration inputs consistently.

By combining what I’d learned from Code with my Survival Arts cornering line, I developed a consistent style that used positively-timed (but NOT ‘harder’) braking to slow whilst upright, a slower, squared-off turning point late in the corner that gets the bike upright earlier, allowing early, positive and upright acceleration out of the bend. My cornering technique took another big step forward – rather than carrying corner speed using the ‘maximum radius’ line as I had on the 125, I was positively sacrificing it.

I got plenty of chance to polish Point and Squirt on long rural courier runs, so let’s fast-forward to 1994 when I got online and began to discuss riding, including my Point and Squirt cornering approach with riders from all over the world. MSF instructor Don Kime sent me some training material which showed how to break down corners using the ‘Slow, Look, Lean, Roll’ approach (quite a few years before Thames Valley Advanced Motorcyclists hi-jacked the technique, incidentally). Now I’d added a way to break the corner down into easily-defined chunks which matched Code’s machine inputs. I also got useful feedback from US riders who’d done Code’s California Superbike School as well as Reg Pridmore’s CLASS in the United States, where the ex-pat British former racer seemed to be teaching a road line not-dissimilar to my Point and Squirt.

By 1996 I was working down in Lydd as a CBT instructor, and I joined a local IAM group. Boy, Point and Squirt did not go down well with my observer. Braking, squaring off, then accelerating upright out of corners; nope, that was all wrong. Instead, I was told how the ‘proper’ approach to cornering was to “vary throttle and speed with radius” and to “smooth out the radius of the corner”. OK, maybe not quite so close to the white paint as my old approach to right-handers, but essentially I was being shown the throttle control that hadn’t worked on my old CX and a near-identical line to the one I’d discarded after the near-decapitation by the police car.

Just a few month later, I ran my own advanced course for one of our trainees who’d recently passed his bike test and turned up with a new machine. I got a day’s warning from the boss, spent the previous evening roughing out a syllabus, and rather than the IAM line it was my own Point and Squirt approach that I showed him. When launched Survival Skills Rider Training in 1997, this reference point-based, slow in on the gas, quick steer and late-turn line was a key part of the two-day Survival: SKILLS course. I’ve continued to develop Point and Squirt, but the essentials were in place.

In early 2000, I was invited to run an advanced riding section on a national motorcycle forum. It rapidly gained members, and questions soon popped up about cornering. When riders had issues cornering, I’d describe the benefits of the Point and Squirt approach. And suddenly, I was being told that this was “the line you’d take if you’d followed the advice in Motorcycle Roadcraft” or that I’d “misunderstood Roadcraft and that if I’d taken IAM training, I’d have been shown how to ‘interpret’ it correctly”.

I checked over my extensive collision of books, articles and videos which date from the early ’70s to see if my memory really was failing but, nope. The Survival Arts line is quite obviously different from diagrams in the ‘Blue Book’ edition of Roadcraft. And there’s that 2000s West Midlands BikeSafe video too (even if the footage clearly shows the rider demonstrating what I’d call Point and Squirt. With hindsight, I’ll concede that there IS a written warning to “tuck in tighter and not to exit too close to the white line on left-handers” in the Blue Book, and the “turn only when you see the exit” advice IS in the mid-90s editions of Roadcraft. But in neither book is the message given any great prominence, possibly because – as is also regularly pointed out – the book was intended to be read alongside the police practical training. However, my response to that is “why write a book with half the story?”

A less charitable suggestion was that I was trying to “score points over other trainers”, or wanted to be the “sole Guardian of the Truth” – if that were true, I’d hardly be explaining how Point and Squirt worked, would I now?

For what it’s worth, a few years after the first “Point and Squirt is just Roadcraft properly explained” bun fight, I met a very nice bloke on a group trip in Europe. He’d had his IAM pass for 20 years but was active in his group. At the end of one of our rides, he quizzed me on the lines I was taking. I explained Point & Squirt. “Nah”, he said, “I don’t like that… it’s all stop/start and sudden jinks… I like match the throttle to the bend mid-corner… and I like to lean the bike and use wide sweeping lines because the bike’s more stable… it’s how my two mates who are both ex-police riders ride too”. Next day I followed him. He was rolling the throttle on and off mid-corner and taking the maximum radius line round bends.

So if Point and Squirt really isn’t ‘Roadcraft-revisited’, does anyone else teach something similar? Some years AFTER I’d talked about Point and Squirt online, Andy Ibbott – then director of the UK outlet of Code’s California Superbike school – wrote about Code’s cornering in ‘Motor Cycle News’. Without calling it Point and Squirt, Andy Morrison of Rapid Training explained it very well indeed in a series in ‘Bike’ magazine between 2005 and 2006, more than ten years after I first started writing about Point and Squirt online, and almost as long after I started teaching it.

So I think I’ve shown that there is a significant difference between the Point and Squirt approach to cornering and what’s covered by Roadcraft-based training. If you’re still struggling to accept that after reading my explanation, maybe book up a course and see for yourself.

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68. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – riding in fog

Fog remains one of the trickiest hazards for motorcyclists, particularly at night or in low-light conditions. Research supports my discussion of visual disorientation and increased reaction time. Modern lighting may help see, high-visibility gear might help others see us — hardly any bikes have a fog light, but the core principles haven’t changed: reduce speed, generous following distances, and riding to what we can actually see, not what we expect. Ultimately, preparation and anticipation remain the rider’s best defences—fog is never enjoyable, but with forethought, it can be managed reasonably safely.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – riding in fog

I’m pretty sure Keats didn’t ride a motorcycle, but it’s not unusual for spells of settled weather to develop during late on in the autumn, and fog can be a major problem. I still remember two trips vividly. Years ago, when I was only a few months into my riding career, I rode from Maidstone in Kent to West Drayton near Heathrow. The ride took twice as long as expected because the fog came down, and I very nearly didn’t make it. Following the kerb along the inside lane of the A40, I didn’t notice I had drifted off the main carriageway into a slip road. I nearly collided with the Armco barrier on the corner. Thankfully because of the thick fog, I was only riding at about 20mph and took some evasive action. A few years later when I was despatching, I took a package from London to GCHQ at Cheltenham. I left in lovely afternoon shine. I got to Cheltenham in time for a beautiful sunset. And the return ride turned into a nightmare of freezing fog, accidents and traffic jams. So riding in fog and particularly in fog at night, is probably my least favourite part of biking. And if I can, I’ll stay put. But sometimes it has to be done. So what are the problems and how best to deal with them?

Fog forms when moist air travels over colder ground. Although we could encounter for at any time of year, the densest fog often forms in autumn – November is a favourite month for fog. Warm air can still make its way up from the near-continent and it holds more moisture than during the winter months. But the nights are long and fog forms more readily than in summer, and it can be slow to clear – it may even persist all day.

Like all other weather-driven hazards, first stop is the weather forecast. Forewarned is forearmed. Find out what the day-long forecast is. Whilst fog may be slow to clear in the morning, it’s pretty obvious when we wake up in it. But if the weather changes and become clear and still during the day, fog can easily be a problem on the dark ride home. Maybe we can change our departure times.

Towns are generally a bit warmer than the surrounding countryside so it’s not uncommon to drive out of town into fog. We can anticipate where we’re likely to find it. It can be low cloud, so worse on tops of hills. Or it can be caused by cold air that’s sunk into low-lying areas after a still, clear day – damp meadows and river valleys are classic places for fog to form on still evenings. Or it can be blown in off the cold sea. Kent, where I lived for many years, used to get all three types. For example, the M2 being near the coast would often be affected with sea-fog. But the M20, being a few miles inland and crossing the North Downs, was often affected by hill-fog. Watch out for patchy fog, because we never quite know where it is, how thick it is, or how long it’ll last. Don’t be tempted to blast into a wispy looking bit of mist drifting across the road. It could be a lot thicker than you think.

It’s often cold riding in fog, thanks to chill air temperatures, but also because the tiny droplets evaporate from clothing and suck away body heat. If riding in leathers, put waterproofs on, and layer up to stay warm.

On the bike, the first problem is simply seeing out the helmet. The visor gets covered with water droplets on the outside and mists up on the inside from your breath.

Wax polish like Mr Sheen on the outside helps the water bead up and run off, often just by turn our head. Try to avoid wiping a finger – the oily crud on the glove gets smeared across the visor and makes it even more difficult, and long term it scratches it. If the visor gets covered in salt spray or road film, a damp cloth kept in a ziplock bag (I spray that with Mr Sheen too) can clean and re-wax the visor.

Holding our breath all the way home is impractical, and I’ve never yet found a helmet that demisted itself from the vents that were supposed to perform that trick. Breath deflectors also help, but an anti-mist treatment is usually needed. Whilst they do seem to work, they need regular reapplication. Quite honestly, I used Fairy Liquid as a courier, applying a dab of the neat stuff, then polishing it on with a clean cloth. The other option is a Fog City-style add-on. It’s effectively double-glazing for the visor, but I’ve found that at night they reduce visibility, partly because they scratch easily. I’ve heard they can be tricky to seal effectively on some visors.

Having sorted yourself out, make sure the bike is in good shape too, with clean and properly adjusted lights. If dip beam is too low we won’t get any forward vision. If it’s too high, even on low beam it will light up the fog – now the light’s bounced back as glare. Extra-bright lights can actually be a disadvantage when this happens.

One of the problems of riding in fog is a sense of ‘dislocation’. A road we’ve ridden dozens will seem totally different in fog, as our normal visual cues will vanish. So use everything available. Reflective posts are red to the left and white to the right, so if we see a line of red posts, we’re approach a right-hander. And vice versa. Triangular warning signs are reflective and are there to flag up hazards. Watch the centre line – longer ‘hazard lines’ indicate just that, and cat-eyes get closer together too when approaching a hazard, and really close – almost a solid line – when the centre line goes solid. Coloured cat-eyes help on multi-lane roads – red to the left, amber to the right, white between lanes, green where vehicles leave or join a carriageway. Ride to what you can see, not what you think you ought to see.

In general I try to follow the centre line rather than the left hand edge of the road – it keeps you further from dangers to the left which will be harder to see – but be cautious entering cross-hatched zones in the middle – there may be unlit traffic islands in the centre of the road.

Unless we meet someone with no lights, it’s usually easy to see oncoming cars, but side-on there’s little to warn us. We can normally see the tail lights of cars ahead, but don’t simply follow the guy in front – if they run off the road, so will we. Fog’s water so it makes the road surface damp, and potentially very slippery, so a good following distance is important.

We need to remember that with no fog light, the driver behind us will have difficulty seeing us against the brighter lights ahead in a queue of traffic. If we do a lot of foggy miles it might be worth fitting one – I used to fit a fog light as a courier. I’ve also seen riders using bicycle LEDs and was surprised how effective they were, although technically they are illegal if fixed to the bike. Typically, reflective material on hi-vis vests is too high up when everyone is driving on dip beam or fog lights – it needs to be low down to be seen.

And finally, make sure the bike’s easy to ride. Many riders use ‘rat bikes’ for winter riding, but make sure everything works properly – we need every ounce of attention for riding, not to worry about stiff clutches, dodgy brakes or cheap and nasty tyres.

Riding in fog is never fun, but we can make it less stressful.

 

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67. SURPRISE! The key to understanding – and avoiding – riding errors

Even if rider training still focuses on ‘perfect performance’ to avoid errors, it’s increasingly recognised in other fields where safety is paramount — such as in airline pilot training — that skill alone won’t prevent in-flight errors, and that the ‘startle effect’ — what I refer to as SURPRISE! — is the key trigger that overwhelms even highly experienced pilots. The same applies to riding. It’s rare we outride the motorcycle. Most crashes result when our instinctive ‘Survival Reactions’ take over. Key points like the rarity of crashes and the influence of optimism bias should become fundamental concepts in rider training. Even with advanced ABS, traction control, or stability aids, anticipating the unexpected and preparing a mental and physical response remains the most effective defence against SURPRISE!

SURPRISE! The key to understanding – and avoiding – riding errors

There are only two things we can do on a bike – change speed or change direction. To do that, we use the same inputs – accelerating, steering or braking – every moment we ride. Accident investigators around the world find the same things when they look at bike accidents. Nearly always, the bike wasn’t at its limits; if the rider had applied the correct inputs into the machine, they’d have got out of trouble. The traditional view has been that riders make errors because they either lack skills or they make the wrong decisions. It’s easy to say “don’t make errors”, and the conventional view of road safety has always been that ‘all’ we have to do is avoid errors, then everyone would be safe on the roads. So training has always proceeded along those lines – years ago, I was told that if I “observed, anticipated and concentrated” I wouldn’t crash. Guess what? I crashed. So the big questions are these: “if the machine inputs necessary are only an extension of what we do as a matter of course, and if the errors are recoverable, why do we continue to crash?” The implication is that crashing is rather more complex than we think, and it’s worth asking “how do we know how to avoid an error, if we don’t understand it in the first place?”. But does anyone teach us about crashing? Read on…

After a crash, it’s easy to ‘walk backwards’ along the sequence of events and to produce a timeline of events. Eventually we appear to come to the precipitating error:

  1. we left the road in a bend…

  2. because we were off-line…

  3. because we turned in too early…

  4. because we ran in too fast…

  5. because we braked too late…

  6. because we had no margin for error…

  7. because we misjudged the bend!.

Such a crash is likely to be explained as ‘too fast for the conditions’.

Is that really correct? Let’s go back to the beginning and start again, this time trying to understand WHY rather than WHAT went wrong. Are we saying the corner was too fast for the bike? Or too fast for the rider? In a serious crash investigation, it nearly always turns out that the bike could have got the rider out of trouble. So it’s not machine limitations, but ‘rider error’. If we stop there, the finger is usually pointed in the direction of the rider’s level of skill and judgement and the assumption is that if the rider had better skills, the crash wouldn’t happen.

Now, let’s take another step backwards beyond where the rider left the road, to consider something nearly always overlooked. How did the rider get to the corner where he or she crashed? They had to ride there. And that means the rider successfully negotiated every PREVIOUS corner, to reach the one that he or she crashed on.

So if the problem really was riding “too fast” or “lacking skill and judgement”, how did they get as far as they did? Wouldn’t they have crashed sooner? We know that statistically a crash is a relatively rare event, even for relative novices. So whilst it IS possible it was blind luck that the rider got this far, it’s far more likely that there were some unique circumstances about this particular corner that caused the crash HERE rather than somewhere else. In short, the corner somehow set a trap that the unsuspecting rider fell into.

Whilst we can point to a lack of skill or a poor attitude to riding as loading the dice towards crashing, it’s not just new or badly-behaved riders who crash. Those groups might be at higher risk, but crashes don’t happen exclusively to the high risk groups. The majority of crashes actually happen to ‘ordinary’ riders doing ‘ordinary’ things. Moreover, even expert riders crash, and they often have the same ‘standard’ crashes that the higher risk groups do – at junctions, when overtaking and on corners.

So if experience, skill and even a controlled approach to riding only reduces risk but doesn’t eliminate it, it should be pretty clear that something rather more complicated is going on. And here’s where we can turn to the work of US rider coach Keith Code. He realised that even good track riders crashed and noticed that in many of these crashes, the rider COULD have got out of trouble. But when things started going wrong, these riders didn’t respond as expected. Instead, Code identified a string of inappropriate reactions including ineffective and frozen steering, over- and under-braking errors, and target fixation. He concluded that it was these errors that caused most track crashes. He called them ‘Survival Reactions’.

You should be able to see the parallel with accident investigations on the road. The bike COULD have got the rider out of trouble, but like the track rider, the road rider also froze, over-reacted and target fixated into the crash.

Next backwards step. If it’s these ‘Survival Reactions’ that dump us on our backside, why DO we react inappropriately in some places and not others? What triggers the ‘Survival Reactions’? Code put it down to the threat of personal harm, because the moment we’re afraid of something we’re likely to revert to instinct. Instinct, being based on the most primitive part of the brain, rarely provides the right response when riding a bike and our trained responses, everything we’ve learned, goes straight out of the window.

So far, so good, but there’s another pace backwards we can take, by asking “what triggers that fear of personal harm?” Factors acting a ‘stressors’ – that is, making us tense and anxious – such as riding on a road that technically trickier than we’re used to or riding with buddies quicker than us – appear to make us more prone to making a mistake, but don’t seem to explictly trigger Code’s ‘Survival Reactions’.

The trigger appears to be SURPRISE! It’s SURPRISE! that overwhelms our learned behaviour and kicks in the in-built instinctual responses to a threat. The bend tightens. We’re suddenly aware we could run off the road. ‘Survival Reactions’ kick in. We freeze and run off the road. We grab a big handful of brake and lock the front wheel. We target-fixate on where we’ll crash rather than look to see where the road goes.

Let’s take one final backward step. What triggers SURPRISE? The answer is remarkably straightforward. By definition, it’s when something happened that we didn’t expect. It’s a straightforward anticipation failure.

Now, I can already hear people saying “but if you’d observed, ANTICIPATED and concentrated…”

But when was the last time you crashed on a corner? As I mentioned earlier, crashes are remarkably rare events.

As I mentioned, a lack of experience and a lack of skill means we’re at higher risk of a crash, but the longer we ride without a crash, the simple truth is it becomes more difficult for us to mentally view a bend as a high risk area. It would be a mistake to call this complacency – it’s a function of the way our brains see the world outside. We’re biased towards looking on the bright side – for more on this, have a read of a book called ‘The Optimism Bias’ by neuroscientist Tali Sharot. The more we do something, and EVEN THOUGH THE RISKS ARE UNCHANGED, the less aware of the risks we become. Ask any builder who’s fallen off a ladder.

If there IS a risk of complacency, paradoxically it’s likely to come after more training. Think about it. The language of riding, driving and road safety generally is about “getting better” and the better we get (in this case, the fewer scares we have mid-corner), the more likely we are to assume everything will go right. The combination of training (which tells us that skilled riders have fewer crashes) AND a crash-free history leads us to believe it’s our training keeping us safe, rather than the laws of chance. Just like tossing dice, each bend comes with a level of risk, and we just haven’t met that unique set of circumstances that could trip us up…

…yet.

Don’t believe me? Roadcraft talks about being prepared for what we can “reasonably expect to happen”. If we don’t get caught out in a corner, that becomes the ‘reasonable’ option. We may not realise it but that’s what our repeated experience is teaching us. But what it doesn’t take away is the risk that the very next corner could be the one that’s laid a trap just for us.

Once we understand this, ‘inexplicable’ crashes start to explain themselves.

Hopefully, now we are aware of how repeated experience and optimism can warp our assessment of risk, we’ll see how to defeat SURPRISE! Instead of planning for “what we can reasonably expect to happen” and thinking that “I’ve done everything I can to ensure the corner goes right”, we MUST reverse our thinking 180 degrees and prepare for UNREASONABLE events. We need to plan for the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ to see a bend might go wrong, rather than planning the ‘right way’ to ride around it. As I explain on my Survival Skills advanced rider training courses, predicting the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ isn’t difficult, but really is a very different mindset to the standard ‘right way’ approach to riding.

Achieving this pragmatic “I’ve taken all the precautions I can but anything could still go wrong ” mindset is known as developing ‘insight’ and has been used successfully in risk management training in other fields. What’s very interesting is that the latest research is suggesting that with just a modest level of machine control ability, developing the insight that engages a “what could go wrong” mindset has significant benefits. I suggest this is because if we’re expecting something to go wrong, when the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ turns up mid-corner, we’re far less likely to suffer SURPRISE! for the simple reason we had predicted it. That would seem to be the way to defeat Code’s inappropriate ‘Survival Reactions’.

So how can we plan for what might go wrong? It’s simple enough – we just need to look at where other riders got it wrong! That’s where we are most likely to caught out ourselves. The three ‘standard’ crashes are at junctions, on corners and during overtakes and they happen to novice and expert riders alike. Once we realise that, it’s easier to be on red alert.

There’s one final step. Even if we correctly anticipate an emergency and avoid freezing, over-reacting or target-fixating, we really need a pre-planned response to beat SURPRISE! If we have to figure out a solution on the fly is about as likely as pulling a rabbit out of our crash hat. We need to know whether we’re going to need to change speed, change position, sound the horn, swerve or hit the anchors BEFORE the emergency starts to develop, or those ‘Survival Reactions’ will still kick in. That’s why even highly trained and highly experienced riders still fall victim to age-old crashes.

So yes, by all means observe, anticipate and concentrate. But learn about crashing, understand ‘Survival Reactions’ and then use that knowledge to anticipate where things will go wrong, rather than how they might go right. That’s the best way to deal with SURPRISE!

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66. Riding in hot weather – avoiding dehydration

The article is highly relevant, particularly since summers in the UK are getting hotter and hotter. Riding in extreme high temperatures continues to pose a real risk of dehydration, heat exhaustion, and impaired concentration for motorcyclists. The physiological explanations (sweating, fluid and electrolyte loss, impact on kidney function, early fatigue, and later confusion) are all accurate and still supported by modern sports medicine and physiology research. One correction is that modern research suggests moderate caffeine intake is not strongly diuretic in habitual consumers but energy drinks can be counterproductive due to high sugar content. Heat stress is compounded by full protective gear but modern ventilated jackets can aid air flow and cooling if humidity is not too high. It’s also possible to get sunburn through a visor; packing and using sunscreen is a good idea. Don’t ignore the signs of heat stress. Dizziness, headache, nausea, rapid pulse, or cramps can indicate heat exhaustion before severe dehydration sets in.

Riding in hot weather – avoiding dehydration

It always seems to happen. One week I’m riding around wishing I’d remembered to wear the heated waistcoat, then we get a few days of ‘scorchio’ weather. Riding a motorcycle in protective kit on a hot day sets up a unique combination of overheating and sweating, and a cooling and evaporating breeze. The body’s physiological functions only work in a narrow range and if we get too hot or cold, we get disorientated or worse. So the body tries to maintain temperature of around 37 degrees by sweating. The result is a high risk of dehydration at the same time as we’re struggling to stay cool. So what are the dangers of running short of body fluid?

Body fluid and electrolytes are vital to the function of the body’s organs. If they are lost through sweating and if they are not replaced, we suffer dehydration. In the early stages, we get rapidly fatigued and start to lose concentration. In the later stages more serious confusion sets in, and the body’s metabolic functions start to be affected. Not good. And that’s why I send out a notice to riders to ensure that when they attend a Survival Skills advanced rider training course, that they pack some water.

So what are the symptoms of dehydration? A good sign that we are dehydrated is not “feeling thirsty”, it’s not needing to pee! That tells us kidney function is already shutting down to save fluids. By the time we do feel thirsty, with dry lips and a dry mouth, then we are already well into the early stages of dehydration.

Most UK riders are oblivious to just how real a problem this, even when riding at home in a British summer. In countries like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the US where they ride long distances in hot and dry conditions, they are much more aware of the risks. You’ll also see racers taking on board fluids just before the start. But dehydration doesn’t only happen to racers. Whilst we’re not working physically so hard, we’re often exposed to that cooling breeze for longer.

So what can we do to prevent dehydration?

Planning ahead is the answer. We can start by pre-loading with fluid before we go out. For sports like cycling and soccer, it’s recommended that we drink around half a litre (roughly a pint) of fluid a couple of hours before we begin. Then around 15 minutes before setting off, aim to drink another half litre.

On the move, we need to keep replenishing fluids. It’s easy enough to take a bottle of water with us, so we can take a drink when we stop. For sporting activities, it’s recommended that we take around 100-150ml every 15 minutes or so when exercising – that would be around a half-litre bottle of water every hour. Given a particularly hot day, that’s probably not far off what we should be drinking on a bike. I took a Hopp Rider Training day at Cadwell Park on a warm autumn day, and we were reminded to get some water on board before going on track, and regularly reminded to rehydrate between track sessions. Doing it right, we should be making regular loo stops too. If that’s inconvenient, so be it. It’s better than the side effects from dehydration.

Riding alone, we can stop when we like, but on a bike with a 250 mile tank range, don’t wait till refuelling stops. Definitely make intermediate stops – remember, if you feel thirsty, you are already dehydrated. Group rides tend to go on too long, and we’re all dependent on the leader deciding when to pull up. So if you’re organising a group ride and you know it’s going to be a hot day, then factor in short breaks at regular intervals, and try to get people to use the opportunity to top up – you don’t want dehydrated and underperforming riders with you.

There’s a lot of marketing surrounding isotonic fluids – these are basically water plus the electrolytes we lose in sweat, so they have the advantage of keeping the chemical balance of the body right. You’ll find them in most service stations. Isotonic drinks also come in powder form – you can buy tubs of the stuff from any cycle shop and make up a couple of litres for the ride.

Personally I’m not fond of fizzy canned drinks because they are generally sweet and sticky. Coffee is generally considered a diuretic (ie it makes you pee more) but lately there’s been some debate about whether the old advice to avoid caffeine-based drinks is actually correct, although it’s generally accepted that the so-called energy drinks aren’t good for rehydrating. Personally I prefer tea – it’s not nearly so strong a diuretic and I like it!

However, they all cost a lot more than plain tap water!

So what to carry fluids in? I avoid buying plastic bottled water, partly because the plastic is liable to split when wedged into a pannier or under an elastic strap, and partly for environmental reasons. Any cycle shop will sell you a plastic water bottle – they are (just about) unbreakable and will squash – or an aluminium bottle. A little more cash will get you an insulated plastic cycle bottle or a Camelbak which is a plastic bladder that sits in a backpack harness – fill either with ice cubes in it, top up with water and even on a hot day, you’ll have something cool to drink for a hour or so.

A couple of final warnings. Steer well clear of alcohol. It might be tempting to sink a nice cold pint “because I’ll be well under the limit” but if you’re rehydrating, the alcohol will be absorbed faster and be even more disorientating than normal.

And… DON’T drink ice-cold water. The thermal shock of pouring ice-cold fluids into the stomach fools the body into thinking it needs to shut down the sweating mechanism. That’s definitely not what we want.