So unlike my "old mucka" Demon Overlord Stoafo i'm not new to the world of Motorcycling, my first bike was a white Honda MT50 2 stroke at the tender age of 16. Within 48 hours i'd managed to crash it for the first time :)

 

 How did this happen ? Well my Dad was teaching me clutch control, and of course i kept stalling the bike. It was brand spanky new and a tiny, unbroken-in 50cc 2stroke engine (with a Powerband tighter than Stoafo's spandex pants that he last wore at "Club XS" in 1991!). Anyways as i kept stalling on my attempt at a Hill Start, my dad got more and more frustrated, culminating in him exhorting me to rev the bike out, and "drop the clutch!".

 

...so i did and predictably looped the bike!  OOPS !

 

Anyways that first year was gnarly. The MT50 would do 43mph indicated with me flat on the tank, downhill and with a tailwind! I laid the bike down probably a total of 3 times, never "big" offs, once i fell off in the snow, another time on black ice. The worst one, i went under a bus, James Bond stylee, when the bus made an illegal right turn in front of me and i locked up and lowsided. The bus was coming towards me in that instance, travelling in the opposite direction so it was my first exposure to how fast an intown collision could happen. my speed of 30mph plus the buses 30 mph is a closing speed of a mile every 60seconds !

 

So where am i going with this ? Well statistically speaking most motorcycle accidents involve alcohol AND are a result of "Rider Error". They also statistically occur within the first 6 months of having a license and owning a bike. The stats show that in the first few months, insurance claims tend to be exclusively "fall-overs". ie the bike got knocked over, fell over, basically the new owner is getting used to the bike. The real problems happen around the 6month-1year mark. Thats where as a motorcyclist you've gotten over the first apprehensions and now you're Valentino Rossi! I don't think i've ever been involved in a pastime that was quite so "testosteroney". Somehow being less skilled or "slow" is a direct insult to a motorcyclists manhood ?  

 

This correlation results in a massive number of rider error accidents. The police reports are pretty damming "rider lost control on right hand bend" ,"rider lost control on left hand bend". They could pretty much copy and paste this into 85% of all motorcycle accidents, which is really really sad.

 

On January 1st of this year I had my first "off" in 20 years of riding and owning motorcycles. I was riding my beloved 1976 Moto Guzzi Convert on Skyline in Northern California. Conditions were dry but the road surface i crashed on had been recently repaved and was slick. Coming into a right hand turn corner at around 35mph, the rear stepped out bigtime, partly because of the slick roads but also because the Guzzi has linked brakes and an automatic transmission so you ride it by trail braking and opening the throttle through corners, otherwise its like pulling in the clutch and trying to ride round a corner which is when BAD  THINGS HAPPEN :)

 

so there i am with the rear wheel so far sideways that i look like a dirt tracker on my 600 pound "standard" motorcycle. Once i reached full steering lock i knew i wasnt going to get it back in time, i was already on the wrong side of the road and everything was now fully "Pear Shaped" !

 

the actual crash happened in slowmo. i probably got the bike to about  10 mph by the time we went down, hitting the ground hard on my right shoulder ( i separated myself from the bike to the left basically jumping off to the left, then going down on my right side and sliding till i hit the barrier).

 

i slid on my right side, the bike on its right sliding on its crash bars on the slick road for probably 10 feet till we both hit the barrier. I faired better than my beloved bike, my jacket was slightly rashed (big props to Dainese D Dry jackets!), my helmet impacted the barrier (Shoei Syncrotec) and amazingly my blue jeans and boots were unmarked !

 

 

the only real injury was i jarred my wrist when i separated myself from the bike.

 

Normally i wouldnt advocate giving up on a corner , ever , but in this case i didnt want a sliding 600 pound motorcycle pinning me against the unyielding barrier . most motorcycle deaths occur as the result of blunt trauma :)

 

so what would i have done different ? hmm im not sure. Most of the issue was a combination of the bike and its peculiarities and the slick road. Once i get the bike rebuilt i'm going to rebuild the brakes so that theyre no longer linked. if they'd been unlinked i could have let go of the back brake until it gripped and applied more braking force to the front. the last 4 months since the accident i've been riding the Triumph Bonneville a lot more, a very similar bike in many respects and have never had anything vaguely similar happen. 

 

Ultimately if there'd been a police report (there wasn't) it would have said " rider error, rider lost control on right hand band" it kinda sucks to be a statistic :) 

 

I tend to keep my rallying around to the race track as the conditions are much safer and more predictable, but thats another article.

 

Keep the rubber side down !

 

Robbie 

 

p.s. It could have been way worse right ? here's a photograph  taken today of Jorge Lorenzo in a practice session at the China motogp :)