The Deckers Route~Experienced Riders Discussion

[GixxerCarrie]

How many times can you say "ride within your limits"? It just goes right over everyone's head that needs to be listening. I do not feel a responsibility to teach anyone anything. If they solicit advise I will be forthcoming because at that point they are open to learning. Otherwise it is like

Very true Dave...

[dirkterrell]

Some very good advice posted above. In case anyone cares, here are my thoughts on street riding in general not just this particular road. Riders need to ask themselves why they are riding. If it's to see how fast you can go, to see if you can get a knee down, impress others, etc. then you unequivocally need to be doing that on the track. There are simply too many unknowns on the street to be pushing that hard. No ride is so good that it's worth being your last.

If your goal is to enjoy riding for yourself, improve your skills and reduce the dangers as much as you can, then you have the right mentality for street riding. I have been riding on the street since 1983 and I am still learning. (e.g. a couple of days ago I got some practice dealing with 40-50 mph gusting crosswinds in rain at interstate highway speeds and learned to scan the grass along the side of the road to see where the gusts were happening.)

It is insufficient to tell someone to ride within their limits when they probably do not know what their limits are. Again, the track is the safest place to explore those limits and extend them. I see people spend all sorts of money on farkles for their bikes and nothing on educating themselves. Today's street machines can do pretty amazing things if you know how to ride them. You can learn from experience and you can also learn from people who are higher up the performance curve than you. Solicit input from experienced riders and learn from them. Take classes like the Jason Pridmore Star School. They will be at HPR on Aug 15-16. It is not a racing school. It is a riding school and I guarantee that you will learn a lot from them no matter what level you are at. The difference between a situation being a pucker moment or a dead rider is very often the rider's skill in making the bike do what is necessary to escape the danger. Forget the aftermarket exhaust. Spend your money on improving your skills.

Since we're talking about a road where people are tempted to hit high speeds, it's good to understand how things change with increasing speed. The main one is that your ability to stop scales as the square of your speed. Your stopping distance at 100 mph is at least four times what it is at 50 mph. But you also have to consider what I call "thinking time" and reaction time. Thinking time is the time it takes you to see a situation and understand that you need to do something about. Then you have the reaction time to make the necessary inputs to the bike. The more experienced you are, the shorter the thinking time will probably be, maybe a second or better. For a beginner, it might be two seconds or more. An average reaction time is about 0.7 seconds. 50 mph is about 73 feet per second. If the reaction plus thinking time is 2.7 seconds, you travel nearly 200 feet before the bike can even do anything. At 100 mph, it's nearly 400 feet. For the experienced rider, it would be 124 feet at 50 mph and 250 feet at 100 mph. Add onto these, the breaking distances. The NHTSA did some braking tests and a VFR like mine took about 232 feet to come to a stop from 80 mph on dry pavement. Scale that up to 100 mph and it would be about 362 feet. Scaling down to 50 mph, it would be 91 feet. So if I took 1.7 secs to see and react to a situation at 50 mph, it would take 124 feet (think&react) + 91 feet (brake) = 215 feet or about 3/4 the length of a football field. At 100 mph it would be 250 feet + 362 feet = 612 feet, or over two football fields. Visualize that. That's the minimum distance for an experienced rider. Can you see that far around the triple digit sweeper you are in, realizing that leaned over, your braking distance will have to be even further? These are the kinds of things you need to understand if you are going to be doing triple digit speeds.

We can't make the risk of riding a motorcycle zero. But we can greatly the reduce the risks. Knowledge, experience, and the right frame of mind can make riding much safer and much more enjoyable. Riding is a great thing, and something I can't imagine not being able to do, but it is not worth dying. Do everything you can to reduce the risks and the odds are that you will enjoy many years of one of the great pleasures in life.

Dirk