How Not To Ride A Motorcycle

Matt Hubbard
Speedmonkey
April 1, 2014

The art of riding a motorcycle is a fine one. The bike itself is inherently unstable, the human on top of it must use his body as much as the controls to make it go, stop and turn and his brain to judge how fast to ride.

I've ridden most of the good biking roads in Scotland, I've ridden the Isle of Man TT course, I've ridden from Edinburgh to Berkshire in one day in the rain, I do about 5,000 miles a year on a bike and I am still learning.

Most of what we bikers do is for enjoyment. Riding the bike itself can be learned in a few days. Learning to stay upright, that you need to steer in the direction of travel up to a particular speed and then against the direction of travel after a certain speed comes quite quickly.

Everything else is refinement and road craft.

It is when bikers think they know how to ride a bike and take liberties with the road, other road users, with their own skills and with the laws of physics that things go wrong, as they did with the chap in this video.

He was going too fast for the corner, he crossed double white lines (and did several times beforehand) and he didn't see the car coming the other way until it was too late. It was only his quick reflexes (something bikers tend to have) that saved him from a head on collision instead of jumping off a near cliff and down a Derbyshire hillside.

Watch it, learn from it. Try not to do what this biker did.



NB - Thanks to James Wright for posting the video on Facebook, where I saw it.