Tempting but increasingly tight for a GoldWing?

I have referred to a helpful internet article written by Biker/Solicitor John Measures of Barratts Solicitors previously and this Article was provoked by another one of his.  Filtering past or through standing or slow moving traffic is common practice in UK but is it safe and is it legal?

With our busy and often traffic-clogged roads, the option to filter through standing or slow moving traffic is a potentially valuable aspect of life on two wheels, providing you have the confidence to do it and the perceptiveness to appreciate when it’s a bit too risky.

Not all GoldWing riders are confident enough to take their big bike into the relatively narrow gaps which filtering often involves but plenty are.  When I get the chance to make progress while cars and trucks are stuck in traffic I do so, with contentment which sometimes verges on smugness at my good fortune at being a motorcyclist.  Not only am I riding my wonderful bike but I’m not stuck in traffic like the drivers I’m riding past either – so aren’t I the luc

An inviting gap, but always check for obstructive lane dividers across the junction

ky one?

So eat your hearts out you unfortunate German and US riders, in your Countries (or at least in many US States) it’s illegal to filter.  But in UK we may do so if we wish, or at least it’s not something which UK bikers will ordinarily get pulled up by the police for doing.

Nor is it particularly likely to provoke, at least not so far in UK, angry or obstructive reactions from other road users, although occasionally a car or van driver will try to manoeuvre to obstruct a filtering motorcyclist.  On the relatively rare occasions when I have seen this happen for some reason it’s usually been someone driving a fairly old car that is behaving selfishly in this way and I wondered why?

I once spoke to a driver of an old Volvo who had tried to deliberately pull out on me in a dangerous way and he eventually admitted it was because he was envious of my grand and expensive bike.  Another driver who objected very strongly after I had overtaken him into a gap behind the lorry he was following (by undertaking me and then deliberately forcing me out into the path of oncoming traffic until I dropped back behind him again,which of course I did in order to stay alive) was a shaven headed thug (again in an old car) who would clearly stop at nothing to keep his place at the head of the queue to overtake that lorry, even though he was extremely unlikely (on that road) to get an opportunity.

It's illegal to cross or straddle solid white line lane dividers on motorway slip roads

However that sort of thing really is very rare and indeed was a complete one-off in my experience but it does illustrate that filtering needs to be done with alertness to the responses which other roads users may make.  In that particular case I did probably take Mr Skull a bit by surprise by overtaking him when he was fairly close behind that lorry, causing him to have to back off a little initially, and I could probably have picked a better and less surprising moment to put myself in front of him.  Keeping yourself out of trouble on a motorcycle nearly always boils down to good observation, so that you have time to make sensible decisions, indeed that’s what advanced motorcycling is all based on.

But taken as a whole in UK, I have found filtering both on motorways and in towns to be safe and worthwhile as long as it’s done carefully and with reasonable consideration to other road users.  Indeed I rather enjoy it as a way of exercising motorcycling skill.  I very rarely encounter adverse reaction of any kind from other road users and it allows me to make progress through congested traffic which would otherwise involve considerable delay.

But don’t try filtering, especially between lanes of traffic, when you’re on holiday in Florida.  You will get pulled by the Sheriff or the State Trooper if he sees you and you might very well have a car door deliberately opened in your path or even a gun pulled on you by an angry driver who disapproves of you jumping the queue he’s stuck in.  In Florida motorcyclists are expected to wait their turn in traffic the same as everyone else.

Filtering is not without its hazards in UK either, including attempts by other road users to be deliberately obstructive, and it should therefore be done with due care or not at all.  In order to filter between lanes of standing traffic on a UK motorway, which is unfortunately all too common these days, you require confident slow speed handling of the bike, including coping with riding along rows of cat’s eyes or along banding of the tarmac.

It takes a bit of getting used to, especially for pillion passengers, for whom it may sometimes hold particular terrors.  But once you have got the hang of it you will find you can relax into steady control of the bike’s line and you will gain confidence to keep rolling even through narrow gaps; a GoldWing is only 1 metre wide between the mirrors and gaps between traffic lanes are not usually narrower than unless the lanes have been narrowed, for example within road works.

Gaps in lines of standing traffic mean potential danger - look carefully for emerging cross traffic

Likewise filtering past standing traffic in towns can be very productive and satisfying – and all it takes is decent forward observation, to spot where you can safely overtake without getting marooned on the wrong side of the road in the face of oncoming traffic.

But is filtering risky in the legal sense – or for that matter in the insurance sense?  Where do you stand if a collision occurs?

John Measures answers these questions very helpfully in his article on the subject and he seems to be pretty confident as well as clear about what he says.  John is a biker who likes to filter through traffic himself when the need arises but he’s also a lawyer, and lawyers don’t offer assurances on the legality of things lightly.  Happily John thinks it is legal to filter past and through traffic and his Article explains why.  There is nothing illegal per se about taking advantage of the relatively modest width of a motorcycle to make progress when other road users cannot do so because of traffic congestion.

Being on the wrong side of double white lines can be an offence of course and so can riding the wrong way along a designated one-way street, but there is nothing illegal per se about riding on the off side half of the road or between lanes of traffic.  A motorcyclist can often overtake standing traffic by using the off-side carriageway when it is clear because he can make use of smaller spaces in or alongside standing traffic than four wheel vehicles require.

It’s a curiosity of English Law that there is no specific legal requirement to drive on the left – although it doesn’t follow that riding unnecessarily or persistently on the right hand side of the road to the alarm of other road users wouldn’t attract police attention.  And of course a motorcyclist can be considered by a police officer to be riding without dangerously or due without due care or due consideration for other road users (depending on the way the motorcyclist goes about his riding) no matter which side of the road he is on and whether or not he is passing other traffic.

Hatched dividing zones can be used unless they are marked for use by turning traffic

So while filtering past standing traffic is not illegal per se, there are plenty of ways of going about it which could be considered illegal.  So it needs to be done sensibly and considerately, that’s the thing.

And if other road users don’t want to move over to let you squeeze through gaps when you are filtering between lines of traffic on motorways you have to accept that and wait patiently until there is room to do so; kicking at the side of a car or at its door mirrors might be tempting if a driver is deliberately being a pain but if you really wind him up he might retaliate physically with his car or van or lorry and at the end of the day he’s inside a steel protective cage and you’re not.

So as long as you are not see by a police officer (or a video camera) to be riding dangerously or carelessly or inconsiderately, and as long as you don’t end up colliding with anything, filtering is not illegal and you are unlikely to be taken to task.  The worst thing that is likely to happen is a toot of the horn or a gesture of frustration from a road user who can’t follow you but if that happens you’ll already be past him (or her) and on your way.

But what if you collide with another vehicle, then what’s the insurance and legal position?  As with any road traffic collision, the police might get involved and might consider whether any offence has been committed and if so deal with it.  Apart from that it will be a matter of how the insurance companies view what has happened and if it comes to it, what the civil Courts decide about whose is to blame.

Tempting but tight

Therein lies the risk to motorcyclists of being hard done by because there is a tendency for both insurance companies and the Courts to think that whenever a motorcycle is involved in a collision it will be at least partly the motorcyclist’s fault.   Rightly or wrongly, and of course we would say wrongly, motorcyclists are regarded as prone to riding faster that is entirely safe and to overtake riskily.  Civil cases are decided on the balance of probability and blame is often apportioned, so even when a motorcyclist is the injured party, it is not uncommon for damage awards to be reduced to reflect the extent to which the motorcyclist is considered to have brought the situation upon himself.

For example collisions often happen at junctions.  A motorcycle is overtaking standing or very slow moving traffic along a main road towards a junction on the left from which a vehicle is trying to exit and turn right.  A considerate car or lorry driver on the main road stops to create a gap and maybe also waves the vehicle out, just as the motorcycle is approaching.  The rider may not have seen the hazard sign for the junction (because the standing traffic has obscured it) and may therefore, unless road markings give a clue, that there is a junction.  The rider doesn’t see the vehicle either creeping or  accelerating briskly out of the gap in the line of traffic until too late and a collision occurs, maybe quite a nasty one.

Courts have been known in such circumstances to regard the biker as partly or even entirely to blame for this type of collision, depending on the particular circumstances – to the extent that persuading the Court that a rider is entirely blameless is quite a challenge of advocacy for even a skilled and experienced lawyer.  This is when bikers need lawyers like John Measures representing them; it can make a big difference.

Approaching a roundabout often presents opportunities but take extra care if you plan to turn left

Better of course to have avoided the collision in the first place and there will nearly always have been indications of a hazard to which the biker could have reacted, if only a hint, if he was looking for it, that there was a potentially hazardous gap in the line of standing traffic coming up.  An observant rider would be alert to the hazards of left side junctions with minor roads and will be looking out for them as he overtakes standing traffic, likewise any gap in the line of traffic which might indicate that a vehicle is about to emerge from an unmarked junction such as a driveway or a gateway from a field.

Even this sort of vigilance while filtering isn’t foolproof because there a possibility that pedestrians or bicycles or motorcycles will suddenly emerge from the smallest of gaps between standing traffic.  Overtaking standing traffic on both urban and country roads requires continuing vigilance and considerable caution.  Any rider who overtakes standing traffic at speed or without due caution at marked junctions and when approaching conspicuous gaps in the line of traffic is likely to to be held substantially at fault if a collision occurs.

Filtering between lines of standing or slow moving traffic on motorways is potentially less hazardous because the risk of vehicles emerging from the left to turn right (i.e. against the traffic flow) is not there, but there are still risks of vehicles on either side suddenly swapping lanes across the bike’s path or, especially when traffic has been stopped for a while, suddenly opening a door.

In my experience only a tiny minority of motorists pay enough attention to their door mirrors, especially their left side door mirror, to be likely top see an approaching motorcycle before it’s upon them.  Safety requires that the motorcyclist assumes that all drivers will not see him and might wander or lurch or even swerve suddenly into his path unless there are indications otherwise.  Encouraging indications to the biker include vehicles in front maintaining a steady line over a period of time as he approaches them, vehicles making a conspicuous move to clear a path for the approaching motorcycle (which does sometimes happen) and in stationary traffic, occupants who are not moving about.  These give no guarantee that obstacles will not suddenly appear in the biker’s path but they will reduce some of the risk.

It helps of course to make yourself as conspicuous as possible when you are filtering so having your dipped headlights on is an absolute must.  Wearing Hi Viz clothing is useful too, especially if it’s a full yellow jacket and you’re wearing a white helmet and riding a white GoldWing, as I do. This is one of thsoe situations when being mistaken at first glance for a police motorcyclist works in your favour.

Cones often herald narrowing lanes

The more lights you can show to make yourself conspicuous to the drivers’ peripheral vision through their door mirrors as you approach the better chance they will spot you coming and most drivers will avoid turning into your path even if they don’t move away from it.

Legal ways to make yourself conspicuous include flashing your main beam headlights regularly and on a GL1800 this is very conspicuous and relatively easy to do; pressing the rear end of your headlight dipping switch works as a momentary press flashing switch (i.e. press on and release off) and you can do this with your left thumb.  Fog lights aren’t illegal either these days, or at least they are not likely to attract police attention, so if you have those and/or any driving lights you have fitted, it’s worth switching those on too.

Other conspicuous lights such as strobe lights are illegal and could get you in trouble if you happen to be filtering past a police car, but they are very effective.  They do capture the attention of a fair proportion of drivers and many of them do then move away from your line of approach.

Lane dividers marked for use by turning traffic are not available for filtering

Filtering between lines of traffic on a motorway while riding a GoldWing requires confident slow speed handling to maintain your own chosen line, sometimes along beading lines on the tarmac, which can feel a bit tottery until you get used to it, and lines of prominent cat’s eyes which feel even worse.  Fortunately your |GoldWing is better at this than you will be to start with, so as long as you keep looking up and ahead, make your decisions about whether the gap you’re approaching is big enough well before you get there and avoid panicky glances downwards or sideways you’ll either get the hang of it fairly quickly or equally quickly abandon the idea for ever.  Filtering between lines of traffic is like Marmite; you either relish doing it and grab every opportunity or hate it and avoid it like the plague.

Filtering through motorway traffic which is moving steadily forward, even if only at 20 mph or so, carries an increasing risk of difficulties as the speed of traffic increases because if a collision occurs it is increasingly likely to be a spectacular one in which you could end up dead or seriously injured.  If you ride the M25 you will often see motorcycles weaving through traffic which is moving at 60 mph or even faster.  This can provide interesting spectator sport while they’re in view but it is really is very risky to follow their example.

John Measures doesn’t cite any cases of collisions while filtering on motorways in his Article but clearly if the motorcycle is the only vehicle which was moving the rider will get all the credit for causing the collision and even if another driver moves into his path or opens a door on him, the motorcyclist will be at substantial risk of being regarded as partly at fault, especially if he has been filtering at considerable speed.

When traffic engineers have squeezed in extra lanes the options for filtering are reduced

In summary filtering past or through traffic on a motorcycle is not illegal per se but it is a risky activity and the motorcyclist is likely to get blamed at least to some extent if anything goes wrong.  By all means overtake standing traffic in towns and on main roads when it’s safe to do so but keep a special eye out for left side junctions and gaps in the traffic from which something could suddenly emerge.  Likewise filter between lines of traffic on motorways when you feel confident that you can ride steadily through narrow gaps without clenching your buttocks and getting into a state.

But and don’t complain if it all goes suddenly and terribly wrong; your insurance company is not likely to be very sympathetic or supportive if you collide with something while filtering, even if the police aren’t particularly likely to take issue.

More detailed discussions of filtering risks and methods is available on the Advanced Driving Forum by Clicking Here.  A well written briefing on filtering skills is available on the In Gear Rider Training website by clicking Here.

And finally, filtering can be a particularly terrifying pastime for pillion passengers, so bear that in mind too.  If you get too cavalier about filtering with the wife on the back seat you might get a buzz from the progress you make and enjoy the moment while it lasts but you might never hear the last of it either.

Postscript (July 14th)

In response to this Article I have had an email from a serving Traffic Police Officer who rides a Wing himself.  He doesn’t want to be named but here’s what he says:

“Whilst I am not speaking for the police, my take on your article about filtering is much as yours, and I feel that most of my colleagues share that view point.  If your actions are deemed dangerous or inconsiderate, then fair do’s you will get nicked.  Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that should an accident happen, the filtering by a bike would be a major factor when it comes to any charge.  Me personally, I do it all the time – but safely and with my highway pegs tucked in.  I and most of my colleagues see GoldWing riders as more mature, considerate and safe than other bikers, so they don’t often get tarred by the same brush.”

Getting this close for a photograph was not ideal

Motorcyclists are more vulnerable than most other road users, who are usually surrounded these days by a protective steel cage, within which multiple airbags are poised to come to their aid if they have a serious collision, even from the side.  So it makes sense for a motorcyclist to feel relatively vulnerable.  Ride a motorcycle like everyone else on the road is actively trying to kill you, so they say.  And sometimes of course that’s precisely what someone is trying to do, even if he or she doesn’t quite realise it.

I was attacked (the only word for it) by a car driver recently who decided he needed to teach me a lesson of some sort by passing very close and cutting in sharply at high speed.  He passed within less than two feet of me and was clearly doing it quite deliberately.  There had been no previous encounter or altercation, so presumably it was because I had dared to be on his road and in his way.  I wasn’t riding as fast as he was driving and I had therefore put him to the trouble of changing lanes to overtake me, so maybe that was it.

But would there be any point in reporting it? Would the police be interested?

As I pulled alongside him at the roundabout about half a mile further on, on the approach to which he had been forced to brake very hard and was now stopped in traffic, I was able to speak to him.  I pointed out that he could have killed me by passing and cutting in as fast and close as he did.  In response I got told to learn to ride properly and in the meantime to get off the so-and-so road.  There were some other vehicles ahead of us both but no-one had been following who might have seen the incident and no policeman handy, so what could I do?  Well, I told him I would report him to the police anyway and he gave me another mouthful.

So I followed him at a safe distance anyway, to be sure I had got his car’s number.  And since I had a camera mounted on the handlebars (I was on the hunt for riding pictures for this Blog) I took a couple of pictures.  But I also decided fairly quickly there would be little point in actually contacting the police; they wouldn’t have enough evidence to prosecute (no corroboration) and they were unlikely to be bothered doing anything else anyway.

Instead I consoled myself by following him for a while longer, still at a safe distance behind.  If nothing else he would learn that you cannot easily shake off a following biker in a car, at least not without getting really silly and attracting all sorts of attention to yourself.  So you can be followed home or to work or to wherever you are heading and the biker can then take note and maybe use the information to your disadvantage.

Nothing provocative and no further attempt to talk to the driver, I just followed him for long enough to give him something to think about, something which might just start to make him think twice before buzzing a biker again.  He did seem to notice photographs being taken as I followed him and he did thereafter seem to be driving on his best behaviour, so maybe I did get him wondering quite who was following him and whether he had got himself into trouble of some sort.

It was only necessary to follow him for a mile or so before he pulled into a college car park and went inside the building.  It was just before 6pm; he was probably going to a night school class and had needed to get there on time.  He now knew that I knew where he went on a Monday evening and where he parked his nice shiny car for an hour or two, leaving it unattended in the college car park. And if he thought about it at all, he could have worked out that it would not be difficult for me to have found out quit a lot more about him too now that I had this lead, if I was so inclined.

Contacting the Police

It was a couple of hours later, after I had got back home and told the story to Management, that she persuaded me to ring the police anyway.  They might not be interested but this young man had clearly used his car as a weapon with which to attack a motorcyclist.  If it had been my son, who I suspect has had his moments while driving, as I did when I was younger and wilder, I would have wanted him to have his horoscope read by a policeman in these circumstances, so he’d think twice before doing it again.  The driver probably hadn’t given any thought at all to what it would feel like as a motorcyclist to be buzzed as closely as this and it would do no harm at all to make him more aware.

So there would be value in him having that pointed out to him by Authority, if I could get Authority interested in doing so.  I didn’t have high hopes, but I gave the police a ring.

I started off  by saying that I realised they probably couldn’t do anything in the way of prosecution but that it might do some good if a policeman had a word and if it was my son etc etc.  I then outlined the incident and explained my concern that it had clearly been a deliberate attack rather than an inadvertent near miss and that the young driver had also responded in the way he had afterwards, by giving me a mouthful and telling me to get off the road.  The key point I made was probably the one about the driver having used his car as a weapon to deliberately intimidate a motorcyclist; that seemed to count for quite a bit.

Instead of the polite “sorry there’s not much we can do” I was expecting, she then said she would look into it and would I be happy to provide a statement?  It sounded like she was looking up his car’s number on the computer as we spoke and maybe something on the computer influenced her too; of course she didn’t say anything either way.  A couple of hours later she rang back to make arrangements for an Officer to interview me; clearly the police were willing to take the trouble to look into the incident.  I was impressed.

A Police Officer Calls

Promptly at the appointed time along came a PC to my home.  He was quite a sight to behold, wearing all-black uniform, military-looking boots and a yellow vest which, together with a belt with all sorts of things attached to it, seemed to contain quite an arsenal of weaponry.  This included a Taser gun in a quick-draw holster.  It emerged later in our conversation that Tasers are now carried routinely in Lancashire by at least one Officer per team; it looked frightening to me just sitting in its holster.  Things have moved a long way since Dixon of Dock Green pounded the streets.  And of course the Police Officer looked extremely young to me; indeed he looked like he had only just left school.

Mind you, policemen have been young to me for the past 20 years at least, especially the small ones.  This guy wasn’t small and you wouldn’t want to mess with him and within a few minutes it became clear that he didn’t want for experience either.  He listened or rather read through the story of the incident, which I had written down for him in advance, to save his time.

He gave no indication of either his impressions or his intentions until he had finished reading and had also asked some questions.  Again it seemed to count for quite a bit when I said that what bothered me was the driver using his car as a weapon against a motorcyclist and that he couldn’t have been taking late avoiding action because he had been crossing sharply from right to left as he passed rather than the other way around.  The Officer then explained, as I had anticipated, that there would be no realistic prospect of prosecution.

But he then said there were two things he could do.  First of all he would go and see the driver and have a word.  It was likely that the driver would deny that he drove at me deliberately; he would probably say that he was merely taking avoiding action as he passed me and might deny passing close at all.  The officer would nevertheless make clear to the driver the dangers of driving at or close to motorcyclists.  This is what I had hoped would happen; the driver would realise that dangerous driving was taken seriously by the police when it was reported.  The second thing the Officer intended to do took me completely by surprise, but I’ll tell you about that later.

Tell it calmly and accurately

I think it helped to get the police interested in taking action that I didn’t pull over immediately after the incident and ring them up while I was still angry – which of course immediately after being attacked and then getting a mouthful of abuse as well, I was a bit.  By telling them the story unemotionally and by asking for help to educate the driver rather than demanding his immediate castration, I presumably came over as more credible than otherwise, and having a sense of proportion about the incident too.

It probably also helped that as an advanced rider, trained to observe and analyse what is happening on the road, I could describe the incident in a way which showed that I had observed things accurately and that I had good, logical reason to conclude from the line he took (moving rapidly right to left as he passed) that the driver must have passed very close to me deliberately rather than having been taking late avoiding action. (No apologies for plugging advanced rider training, it’s something I would encourage everyone to do.)

I’ve done it (i.e. reporting an incident to police) the wrong way and ended up feeling fobbed off, probably as a result of coming across as angry and maybe wanting revenge.  If you are doing it because you’re angry and want to get the other guy in trouble this will of course be apparent to the police and they will take your anger and desire for vengeance into account when they assess your credibility.

From their viewpoint road rage incidents, as they call them, are often six of one and half a dozen of the other.  So if there are things about the incident, for example about your own riding or belligerence, that you would prefer not to have to detail to the police, don’t be surprised if they suspect something anyway or discover it from the other driver; the police are not mugs and they won’t let themselves be used as mugs either.

So, just as the police themselves have to keep their cool when an incident happens, so do you if you want to retain credibility as a reliable witness.  It’s probably best not to tackle the bad driver yourself at all unless you can stay calm and courteous as you do so – and certainly not to do so in any aggressive or challenging way.  Almost any driver’s instinctive reaction to anyone giving them an earful about their driving is to return it in full measure or at least to argue the toss, so the police won’t automatically assume fault from his having sounded off at you when you probably also sounded off at him.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t speak to a bad driver who has put you at risk and if you can find a polite way to say that you’ve just had quite a serious fright and could he or she possibly consider not doing that again to a motorcyclist, it might not automatically provoke an aggressive reaction and it might even have the desired effect.  But any aggressiveness on your part will almost inevitably provoke aggressiveness in return and will be potentially counter-productive if you wish to involve the police.

This is perhaps particularly true for women drivers whom you have seen driving badly or dangerously, which of course happens these days.  Women who drive aggressively might be inclined to accuse aggressively too, and might not be above putting on a tearful performance about being verbally assaulted by a nasty man for no reason at all while they are at it, so beware.

Don’t kid yourself that you stand any real chance of persuading any offending driver, male or female, that he or she was wrong and you’ll then get an acknowledgement let alone an apology; that is extremely unlikely ever to happen.  Generally it will be best to restrict yourself to saying, if anything, concisely and politely, that you have noted the registration number and intend to report the incident to the police.

Don’t risk another attack

If you’ve just been attacked by another road user, it’s obviously a good idea to deny him any further opportunity to have a go at you, so whatever else you might do, it is vital not to put yourself in a position, on or off your motorcycle, where you can be attacked again.

On this particular occasion the driver who had cut me up was alone, respectably dressed and in a newish car which was in good condition.  I reckoned I was safe enough following him providing I kept well back.  And since his driving settled down and it looked like he was on his best behaviour as I was following him, I even took the risk of riding directly behind him to get a clear picture of his number plate, although I did follow at more than my usual following distance.  The picture which heads this Article was taken while halted by traffic lights, after he had shown himself to be on his best behaviour for a while.

Ideally you should keep at least one other vehicle between you and the object vehicle when following a bad driver, so he (or she) cannot stop and reverse into you at speed.  Doing this would put you on the ground and prevent you from continuing to follow as well as damage your bike and maybe cause you injury.  And it might also allow an ill-intentioned driver to turn the tables by claiming that you had rear-ended him.  This is a common way of deliberately causing an accident to conduct an insurance fraud.  (Likewise accelerating hard into the side of a vehicle which they have just waved or flashed out of a side turning ahead of them; that’s another trick they use.)

Really it’s best not to follow bad drivers at all unless you have a clear purpose in mind and there are indications that it will not be dangerous to follow them.  I wouldn’t have followed a car containing several young men wearing baseball bats for example; I would have simply got the registration number as best I could and then quietly scarpered.

Bear in mind too that your eye-catching motorcycle can sometimes generate obstructive and perhaps even violent envy from other road users as well as the friendlier interest from the public which we have the privilege of attracting.  I’m convinced that some drivers of old cars, perhaps because they are losers in life themselves, get so resentful of the symbol of someone else’s success (or as they might see it unwarranted privilege) that they can be goaded into obstructing if not attacking GoldWings in the same way that motorists are generally less likely to show generosity to drivers of Jaguars and other “flash” cars.  This might be even more likely to happen if they think a GoldWing is on their case by following them.

Take your own revenge?

Revenge is sweet, so they say, but they also say it’s a dish best served cold.  Tempting though it may be to take issue or to extract vengeance, at least try to avoid doing so when hot blooded.  Whatever entitlement you might feel to take revenge on bad drivers if you can, allowing the red mist to descend and take charge of your actions while you are still riding a motorcycle is not a good idea.

I suppose I could very easily have damaged the car I had been following as soon as the driver left it in the college car park but, putting the morality of doing that aside for a moment, I could very easily have been spotted and remembered.  GoldWings are eye catching bikes.

But what if you could get away with it?  One chap I know was outraged when he saw an obviously healthy and agile young woman park her Chelsea Tractor in a disabled bay right outside a supermarket as he was leaving it, also on foot.  He pointed out that it was a disabled-only space and when she told him to mind his own business he told her that if she didn’t move her car he would slash the tyres.  She ignored this warning and went into the store; he then slashed all four tyres and left.  He got clean away with it but vigilante actions are a risky business with all the CCTV that’s around these days, even if you happen to think the victim thoroughly deserved it.

Another biker I know once turned up at a meeting and proudly showed off a set of keys which he then ostentatiously dropped down a drain.  He had been at the Council’s Recycling Centre that morning dumping some stuff when a really pushy bloke barged in front of everyone with his BMW and was being a real pain to others, including the biker.  The BMW driver happened to have left his keys dangling in the lock of his open boot lid as he bustled around, getting stuff out of his boot and then out of his car and to throw into the various skips.  The biker took the opportunity to pocket the dangling keys, finished his own business and left.

So if taking revenge on other road users is attractive to you, opportunities for vigilante justice may sometimes present themselves without too much risk of getting caught.  It’s worth bearing in mind however that in both of these cases the victim of the vigilante action, even if she and he couldn’t identify the actual perpetrator, would probably associate the incident with a motorcyclist and have something of a down on all motorcyclists thereafter.  One way and another vigilante action is probably not a very good idea, if only because it can easily rebound and/or escalate out of your control.

How about a bit of psychology?

Getting a bad driver to think twice about doing it again by perfectly legal and non-violent means is potentially a different matter and might at least give you some sense of having turned the tables.  There are laws against stalking these days so it would be unwise to make sustained efforts to hound anyone but following someone immediately after an incident in order to identify them and show that you have identified them (and incidentally now know where they live or work) is at least something you can hardly be criticised for.

The driver I followed to the college car park would be likely to have had some concerns about what might happen next.  Having a camera mounted conspicuously on my handlebars seemed to have a useful psychological effect too, albeit only after he had attacked me.

Perhaps I should ride routinely with my camera on the handlebars in future.  Indeed if I can get my granddaughter to teach me how to use it in video mode I might even leave that running routinely while I’m riding.  And maybe I could also fit a rear-facing camera, and maybe wear a hi viz vest announcing that video recording is in progress – now that really would be a defensive approach to riding!

The Trick up the Policeman’s Sleeve

Let’s get back to reality and finish the story of my recent incident and the involvement of the police.  Remember the Police Officer who called to gather information from me said there were two things he would do, one of which was to “have a word”.

Unless persuaded otherwise by what the driver had to say when interviewed, the Police Officer also intended to make an Intelligence Report of the incident on the Police National Computer.  This would flag the car’s number plate to any ANPR equipped police car (Automatic Number Plate Recognition, so all traffic cars and lots of others these days) as a vehicle known in connection with a report of bad driving.  It would make his car an object of interest and if it was seen being driven badly it would probably be stopped.  Maybe the driver would also get flagged personally on the computer too, the Policeman didn’t say.  But he did take the trouble to ring me a few days later to say that the PNC intelligence report had indeed been entered, which was kind of him.

I suppose I should have realised that the police will use ANPR to flag up all sorts of potential offenders who deserve a close look, but I had no idea that this included suspected bad drivers.  The police can use this technology to flag up bad riders too of course, so if bikers are reported by other road users for riding dangerously, they could also end up subsequently attracting the particular attentions of a traffic car.

No doubt some people will think it’s an infringement of civil liberties to use computers and cameras to flag people as targets in this way unless they have at least had a relevant conviction, but I think it’s a very good idea.  Abuse of police technology is of course a possibility but that’s always been true of all police facilities and authority – and improved technology also helps to catch abusers too, as the former traffic officer who extracted sexual favours for letting people off discovered the hard way recently; he’s now doing eight years in jail.  The police seem to be getting better at weeding out their own bad apples and good for them.

Of course there’s no point in ringing up the police every time you see an example of poor driving.  You’d never be off the phone and they’d soon have you marked as a nuisance caller.  But it’s surely comforting to know, for those of us who at least try not to ride or drive badly ourselves, that reporting really dangerous driving to the police is not a waste of time providing you go about it the right way.  And since the police were willing to do something when a motorcyclist reported that he had been attacked on this occasion, I for one will be happier to trust them to do so in future.  I’ll be less likely to follow the offending driver myself, scheming as I do so how to cause problems for him.

Well done Lancashire Constabulary.  Thank you for listening properly when I called to report the incident.  And thank you for taking this opportunity for constructive intervention, to the benefit of safety on our roads. Very professional, indeed from my viewpoint it was absolutely first class policing; minimal paperwork and worthwhile impact.

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Thanks to bifocals, one of us could see where we were going

I’ve never been on a Track Day of the sort you see advertised to UK motorcyclists, when you pay a fee to take your bike on to a race circuit and maybe get some tuition, the idea being to let you explore or develop racing-type skills.  That sort of thing might appeal to sports bike riders but a GoldWing on a race circuit?   I didn’t think so.

I had taken the opportunity to ride my Wing around the Nurnburgring during one of its public access sessions a few years ago when I was touring in the Mosel with some other riders who were keen to do it, but that was a one-off experience of just two laps; the first one in a state of high anxiety getting used to keeping out of the way of the really high speed lunatics among the high volumes of traffic on the circuit and the second one less terrified and experiencing the beginnings of enjoyment of what only a race circuit can provide – bends and sequences of bends which have been specifically designed to provide challenging riding.

The Nurnburgring during public sessions is something of a madhouse and I have no desire to do it again.  But the opportunity to ride on a race circuit for a whole day, free of charge and without having to cope with lots of other traffic on it, well that’s a different matter altogether.  I jumped at the chance.

There are however no free lunches in this world so there was of course a catch.  Access to the circuit for a whole day had been donated by the owners of the Three Sister Race Circuit near St Helens to Galloway’s Society for the Blind.  Along with other riders in my IAM Group, I would be providing visually handicapped people with the experience of being ridden, at speed, around a race circuit as a pillion passenger. They would also have a chance to ride in a sports car and to drive a dual control car and to be driven (off Circuit) in vans and lorries. It was to be quite a day out – and for about 80 of them altogether, so quite a logistic challenge for us too.

Visually handicapped people had opportunities to ride in and drive all sorts of vehicles

My South Lancashire IAM Group, SLAM, had supported Galloways with a riding day for some years but this had taken place on the runway of a private airfield.  It took place annually and there were always plenty of volunteers so one way and another I had never been involved.  Riding up and down a runway had never struck me as appealing and nor could I get my head around why blind people could enjoy it.  Wouldn’t it be a bit like sitting on a rocking chair in front of a large and noisy fan?

But a couple of years ago the runway had been closed and dug up for development and it was only when the owners of the Three Sisters had agreed to make their Circuit available that the annual event could continue.  And since the offer was restricted to a weekday, which seriously restricted who in SLAM would be available to volunteer to do the riding, I got my chance to take part.

I still didn’t really see what would be attractive to blind people about being ridden as pillion passengers but of course I was being very blinkered; blind people, or at least some of them, find the thrills (and the risks) of motorcycling attractive in the same way as we motorcyclists do.  Just because they cannot ride a bike themselves because of their visual handicap doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy being a passenger, in the same way some bikers have enjoyed being ridden around a circuit by Ron Haslam on a specially adapted racing bike.

A smiling passenger, kitted out ready to go.

I don’t think I would be brave enough to do that myself, but I can see how others might want to.  One of our blind passengers, a young man whomight have been dangerously without fear as well as completely without sight, asked me, quite seriously, if I would let him ride my GoldWing while I sat on the back seat telling him which way to go.  He wasn’t for being talked out of it either.  (Another option on this day was for the blind people to drive a dual control car themselves under an instructor’s supervision on a separate small circuit, he presumably got the idea after successfully doing that.)

A flexible, team approach was necessary for boarding some passengers

But would I enjoy (or even be able to cope with) a bunch of blind pillion passengers, over which I would not be able to pick and choose in any way, while also trying to cope with riding the challenging bends of a racing circuit?  That was the question.  As we rode in convoy to Three Sisters Race Circuit I wasn’t entirely clear what I was letting myself in for.

So we arrived, hung around for a while, then had a cup of coffee and a safety briefing by the Circuit Manager, then off we went to do a few practice laps.  We had the circuit completely to ourselves and it was bone dry.  It’s a fairly short (only 1 kilometre) and tight circuit which is used primarily for kart racing but it also hosts motorcycle events and it is used extensively for motorcycle testing.

Only selected passengers could perch on the Fireblade

The surface was fairly good with few undulations and although there was one section containing quite a challenging sequence of tightening bends, the circuit wasn’t difficult to get the hang of, not least because we weren’t trying to race (i.e to go as fast as possible) merely to get round safely at a reasonably brisk pace – enough to be exiting for the passengers but without getting in any way scary.

There were six bikes altogether: one Fireblade, two BMW GSs, one Pan European, a Yamaha and my GL1800.  We all thoroughly enjoyed our practise laps and after a while I found that I was getting the hang of the Circuit sufficiently to be scraping the footpegs on most of the bends, especially around the right hand hairpin near where most of the people were standing.  It was great fun and I could have very happily continued lapping for much longer were it not for the need to get on with the job in hand, which was providing passengers with the experience of doing it.

But there were plenty who could!

As it happens my noisy scraping around the hairpin had had something of an alarming effect on some of the spectators.  One of the car drivers sought me out to tell me that something on the bike was dragging on the ground on all the corners and did I know?

My bike is fitted with aluminium spray shields below the engine crash guards, to help keep my feet warm and dry in Lancashire weather and these touch the ground, making rather a lot of noise, at about the same time the foot pegs touch down when I lean into a bend at all enthusiastically.

While you can reduce the noise (and sparks) from dragging your footpegs simply by lifting your foot up slightly as the footpeg touches, there is no way of stopping the noise which those splash guards make – and it fact it’s quite useful to have them sounding off.   It therefore became necessary to explain to passengers that my bike wouldn’t be about to fall over as I went round the bends if a scraping noise developed.  Not one of them batted an eyelid.

Slowing for exit into the Pit Lane

We set up shop with our array of spare jackets, gloves and helmets in the Pits and the visually handicapped passengers (only some of whom were completely blind) were brought to us in small groups by the Carers which Galloways had laid on as escorts.  They were accompanied by their guide dogs, who were lovely and friendly but sadly there was no plan to give them a pillion ride so they had to stay and pine (which they did, loudly in some cases) while their owners were on the Circuit.

We worked out a system for introducing ourselves to our passengers and them to the bikes, kitting them out and helping them to mount the bikes – which in some cases required a team effort.  We then gave each of them two or three laps of the Circuit before returning to the Pits to change passengers.

There was no way to shake off the Healey on the Circuit

Some of the passengers were less well physically suited to being a pillion passenger than others and I eventually realised that I had been invited along with my GoldWing as the heavyweight, to cope with the ones who could not be perched on the rear of a Fireblade or even the Pan.  It was clearly safer and more comfortable for the larger or less physically able passengers to ride on the GoldWing so we tactfully steered them in that direction.  The visually handicapped people who had chosen to come along ranged in age from 12 to over 70 and they came in all shapes and sizes, including two really quite large ones.  In some cases it was quite a challenge to get them onto the bike and occasionally I had to position the bike close to a low wall, from the top of which the passenger could step sideways on to the bike.  One lady was worried that she would damage her artificial hip if she lifted her leg high enough to get on the bike so I explained that I had one of those too and there was nothing to worry about; she survived the experience.

I am of course on the large size myself and I had taken along my largest spare jacket, an XXXXL from days when i was even bigger.  This was a blessing because the other riders were all relatively slim.  Even so it took two of us pulling hard to get the zip fastened for one passenger – and I found myself riding those laps, of necessity, leaning well forward in my seat.

Three Sisters Race Circuit at St Helens

I suppose the passengers wouldn’t have come anywhere near the bikes at all unless they were up for riding on them but I have to say they surprised me, given their advanced years and in some cases conspicuous frailty, by their pluck and determination to get on the bikes.  They were also invariably insistent on going as fast as possible and being very appreciative afterwards.     I didn’t attempt to go as fast as possible of course, just fast enough to allow them to experience the bike’s acceleration and to lean far enough over to feel that we were leaning over and occasionally make a bit of noise with the foot shields.  The very last thing I or any of the other riders wanted to do was to risk an accident.

And therein lay a problem because as our lunch break finished it started to rain – only lightly at first but eventually it was coming down really quite heavily.  Our passengers were not in the least deterred by the prospect of a soaking but the circuit became very slippery, especially on the section with the combination of tightening bends and we had to slow down almost to a stop.  The race line was worn smooth and was covered in a film of water which in places seemed to have oil on it too.  On two or three  occasions I felt the back wheel slipping, once very alarmingly, despite the much slower pace and the extra care I was taking.

Believe it or not this guy preferred to perch on the Fireblade

There was therefore no option, short of calling a complete halt, to taking a slow outside line around the bends, to find better grip and using the parts of the circuit where there still was some grip to open up a little.  Our speeds unavoidably dropped by more than half and at one stage I thought we would have to call a halt.  Happily however the heavy rain didn’t last long and there were parts of the circuit where we could still accelerate briskly and lean over into a bend so the passengers still got their thrills.  And later in the afternoon the rain stopped and the Circuit started to dry out.

Noisy Spray Shields

We were sharing the Circuit with five sports cars: a Morgan Plus Four, a TVR, an E Type Jaguar,  a Mitsubishi Evolution and 1961 Austin Healey 3000, the last being driven with real gusto.  During the heavy rain they could keep up a better pace than we could but even they had difficulties; on the section of the Circuit with the3 combination of tightening bends the Austin Healey spun twice round as he lost grip, fortunately without hitting anything or coming off.  Happily that was the only such incident of the day and the Circuit Manager didn’t see it – otherwise the Healey driver might have been given a black flag and I wouldn’t have been able to persuade him to drive me round the circuit in his lovely (and lively) car at the end of the day.   The track was drying out nicely by then and it was an exhilarating ride.

Footpeg wear wasn't all done on this track day

So there we are.  I had the good fortune to be invited to give pillion rides to a dozen or so visually handicapped people of varying ages and varying shapes and sizes.  They were keen, interested and appreciative and it was a real privilege.  And I got to ride 40 or 50 laps of a race circuit in the process, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  I will certainly be volunteering again next year.

My thanks are due to Keith Wilde and Pino of SLAM who took these photographs and has kindly allowed me to use them.  Likewise to my fellow riders of SLAM who showed me the ropes and didn’t pull my leg about riding a behemoth any more than usual.

Good for the motorcycling soul

My first set of confessions about what I have learned by frightening myself riding my GoldWing seems to have pushed viewing figures for this Blog to a new high, over 4,500 unique visits last week which is very gratifying, thank you all.

So it presumably struck a bit of a chord with some of you readers out there, if only to give those of you who don’t suffer any such qualms an opportunity to feel a bit  superior.  The subject may therefore be worth developing a bit more – and my buttocks have, if nothing else, gathered enough experience of motorcycling clenches to provide plenty to write about.

Maybe there are Wingers out there who did all the bike-dropping they needed to do or learned all they need to learn before treating themselves to a GoldWing, but generally speaking there are Wingers who admit to having dropped their bike and Wingers who pretend they have never done so.

So let’s be honest with ourselves; none of us are infallible and if we want to minimise the risk of undignified wobbles and horizontal parking, we need to make sure we understand what can go wrong and how to avoid it.  Then it’s simply a matter of eternal vigilance and sustained concentration when you are riding, as usual!

Having established that there is interest among my Blog Viewers in basic riding skills, or at least in me owning up to failures of skill, I might as well bare my soul by confessing to difficulties I have had with even the most basic of all riding skills, like setting off and stopping – in the process of both of which I’ve managed to drop the bike at least once and to wobble far more often than I would have hoped, even when there were no particular hazards or complications to deal with.

And you feel such a pratt when you do this sort of thing, don’t you, when really you should have been able to avoid it?

Beginner’s wobbles

My problem, which recurs if I get lazy about the way I balance the bike at the halt, was that sometimes I could set off smoothly and stay perfectly vertical while doing so, and therefore ride off in a nice dignified straight line.  On other occasions, without really understanding why, the bike would set off with a bit of a mind of its own, veering left or right or both so that I would have to make a correction.  Not necessarily a serious wobble but enough to feel sloppy – and even more importantly to me at the time, to look bad.

It was really irritating if it happened when I was stopped at traffic lights with other bikers around (especially behind) which is when you really want to look the business by setting off smoothly and under perfect control and also showing these riders of lesser bikes that a GoldWing is perfectly capable of a brisk departure.  Any chance a non-Winger gets to feel superior about his own riding when he sees a GoldWing wobble is of course taken.  You can’t ride a magnificently conspicuous bike like a GoldWing and hope to be inconspicuous when you make a bollocks of your riding, can you?

And stopping used to be a major source of anxiety too; I would always be wondering (and was sometimes really worried) whether I would end up having to recover from a serious lurch to one side or another as the bike came to a halt, even on dry level tarmac.   How dare my GoldWing do this to me I used to think?  How can a bike have such a mischievous spirit lurking inside?  I spent all this money on it to look and feel impressive as I make an arrival somewhere and the bloody thing wobbles on me and even tries to chuck me off!   As my anxieties persisted I even tried to talk the bike into behaving as I approached a stopping place.  This time could we stop smoothly please; no jerkiness, no lurches sideways, just a nice smooth halt?

Yet sometimes I would start and stop smoothly and (apparently) under perfect control.  So the problem was that I didn’t know why I was doing it badly or well, so I couldn’t correct whatever the errors were.  It was very frustrating.  Talking to the bike hadn’t worked so it was time to get serious.  I signed up to do advanced rider training.

Stopping smoothly and precisely can be very rewarding

I don’t remember whether my Observer (i.e. instructor) when I was doing my IAM training covered starting off from the halt specifically but he certainly covered stopping under positive control because that’s part of the skill set you are expected to acquire.  Maybe teaching riders to set off smoothly wasn’t considered necessary or maybe my little wobbles when setting off weren’t all that conspicuous to anyone but me.

Some of my wobbles were however very conspicuous and my worst ever starting-off wobble is carved deeply in my memory as a huge source of embarrassment.  It must have been very conspicuous, although thankfully the other bikers I was with at the time didn’t say a dicky bird.  They did take the mickey out of me for getting lost while I was supposed to be leading them, which I deserved, so maybe they thought that wobbles of that sort were only possible if you did them deliberately.

There was nothing complicated about the crossroads I was pulling away from and no pressure from oncoming traffic either; it was simply that I was getting very flustered at the time and more or less lost the plot for a few seconds.  I must have had both feet down as I pulled away and the bike seemed to start wobbling alarmingly.  Neither foot got anywhere near a footpeg and as the bike wobbled from side to side underneath me and my legs ended up sticking out sideways.

I found myself balanced on rock-hard buttocks, like a tightrope walker who’d dropped his balancing pole trying to recover the situation by using legs instead.  As a well-practised stunt it would have looked like a very impressive pretence of losing control, a bit like the way Les Dawson used to play the piano badly with superb precision.  Hence the possibility that the following riders thought it was deliberate, as if I was showing off in some way.

In reality of course my buttocks, still rock hard and tightly clenched, were balancing like a pair of ten pin bowling balls on the seat and in real danger of rolling off.  I had completely lost control and strangled screams of anguish were coming at me over the intercom from the back seat so at least one other person in the group knew it wasn’t an act.  My hands were still on the handlebars but by no means doing anything useful.  Underneath me the bike was very much doing its own thing.

Since we were by now doing something like 10 mph, the bike was perfectly capable of staying vertical all on its own providing I stopped interfering and that’s what probably happened next.  The wobbles subsided, my feet stopped levitating and found the footpegs and a more conventional style of riding was resumed – or what passed for riding style at that miserable stage of my motorcycling development.

Failure to recognise overload

The underlying problem on that occasion, and the reason why I had got flustered enough to lose the plot, was that I was supposed to be leading a ride of several GoldWings south-westwards back across the Northern Pennines after a touring weekend in Edinburgh.  Foolishly, on the basis that I had ridden more or less the same route a fortnight earlier, I had volunteered to do so.  Big mistake.  At that stage of my motorcycling development I would have been far better off concentrating entirely on my own riding and letting someone else do the navigating.  No matter how or why it’s happened, if the motorcycling you’re engaged in has taken you outside your coping zone you should be willing to recognise that it’s happened and either pull over straight away or slow down and ride carefully to somewhere where you can stop safely to take a break.

I had actually started my IAM training when I had my memorable megawobble but, fairly obviously, only just.  And I had been on an IAM group ride that passed the same way only a fortnight previously.  (That was also, in part, a terrifying experience but that’s another story.  It’s really not a good idea for trainee riders to go out with the big boys until they have completed their training.)

I had recently installed satnav on my bike (so she was a very well equipped GL1200) and must have felt that I could probably remember enough of the route on which I had followed someone else to get away with leading this group of GoldWings over the same ground a fortnight later.  Over-confidence comes before a fall – or in this case thankfully only a near fall.  I did eventually see sense and stopped to admit I was lost and someone else kindly (and without fuss) took over.  I think it probably helped that Management, as she’s respectfully referred to in our Household, told me to do so.

Ideally of course I would have worked it out for myself and pulled over to take stock and think again.  But you don’t do you?  What is that makes blokes  press on anyway, same as when we won’t stop to look at the map until we’ve actually, undeniably got lost?  When you are in a group trying to avoid loss of face must have something to do with it I suppose.  When I was younger I could blame testosterone but I think I’ve used all mine up.  Maybe that’s why I’m generally a bit more risk averse than I used to be.  One way or another I am certainly getting better at pausing for thought rather than forging onwards these days and it’s a blessing.  Come to think of it having a shorter bladder range can be seen in a positive light in this context too.

In spite of getting more cautious with age and gathering at least some experience along the way, I still sometimes have to tell myself to calm down or to pull over and take a break before something goes badly wrong.  Some riders talk about the importance of recognising that you’re having a “bad bend day”;  you might not be able to work out precisely why yet but you can tell that you’re not riding as well as you should be doing.  Being sufficiently self-aware and self-critical to recognise when you are not doing very well is very important for motorcyclists; it’s a way of staying alive.

Stopping smoothly and precisely

Whether or not I was specifically taught during my subsequent IAM training how to set off from the halt smoothly I cannot clearly recall but I was certainly taught how to bring the bike to a smooth halt.

Teaching granny to suck eggs?  Not a bit of it; this was valuable stuff, a basic building brick of riding skill which then made learning other things much easier.

Once you understand why you are wobbling you can work on fixing it

The training is done differently nowadays but at the time great store was set on learning to do what’s called the Hendon Shuffle as you stop.  It was explained to me that learning to do this was not compulsory but it was the mark of an advanced rider to use it – and of course to be seen to be using it.  If I took the trouble to learn it, I was told, I would develop my confidence in being able to control the bike precisely as it halted.  Police motorcyclists were all taught it, hence the name, from the Hendon Police College’s teachings.  Well, I thought, to myself, if that’s the way to do it properly, I’d better give it a go.

First steps first however and to start with I was to be taught only the essentials of stopping smoothly.  (My determination to learn the Hendon Shuffle, whatever it was, was now even firmer.  It became my private goal.  Once I could do the Hendon Shuffle I reasoned, I could start to think of myself as an Advanced Rider and other initiates would recognise this.  Secret signs would probably be exchanged at traffic lights and, as one of the in crowd, I’d perhaps be let off speeding offences too.)

The essentials of stopping a motorcycle under positive control are:

1. Observe what’s in front of you carefully; the nature and slope of the road surface, any obstacles etc, then choose where you are going to stop and plan how you are going to do it.  (This doesn’t mean drawing mental diagrams or making up a formal risk assessment but it does mean looking properly and deciding where and how you are going to stop.)
2. Always (except perhaps in slippery conditions) use brakes rather than gears to slow the bike down.
3. Use both brakes to reduce speed, to exploit the front brake’s extra efficiency when weight is being transferred forwards during braking, but for the last few feet to use the rear brake only in order to minimise dipping of the forks and consequent rebounding.
4. Bring the bike to a halt perfectly upright and in balance, so that the bike will, if left to its own devices, stay vertical on its own, at least for a moment or two, before starting to tip.
5. Then without jabbing at it, put your left foot down gently; the small transfer of weight to the left as you do this will tip the bike enough to ensure that it doesn’t go the other way and not so much that it tries to fall over.
6. Hold the bike lightly in balance, almost upright; there should be hardly any weight on your left foot at all as you put it down.
7. If you are turning as you stop (eg into a parking space) you need to judge things so that your bike is just coming upright and into balance as it comes to a halt.  Using only the rear brake to come to a halt is very helpful in achieving this.

Once you’ve practised this and can do it consistently you are entitled to look smug as you do so if you wish because it looks really impressive to bystanders, especially other Wingers.

Note that while releasing the front brake before you finally stop is generally necessary to prevent fork dip and rebound on lesser bikes, GoldWings have linked brakes, so using the pedal brake acts on both wheels.  The brake pedal also triggers the bike’s an anti-dive mechanism too, so using both brakes throughout a stopping manoeuvre is perfectly OK.  But it is still good practice to ease off on the front brake as you are coming to a halt because this helps to avoid any risk of a snatch which could pull you down if you’re not quite straight and level.  If you use front brake only the anti-dive mechanism does not operate, which is another good reason for avoiding the use of just the front brake at low speed.

An analytical approach, to what is after all a fairly simple riding manoeuvre,  struck me at the time as a bit anorakish but I learned by experience to value it, especially since the implications of the theory could be turned into a simple drill for stopping which I could memorise and apply.  Observe, choose, use both brakes, get upright, rear brake only, left foot down.

Now I was talking to myself rather than to the bike as I was bringing it to a halt and with beneficial results.  The stopping drill sunk in, I started stopping more consistently smoothly and eventually, as the penny dropped, I didn’t even have to talk to myself either.

The Senior Observer who expounded these principles to us Associates (trainees) during a classroom session was patient and thorough and he left us in no doubt; do it this way and it will work.  You might need to practise to be able to do it consistently smoothly but follow these steps and they will work.  Generations of police riding instructors and IAM Senior Observers cannot all be wrong.  I got the message: no self respecting Advanced Rider would normally put two feet down when he stops.  Only the left foot goes down.

“Ah but”  said one of my fellow students, “I always have to put two feet down when I stop because my wife wiggles around a lot on the back”.  Without any perceptible pause for thought, the Senior Observer said “Well give her a slap then” and carried on with the lesson.

Putting only the left foot down actually makes good sense.  Having a foot on the rear brake is an important part of being able to control your bike as it comes to a halt so your right foot needs to be there.   Otherwise you are either going to be sliding your feet on the ground to stop the bike or using front brake only, neither of which is a good idea.

You might have to put your right foot down eventually in some circumstances of course, to stabilise the bike, for example if there is a gusty cross wind.  Even so your left foot should go down first.  If the ground slopes so steeply down to the left that your left leg isn’t long enough to let you put that foot down you shouldn’t be choosing to stop there in the first place.

Of course you have to swap feet over to put the side stand down or to engage gear prior to setting off, but apart from that it’s the left foot that does the balancing of the bike when you are stationary.

It’s really quite important for your confidence in handling a GoldWing at low speed that you practise this until you can bring the bike smoothly to a halt in precisely the position you have chosen to put it and then, with casually ease and gentleness, put your left foot down.  Once you get the hang of balancing the bike completely vertically as you bring it to a halt and the confidence that you can do so reliably, you will discover that the bike really will just stay there for long enough to meet your needs, tipping only very slowly to the left as you put your left foot down at relative leisure.  No need to jab your leg out in a panic; that will destabilise the balance of the bike and make it lurch to the left rather than lean over gently and you’ll end up having to take a firmer stance to stop it falling over.

Practice makes perfect and after a while the penny will drop, the stopping sequence will start to come naturally and you will be able to relax as you are stopping rather than getting all tensed up about it.  You will gain confidence that you are, and can always expect to be, in control.  It’s a wonderful feeling when it happens.  (Telling the wife that unless she sat still on the bike the Senior Observer would give her a slap was very satisfying too.)

But you will need to practise.  So find yourself a quite area on a nice flat supermarket car park and practise stopping and starting in a straight line, then practise turning into parking bays smoothly and stopping neatly in the middle, precisely where you have chosen to park.  Do this riding solo to start with and then do it again with your passenger on board.  This will teach you both what to expect and give both of you the confidence that stopping and parking the bike needn’t be a time for anxiety.

Setting off without wobbles

I suppose from learning to stop under control I was able to work out for myself how to reverse the process when getting going.  The trick is to get the bike properly upright before you try to set off rather than trying to do it leaning over enough to be carrying lots of weight on your left foot.  If you are not resting lightly on your left foot, the bike isn’t sufficiently upright. And it’s the left foot remember, always the left.

Setting off from left foot down, right foot on the brake, allows you to hold the bike on the rear brake and also to have your right hand completely free to control the throttle.  If you try to apply throttle and control the front brake at the same time you’ll find that you can’t do either properly and you’ll risk making a mess of things, especially if you are doing a hill start and whether you’re facing uphill or down.  Get into the habit of always using the rear brake for setting off as well as stopping.  If you always do it, even on level ground, you won’t need to think about how to do a difficult hill start, you will be doing the right thing automatically.

When subsequently became an IAM Observer myself  I always took my Associates (i.e. trainees) to a quiet car park for a bit of stopping and starting practice early on in the training sequence.  And even though some of them were quite capable and experienced riders already, they all found this session useful.  Being able to stop precisely where you choose to stop under good and reliable control is a very useful basic riding skill.  And once you’ve acquired this basic skill, a lot of the anxiety you will feel about riding a big bike like a GoldWing will tend to evaporate.

Likewise if you’ve developed the skill of setting off smoothly and effortlessly, with the bike well balanced, it’s much easier to cope with additional challenges, like having to make a tight turn as soon as you’ve set off.

Summary

In summary when you stop your GoldWing it’s a question of looking properly and choosing wisely where and how you will stop, then making sure that you get the bike upright as it comes to a halt, using the rear brake to bring it to a final stop and then putting your left foot down.

When you are setting off ensure the bike is upright as you release the brake and clutch to move off.   There should be negligible weight on your left foot as you are about to set off; if you have to push off with your left foot to get vertical as you accelerate away the bike is going to wobble.

For both stopping and starting smoothly it’s a question of developing the confidence to be relaxed while you are balancing the bike at the halt and at low speed and trusting it to stay vertical for long enough to allow you to do your bit, which it will.

And then, once you have got the hang of stopping and setting off smoothly, you can start thinking about the Hendon Shuffle, so maybe I’ll write about that some time, so you can give it a go.

But don’t have any illusions that it’s a shortcut or even a reliable pathway towards genuinely becoming an advanced rider.  I have discovered that there’s quite a bit more to achieving that than learning one particular skill or even a whole array of skills.  And as a consequence, certainly as far as I’m concerned, becoming a genuinely advanced rider is very much work in progress and likely to remain so indefinitely.

Silly really but I still haven’t felt able, even though I’m perfectly entitled, to put an IAM sticker on my bike.  Don’t be discouraged by my hang ups though; the journey of discovery with the IAM is a very enjoyable one and it’s rewarding very quickly in terms of the improvements to your riding and confidence that you will feel.  And this is ample consolation for the possibility that you, as I do, may never quite feel that you’ve actually arrived.  Maybe that’s a healthy state of mind to hang on to, or at least I like to think so.

If you would like to make contact with your local IAM Group to learn more about advanced motorcycle training, click here.

Despite pulling right up to the line and a well trimmed hedge, this driver's view is still obstructed

Many of us will have had a break from riding over the winter and I had a longer break than usual myself this time, thanks to a bit of surgery followed by a lot more snow and ice ( and therefore salt) than usual.  So coming back to riding might involve for some of you, as it always seems to do for me, recovering riding skills which have gone a bit rusty.

Setting off for the first ride never seems to bother me and it feels quite natural to get back on the bike and start riding it again.  So I am perhaps fortunate in rarely suffering any huge crisis of confidence, although it did happen to me one Spring – ironically after passing my Advanced Riding Test the previous November.  I really did have to go back to basics that year and rebuild confidence in my basic handling skills that year.  Mind you I was still riding my GL1200SEi that year and compared to a GL1800 it is a bit of a handful.  Fortunately that sort of major loss of confidence has not recurred.

Every year there is however something I need to relearn – or more usually quite a few skill elements I need to brush up.  And sometimes I seem to have to experience a buttock-clenching moment or two as a wake up call before giving them the attention they deserve, even though I consciously try to go through a personal re-training routine each year as I start riding again.  For example one of the first things I do is head for a nice quite, flat car park to practice stopping and starting smoothly and to do some other slow speed manoeuvring to get my confidence back about coping with tight turns and the like.

Blind junctions seem to crop up most years as something I forget how to do properly for a while and from time to time they deliver the sharp reminder of a near miss (or worse) that I’ve fallen into bad habits again and need to get my act together or pay the price.  By “blind” junctions I’m referring to those where there is no proper view of the approaching traffic to which you will have to give way until you are right up to it.  There might also be an awkward angle of view (my neck won’t go round as far these days) or additional hazards at the junction such as a slope or a loose surface to complicate matters too, but essentially it poor visibility of conflicting traffic I’m referring to.

Many junctions are marked with a Stop sign rather than Give Way and for those you have no option of course – you are obliged by law to come to a complete halt and put a foot down.  And really you’re taking a big and unnecessary risk if you don’t stop at these junctions.  Stop signs are not erected for fun and there will almost invariably be a very good reason why the extra precaution of stopping completely for a good look before entering a junction is necessary for your safety.  And GoldWings aren’t the easiest of bikes to hover, feet up, at a junction in a state of indecision are they, even when the road is flat and smooth?

At a Give Way junction on the other hand you have a choice and you can keep rolling as you enter the junction if you wish.  Keeping moving through the junction isn’t compulsory of course but stopping isn’t mandatory either.

The golden rule of Give Way junctions is Plan to stop so that you can choose whether to go.

Incidentally this applies to junctions generally, not just blind ones, and to roundabouts too, especially when your view of other traffic is obstructed as you approach it.  If you are prepared to stop as you approach you will be able to do so without difficulty, if you’re not prepared you risk making a hash of doing so when the need suddenly arises.

It’s easy to forget to apply this Rule because the instinctive thing to do for most riders when approaching a Give Way junction or roundabout is to plan to keep rolling and to consider any problem which stopping might prevent only when it becomes necessary.  Since you might have to stop very quickly indeed if traffic appears at a blind bend, being unprepared to stop is not a good idea.  Your balance of the bike will be wrong for stopping and you might not be able to recover in time if you need to.

I know that I have a tendency to slip back into this particular bad habit and I do try to stop myself doing so but it’s not easy.  It’s perhaps a combination of eagerness to keep moving (it is only a Give Way junction after all) and laziness, in that superficially it’s easier to keep the bike moving through the junction than stopping and starting off again.

And when I do start to fall back into the bad habit I usually get away with it a few times which isn’t helpful because this tends to reinforce the bad habit.   I might tick myself off for being sloppy but having got away with it I don’t dwell on it and don’t do anything to stop it happening again either – until I get a real fright, when fast traffic suddenly appears, just as I have committed myself to entering a junction.  And even if I do survive unscathed the buttocks will have clenched and I will have had my serious reminder to get a grip and start tackling junctions properly again.  All it takes to end up dropping the bike when you have to stop suddenly and unexpectedly is an unfavourable slope or a bit of loose gravel which you haven’t bothered to look for and down you go.

You can slip back into bad habits at any stage of the Season of course, it doesn’t need a lay off to bring it about.  I didn’t need a reminder to tackle junctions properly this year because I was still smarting about a mistake I made late last Season when I did drop the bike.

At this junction the view is obstructed by a roadside equipment box

I was taking my granddaughter out for an afternoon ride around Pendle Hill in East Lancashire, where the Pendle Witches came from.  It’s a scenic potter through fairly narrow and twisty lanes.  I felt on safe ground because I’d done the same circuit a week or two earlier and found a nice Cafe with a witches theme; just the thing to interest my granddaughter.  I decided to do it anti-clockwise this time, for a change.  I don’t get the chance to take her out very often so it’s a special opportunity with a special passenger; I was taking great care.

I was approach a blind T Junction (high untended hedges obstructing the view left and right) on a narrow country lane intending to turn right.  I slowed right down but there was no sight or sound of traffic so I kept moving slowly, very slowly I suppose, as I was about to enter the junction.  I looked both ways and the road was clear but it was an awkward tight right turn I was about to make and with granddaughter on board I really didn’t want to make a balls of it.  I was now focused on making the turn.

At that very moment, as I was still moving ahead, barely into the junction and eyeing up my turn a fast moving vehicle appeared from the left and I saw the movement in my peripheral vision. Instinctively  I jammed on the brakes (including grabbing the front brake) and down the bike went to the left.  The white van, for that’s what it was, swerved around me and carried on as I went down.  I rolled off with the momentum of the slow but unstoppable fall of the bike and granddaughter found herself  sitting at a much steeper angle.  The bike had toppled right over, rocking on its crash bars, rear wheel off the ground, touching down with mirror housing and clutch lever.  My granddaughter was shaken by the sudden change of circumstances but unhurt.

Perhaps the van driver had a conscience about his speed but anyway he had seen me go down and very kindly came back to offer help.  The bike was easily rocked back onto both wheels and then lifted (using the technique I learned at the 2008 Light Parade from our US friends) back upright.  The clutch lever had broken and the mirror housing was scratched but the mirror was intact and there was no other damage.  I thanked the van driver for his help and we went on our way.

So where did I go wrong?  I could of course try to lay all the blame on the van driver; he was cracking along approaching a junction which should have been signposted to him as an upcoming hazard and he was probably a local lad forging ahead with gusto.  But his hazard sign, if there was one, might have been as obscured by overgrow hedges, as my Give Way sign had been, if indeed there had been one at all.  There were certainly no road markings at the junction; it was a narrow, unclassified country lane.  Maybe I should blame the Highway Authority for poor signage, poor junction design and poor maintenance.

But no matter whether the junction was a bad one or the van driver was driving faster than he should have been, I was unprepared to stop and that’s what really mattered.  That’s why the bike went down when it shouldn’t have done.

It was a real pig of a junction because of the angles and the hedges and the distinct slope down and across the turning line.  I should have spotted the difficult slope of ground and realised the junction presented exceptionally poor visibility of approaching traffic.  I should have planned to stop to pause to listen as well as look.  I should have planned to align the bike for the right hand turn as I stopped, to make it easier to move off straight into a tight turn.  I should have paused to listen and look for long enough to have more confidence that there was no oncoming traffic.  I should certainly have sounded my horn before moving into the junction to warn other traffic of my presence.  It was such a pig of a junction that I should perhaps even have considered asking the granddaughter to dismount and cross over on foot to check for approaching traffic from where it could be seen.  I didn’t do any of these things and I paid the price.

Fortunately it was the relatively small price of a new clutch lever and a replacement mirror housing.  Had the van approached at the same speed one second later when I would have been further into the junction, I doubt very much if he could have stopped and a serious collision who have occurred, of which my granddaughter’s left leg would have taken the brunt.  I shudder to think what injuries she would have sustained.

As buttock-clenching reminders go this one was therefore fairly high on the Richter Scale and the memories have persisted.  I am, for the time being, consistently planning to stop at junctions and choosing to go if and when the view of approaching traffic is clear.  So I can now concentrate on some of the other bad habits I’ve developed over the winter, like turning into bends too early again.

You really have to keep working at your skills to ride safely and well but that’s one of the things which makes motorcycling so enjoyable.  If it was easy it would be boring!

Advanced Riding Training was great fun as well as the most useful thing I ever did to develop my motorcycling skills.  The Skills for Life programme offered by the Institute of Advanced Motorists is available all over UK and it’s really cheap too – the fee includes your first year’s membership as well the training manual and the test.  And the lessons are all free because the instructors (called Observers) are volunteers.

Apologies for the photographs in this Article, which are the most relevant I could grab in the limited time available.  It seemed important to publish on this subject early in the Season but I will replace them with pictures which are motorcycle oriented as soon as practicable.

Shall we turn right next then chaps?

The Central Florida Motorcycle Drill Team, who came to Blackpool for the GoldWing Light Parade in 2008 to display for us, are alive and kicking and they are still World Champions too partly, as i recall, because no one has been brave enough to challenge them for a while.

We became friends with the four Team Members who came over to UK in 2008 and have stayed in contact ever since.   My wife and I (and other members of the Light Parade Organising Team) have met up with them whenever we’ve been in Florida on holiday ever since and their Captain, Randy Rodriguez, will be coming back to UK again for this year’s Parade in  September and bringing his wife, Cat, too.  So we look forward to seeing at least two of them in Blackpool again.

Not as a Display Team this time unfortunately and not to give a Display, but at least Randy will be here and hopefully I will be able to organise a loan bike for him and maybe therefore be able to do some training sessions for us, as he kindly did last time.

They don't usually get quite this close while riding nose to tail!

However this Article was provoked not by the prospect of another refreshment of our trans-Atlantic friendship, pleasant though that certainly is, but by the arrival of a set of pictures of the Team in action this year on home ground.  As you can see these show that the team is still very good at what they do and they are still thinking up new routines.   For example two riders standing up while riding one bike is a new one.

The Team had acquired two lady Riders in Training when we were over there last May and although one of them was perhaps keener on pursuing Smitty than getting her riding skills up to the necessary standard (which was also featuring strongly in Team Humour as I recall, Smitty was shown no mercy at all) the other lady was showing real talent.  And toughness, for learning to ride the way they do is not for the feint hearted.

Look no hands! Two riders standing.

It takes many months of practising, first of all personal riding skills and then with Team Riders on the Training Pad before a rider stands any chance of joining the Display Team proper.  It’s quite a democratic thing; the whole Team has to agree to accept a new Team Rider – not surprising since complete confidence in what all the other Riders will do when you and your expensive bike are in such close proximity to them is vital.

Collisions are not common but they do happen occasionally and bikes do get damaged; the deal is that everyone pays for their own damage regardless, which save any disputes.   The Team often travels long distances to give a Display and only sometimes get expenses refunded, so being a Team Rider is quite a financial commitment too.

Now which way was I supposed to turn next?

As you will see from the photos the Team ride either GoldWings or big Harleys.  The GoldWings are better at maintaining constant speed (thanks to fuel injection and an ECU) while the Harleys can turn a bit more tightly.  They reckon you can get a GL1800 down to an 18 foot diameter circle (as an absolute minimum, don’t try this at home!) while a Harley can be turned in as little as 16 feet.   Some Riders have a Harley and a GoldWing and I even met one who preferred the comfort of his Harley to his GoldWing, although I wasn’t convinced that was his real reason for the preference; I suspected he was secretly addicted to vibration.

He looks like he's standing still because he is standing still!

They are a great bunch to spend time with and we look forward to continuing our international friendship.

Following the great success of their display at the 2008 GoldWing Light Parade and their generosity in teach a few UK riders some of their skills there was talk of forming a UK GoldWing Drill Team.  We got as far as riding tight circles with four of us nose to tail and some simple flaring and outward turns from and back into pairs.

Sadly the upheavals in the UK GoldWing Club scene put paid to that idea but maybe all was not lost and 2010 could see that prospect emerging again in due course.  It was certainly a lot of fun learning and, albeit maybe beginner’s luck, no one collided.

Finding a Training Pad wasn’t going to be difficult but there are difficulties finding suitable venues to give displays in UK; there just aren’t the same number of big flat car parks etc in our over-crowded little Island to provide the necessary space and flat surface.  Trying to do it on grass is, according to the experts, a big risk too far.

If you would like to see more of the Central Florida Motorcycle drill team in action please visit their Website by clicking here.

Never mind, just pick it up again! It's not difficult

It’s quite normal to approach a GoldWing with sense of anxiety about its weight, wondering how on earth you could pick it up again if you dropped it.

This Page aims to give you confidence that although of course GoldWings can be dropped, there are ways to minimise damage (there is usually none or very little) and they can be picked up by a rider without assistance, as the demonstrations at last year’s Blackpool Light Parade showed.

Indeed one of the things you have to beware of when you are picking up a Wing is helpful bystanders getting too enthusiastic about helping – and doing unnecessary damage by grabbing and pulling in the wrong place.

These notes are based on experience with a GL1800 but they will also apply pretty well to other GoldWing models.
How to drop a GoldWing (gracefully)

Dropping a GoldWing almost always happens at very low speed, almost stationary in fact, and more often than not because the rider grabs the front brake when the bike isn’t quite vertical or the front wheel is not pointing straight ahead. The effect of braking like this jerks the bike into a potential fall which it can be difficult if not impossible to stop.

Like any bike a GoldWing can be kept vertical very easily providing it’s kept nearly vertical. With a lightweight bike it may not matter if it is allowed to lean quite a long way over, the rider will still be able to arrest the fall by putting a foot down and pull the bike up again with relatively little effort.

Never reject and offer from a lady to pick your bike up

Not so with a GoldWing, once it starts to go down it quickly becomes impossible to stop going down and the best you can hope to do is break its fall. You can start to feel this happening as you drop the bike onto its side stand in the normal way; it gets a little heavier the further it leans over.

The extent to which the bike leans when it’s on its side stand is more or less as far as a rider sitting astride the bike can comfortably pull it up from, even he has a foot firmly on the ground. If you ever fit a shortened side stand by mistake, you will notice straight away that the bike has got much heavier (and harder) to pull upright.

So if you fail to get the bike upright as you stop, and especially if you use the front brake to stop suddenly, a GoldWing will try very hard to lie down completely. It only takes a sudden stop from less than walking pace to cause this problem.

The best way to prevent a GoldWing from dropping on you is to bring it to a halt smoothly and carefully, get it upright before you come to a halt (so no stopping while you’re still turning) and use the foot brake to do so.

You can use a little front brake too if you wish, but never (repeat never) risk stopping purely on the front brake just for the sake of getting your feet ready to put down. Unless the bike is completely vertical as it comes to a halt and your feet are placed solidly on firm ground, there will be a serious risk of the bike toppling.
If it’s going down, it’s going down

If you don’t get this right and the bike starts to fall beyond the point where you can hold it then it’s time to accept the inevitable and put your efforts into breaking its fall.

Back to the bike, butt low down, legs nearly straight

GoldWings are designed to cope with being dropped and, unlike lesser bikes, even it you do little to soften the fall, there is unlikely to be serious damage. Superficial scratches on the engine crash bars will often be all there is to show for it.

Unless a GoldWing falls onto a surface which is sloping away from it fairly steeply, it will drop onto its crash bars and nothing else will touch the ground.

If you are unlucky and the Wing gathers enough momentum to go further over, rocking on its crash bars, then the mirrors housings touch the ground and may be scratched. If it lands heavily the clutch or brake lever may also suffer damage and the pannier lid may get scratched. That’s about as bad as it can get. Mostly damage will be limited to superficial scratching of the front crash guard and probably not even that.
Picking it up

This is nothing like as difficult as you might imagine and it can be done by one person unaided, indeed it can be done by a woman of small stature. It’s technique rather than brute strength which gets a GoldWing back upright.

No helping, she's doing it on her own

Before you start lifting, it is important to stabilise the bike, so it won’t run away with you as it comes up to the vertical. The engine will have stopped automatically but turn off the ignition anyway.

Next ensure that the bike is in gear. It may well be in gear already but if move the gear pedal with you hand to engage a gear, reaching under the bike if necessary.

It can also help to stabilise the bike for purposes of picking it up if you put the handlebars right over and apply the steering lock, although this is not essential. It you are going to do it turn the handlebars so that the downhill grip is to the rear of the bike.

Finally if the bike has fallen to the right put the side stand down so it can’t possibly fall over the other way when you get it upright. If it’s fallen the other way this will not be possible until the bike has been picked up.

So the ignition is off and the bike has been stopped from rolling forward or backwards by being in gear and you are ready to think about lifting it up.

But the technique for picking up a GoldWing is based on pushing (in the right way) rather than lifting, so you’re not going to be doing any lifting at all.

If there are willing helpers around by all menas make use of them but make sure they are told where to take hold and what to do. The only safe places to allow helpers to grip the bike is the uphill passenger grip, the uphill rear crash guard and the uphill front crash bar and (providing you have applied the steering lock) the uphill end of the handlebars. And even then make sure they know not to pull on brake, throttle of clutch cables and the like.

The bike is coming to no further harm lying on the ground so take you time, gather your cool, make absolutely sure that the helpers known where and how to try to help. There is a limit to how many helpers can be safely allowed to help and it’s probably no more than three.

So you are going to be the only person positioned on the down side of the bike. When you are ready, and not at the rush, you sit on the rider’s seat facing to the down side (with your back to everyone else) and your feet together on the ground with your legs straight and toes pointing away from you and away from the bike.

Then you slide your backside (or butt as the Americans call it) off the edge of the seat until you are almost off it, bending your knees slightly as you do so. What you are doing by making this adjustment of position is gaining leverage. As you start to apply force by straightening your knees, you will be pushing backwards against the edge of the seat and this will help to start to force the bike upwards.

Next you take hold of the passenger hand grip with one hand and the handlebar grip with the other. because where you placed you backside (butt) your elbows are likely to be bent – keep them that way. You are not going to be lifting with your arms, just holding on.

Success! And all on her own too!

When everything is in place, as described above, you keep your feet firml;y on the ground and start to straighten your knees, push backwarsd with your backside (butt) as you do so, leaning backwards rather than forwards and holding the position of your elbows rather than allowing them to straighten.

The bike will start to lift off the ground and as it does so you start to move your feet an inch or so backwards at a time, one at once, to keep your backside( butt) pushing horizontally at the edge of the seat. You assistants (if any) can help as you are doing this by pulling the bike upwards.

As the bike lifts off the ground you need to keep the pressure on, shuffling slowly backwards with your feet, holding your elbows and shoulders in a fixed position.

This is the hard bit so you must keep pushing backwards hard to get through it. As the bike lifts further and further off the ground it gets easier and easier to keep going. Remember to keep leaning backwards as you push, that’s important too. Don’t stop pushing too early; there is very little danger that you will topple the bike over the other way.

As it gets near the vertical the bike will be noticeably easier to push further up and this is when you must slow down, to judge the point at which the bike is upright. There is no hurry changing positions because it is just as easy to hold the bike upright in your leaning backwards posture as it is when you are sat on it – so pause for a second rather than rush into the next move.

Once you have the bike upright and stable if you have asistants they will be able to hold the bike upright for you while you stand up and turn around. If you’re on your own you will have to maintain the bike’s upright position as you roll forwards on the seat and change grip to end up with both your hands on the handlebars as you would normally hold them, facing the bike and standing upright alongside it.

If the bike dropped away from the side stand, which you will therefore have already pulled out before you started picking the bike up, you can then lower the bike away from you to rest on the side stand. If it dropped the other way you will need to use your foot to get the side stand out before lowering the bike towards you on to it.

Then you can breath a sight of relief before checking for damage, and another sigh of relief when you confirm that there isn’t any.

A demonstration of this technique (and a chance to try it yourself on someoine else’s bike) will be available at this years Blackpool Light Parade next Saturday, September 5th.

Good roads, well signposted - and really nice views

Click on any picture for a full size image.

For our second Riding Day in the Mosel I offered the group a choice.   I would lead a ride aimed at enjoying some of the Area’s excellent riding roads, which would be a rider’s day out rather than a tourist day, not all hard and fast riding, but an opportunity to ride at pace on good roads for its own sake rather than a leisurely scenic tour.

The alternative would be to spend time as a motorcycling tourist in some nice tourist places, such as Bern Kastel, an attractive town an hour or so up river which is both easy to find and has easy bike parking when you get there.

All the couples chose the tourist option (can’t think why!) leaving just Bill and I to set off in search of some nice twisty roads. John, plenty experienced enough to cope with leading a group of bikes to Bern Kastel, volunteered to do so.

Nice place to pause for a picture

On the following day I also provided an option of a riding day out of a more touristy nature, like the first one we had had, but having sampled Bern Kastel and having not seen much of Cochem apart from riding through it, most of the group opted to be tourists for the last day in the Mosel. We were of course facing the longish ride back to Rotterdam for the Ferry home the day after, so it made sense for some to have a rest day.

Bill and I, lacking wifely supervision on this holiday, were therefore off the leash for two whole days in a wonderful biking area, so we set about making the most of it.

On my satnav I had a stored a route based on the one which Klaus, our Hotelier, had led me with another group last year. It had taken us along some roads and to some places which mere visitors to the Mosel would never find, so with just two of us riding together, this was a chance to see if I could find them again. The satnav route wasn’t completely true to Klaus’s original because the process of converting a track (the satnav record of a journey) into a route is not straightforward – or at least it’s not straightforward for me.

So while I managed to find the special viewpoints Klaus took us to, we didn’t necessarily get to them in quite the same way. Not that it matters in the Mosel area which way you go on a motorcycle, there are so many attractive roads you can almost take any turning in any direction and end up with an enjoyable ride.

Panoramic view from the woodland near Valwig

But Klaus knew some special places and hidden viewpoints. For example he took us to a football pitch on the outskirts of a little town called Valwig and got us to park on a rough track alongside it. We were then led about 200 yards along a footpath into the woodland – wondering as we walked what on earth this was all about. I don’t suppose I was the only biker to have wondered why we had stopped somewhere where there was no sign of anywhere to buy even a cup of coffee, let alone a bacon butty.

However our patience, or in my case lack of it, as I stumbled in my biking boots along a rough woodland path, was rewarded, as was Bill’s when I took him back there this year, with an amazing view. Suddenly a gap appears in the trees on the right of the path and you are standing on the edge of a very steep hillside looking down to the river below and the town of Ernst on the other side of the river. So steep is the hillside that the view is almost vertically down on to this little town. Bill was duly impressed.

Bravely standing, bravely - on the edge at Valwig

The gap through which we took in this view has a small, sloping wooden platform under foot from which, if you were at all careless, it would be possible to take a distinctly precipitous step into oblivion. The penny dropped after a while that this structure served a purpose other than committing suicide and its primary purpose was probably a launching ramp for hang gliders or the like. Standing on this ramp to take a picture of the view took more than a little courage, not least because the average hang glider pilot is probably quite a few stones lighter than the average GoldWing rider and this structure looked to be distinctly under-engineered. Bill and I took the precaution of standing on this platform one at once and I allowed him to go first.

Looking down over Ernst from Valwig

The place where we had parked the bikes to take in this view happens to be fairly close to the supposed location of the ventilation tower of the WW2 underground slave-labour Spark Plug Factory which I had gone looking for a couple of days previously. So Bill and I diverted briefly to see if we could spot anything I had missed in the rain on my first attempt, but we couldn’t. If I get back to coping with tramping through woodland again after my hip is fixed, I’ll go back and have a proper look. I’m sure there will be little to see and anyway the ventilation tower isn’t central to what went on in the tunnels below. But having learned of the existence of this place of such awful oppressiveness, in an area of such natural beauty and grandeur, it somehow seems important to make proper contact with it – a bit like the obligation I always feel to stop for a few moments to show respect at a war cemetery whenever I come across one.

The roads were dry and well surfaced and we took advantage of this as we rode them on these two days, enjoying our bikes’ excellent handling. Motorcyclists at large are unfamiliar with GoldWings and they are usually pretty surprised when they see them performing like this. I rode at this sort of pace with a mixed group in Yorkshire a couple of years ago and at the coffee stop after a section of nice twisties which we had taken at pace one of the other riders said “So you can ride it like a hooligan then?”. I’m pretty sure he meant this as a compliment to the bike’s handling capabilities rather than a criticism of my personal riding style. It is of course possible to “make progress”, as it’s called, without taking irresponsible risks; that’s what advanced motorcycling is all about.

Pearl one, Cream one?

Our footpegs would touch down on the bends from time to time as we made this kind of progress and I was reminded yet again that I am no accurate judge of when this is likely to happen. It depends on undulations in the road surface and how hard the suspension is being compressed in the turn as well as the angle of lean and the road’s camber. That’s why you sometimes don’t scrape when you expect to and vice versa. Footpegs pivot upwards of course, so that they scrape along the surface as they touch rather than dig in, and there’s quite a bit of lean angle to go on a GoldWing before anything else on the bike touches down. Once you get the confidence not to panic and start pulling the bike upright just because the footpeg is scraping, it’s merely a useful indicator of how much lean angle you’ve got left.

Although the point at which the footpegs will touch down may be unpredictable on some bends, you can judge this point much more easily on, for example, roundabouts, where the road surface and camber is more even. So roundabouts, in dry and diesel-free conditions, are a good place to get used to the experience of touching down without undue anxiety. Just let the footpeg lift under your foot, as you hear and feel it start to scrape, then enjoy the moment; you are discovering what your bike is capable of, in case you ever need it. If you think you are too fast in a bend and in danger of running out of road you should nearly always lean further and turn tighter rather than brake, it’s safer. Of course it’s even safer to get your speed right as you enter a bend. But if you have go that wrong, leaning over further and thereby turning more tightly should replace panic braking as your instinctive response.

The Mosel Valley’s scenery is of course spectacular and we were able to enjoy that too. Riding hard on the twisties focuses the mind more or less completely, which is one of its attractions, but there are always more open sections of road when you can spare a moment to look around and admire the vista.

Worth riding there to see?

Bill and I also visited another of the obscure place which Klaus had taken me to the year before and this time there was refreshment to be had as well as a nice view. Grevenbruch Castle, which overlooks the riverside village of Trarbach, is one of many ruined castles along the Mosel and in this case it’s very ruined indeed, with little more than a few bits of wall left standing, albeit one of them is quite tall. It occupies a commanding position, as of course medieval castles, built for primarily military reasons, all tend to do. There are spectacular views both up and down river and it has the advantage over others, such as Klotten Castle, of being relatively easily accessible by road, or rather a road of sorts, and having a car park and a cafe/restaurant on site.

Access is via an awkward turn off the main road on to a narrow roadway which then turns into a rough and twisting track which, in case you’re not already wondering whether this place is worth the effort of getting there, suddenly presents an extremely steep and tight S-shaped bend on the final approach to its car park, which is all gravel. Not really the sort of place to take a GoldWing you might think, and you’re right. It would not have been a place to take the whole group. But I had been as pleasantly surprised by how easily I managed to climb out of this place the previous year as I’d been terrified about the prospect when I rode into it.

A charming old ruin - and a crumbling castle

And obsessed though he is with cleaning his bike and combing his hair, Bill is a very capable rider, so I had no hesitation about taking him there. Apart from anything else he would come in handy helping me to pick my bike up if I dropped it this time!

In the event we enjoyed a pleasant refreshment stop in the shade of the trees on a lovely sunny day and we even took time to explore the Castle ruins and take some pictures. Despite several opportunities I didn’t quite manage to catch a photograph of Bill combing his hair, so the pictures are not truly representative.

Terrace viw from Beilstein

There are lots of attractive refreshment stops along the Mosel, indeed you can stop in any village or town and find something. Bill and I stopped at the site of a former monastery, where there is still an interesting church, on yet another elevated viewpoint at Beilstein. Looking very small from the riverside road, this place expands behind the river frontage. A set of steps, enough to get both of us puffing and pausing again, lead up the hill to the terrace in front of the Church where there is a cafe/restaurant.

Shops and Eateries in Zell

Zell was another pleasant refreshment stop. This is much bigger, a small town rather than a village, and it has some tourist shops as well as a selection of restaurants on the street one block away from the river. There is also a riverfront snack bar, which we used, which has a few tables under an awning. By exercising Biker’s Privilege, you can even park on the pavement next to the seating while you relax and eat or drink.

Because it’s open-air eating you do of course run the risk of smokers sitting next to you while you’re eating. I haven’t smoked for over thirty years but I can still remember the days when most of us did and a smokey environment was unremarkable; the change in UK to a legal ban on smoking indoors in pubs and restaurants has made a huge difference to my expectations and I now find it really unpleasant to have anyone smoking in my vicinity, even on an open terrace. Germany is pretty good in this respect; its France where you are still likely to encounter someone at the next table in a restaurant lighting up between courses.

Beilstein Ferry and some elaborate roof tiling

On the second day, as we headed vaguely back towards Klotten during the afternoon, I decided to surprise Bill with another really spectacular view I seen the year before and we diverted towards Burg Eltz. This is a Cinderella-type castle set in an isolated steep valley a few miles north of Klotten. And it is hidden from view until the last minute as you approach it; for maximum impact I didn’t tell Bill where we were heading.

The last part of the approach to the Castle, beyond the Car Park, is on foot, although there is an option to take a minibus ride down the very steep roadway. The Car Park is along either side of the last half mile or so of roadway leading to the place where the minibus service runs from. Knowing this I led Bill to the far end of the Car Park in the hope of finding a parking space there. We were unlucky but rather than subject my dodgy hip to an extra half mile of walking unnecessarily, I exercised Biker’s Privilege and parked against the railings of the turning area right at the end, strictly speaking illegally but not really causing any obstruction.

The reason for mentioning this otherwise uninteresting detail is that by parking tightly against the railing, when I dropped the bike onto its side stand, there was no room to get off it in my usual way. Because of my hip and because I have a rider’s backrest on the bike, I use an inelegant but effective reversing bunny hop on the left leg, dragging my right leg over the seat as I move backwards. This sounds silly but having tried various other ways, it works for me. But it wouldn’t work here, there was a railing in the way. So I tried to get off to the right hand side. After a few false starts I eventually managed to achieve this by performing part of what we used to call a forward roll during my school gymnastics days, narrowly avoiding actually making contact with the ground by scrabbling forwards on all fours for a few feet.

The impressive Burg Eltz Castle

It was not a pretty sight but there was a certain amount of spectator value for Bill, who fortunately for me was the only spectator. He hadn’t seen me attempting gymnastics before and wondered what on earth I was up to. By this time I was laughing aloud at my foolishness and the predicament I had created for myself and it didn’t occur to me at the time that if getting off had been difficult, getting back on would be even more of a problem – but more of that later.

So we walked the few yards to where the minibus was waiting and I decided, since I knew the walk down to the Castle was challenging even without a dodgy hip, to treat my companion and myself to a minibus ride. The minibus was standing waiting but without thinking, as a Brit used to access for the left hand side, I walked around the front of the bus to what turned out to be the wrong side; the passenger door was on the right. So back around the front of the bus I went. The bus was empty apart from the driver, who hadn’t given any indication of noticing my wanderings around his vehicle, so having eventually located the passenger door, naturally I opened it and made to get in.

This caused the driver to suddenly spring into life. He uttered a stream of harsh-sounding German, which I didn’t understand at all but took to mean I should get into the very back seat rather than the row immediately opposite the door, to avoid blocking the rear seats. So I reached for the release lever to get into the back. The driver then said in English, again very aggressively, “Read the paper on the glass!”, pointing as he did so to the window behind the door.

Pity about the minibus service

The penny then dropped that he meant I should read the notice stuck to the inside of the window which said “The door and windows are controlled by the driver”. The penny dropped again after a pause for translation of this puzzling phrase into understandable English, that this unpleasant individual expected his prospective passengers to wait outside the vehicle until he was ready to leave his seat and open the door and supervise boarding. Well, I thought to myself, we won the war (or at least with John Wayne’s help we won it) so I’m not being treated like that. We’ll bloody well walk rather than pay to use his precious bus – so I closed his minibus door with gusto and limped off in silent high dudgeon.

Bill had witnessed this altercation and without exchanging a word, it somehow seemed natural to both of us that we should spread ourselves out across the narrow roadway as we made our descent of the hill towards the Castle. We must have taken quite a while to hear the noise of the minibus approaching us from behind as it came down the hill and this might have caused the driver some frustrating delay as he had to alter speed and aim for the gap between us or around us, which might just have appeared to him to be a shifting target, as this limping, lumbering tourist, who was apparently also deaf to the noise of his approaching vehicle, staggered about in startled confusion.

A bit petty of us perhaps, but we felt he deserved it. And I’m afraid a similar thing happened as we walked back up the hill too, before we moved out of his way.  We got him slowing right down and having to change gear if not come to a complete halt on the really steep section of the hill. He showed his irritation by missing me by a fraction of an inch as he drove past and I suppose if I’d thought quickly enough I could have cried out feigning impact for the benefit of his passengers, but maybe that would have been going a bit too far.

The Germans we met throughout our visit to the Mosel were, with the notable exception of this nasty piece of work, very friendly and helpful people. This made the minibus driver’s obnoxious behaviour even more surprising and conspicuous.  He was after all in the tourist business and so is the Castle.

We walked only half way down the hill to the viewing point overlooking the Castle, took our pictures and walked back up. We had paid the friendly man at the Car Park entrance his due, and he had been suitably complementary about our bikes.  But we didn’t bother visiting the Castle, and of course we didn’t spend any money on the minibus either, as originally intended.  The Castle is an amazing spectacle from the overlooking viewpoint and well worth going to see just for that, maybe worth going all the way down too.

There is another chapter to this bus driver story.  As we reached the top of the hill again, both of us puffing a bit, I sat on a bench near the bus stop to cool off and take on water. A while later the bus arrived, the driver got out and opened the door and out got his passengers, not one of them smiling or thanking him. Was that significant? A UPS van had turned up a few moments earlier and its driver was waiting to get a signature for a couple of parcels destined for the Castle. I didn’t need to understand the German conversation between the two drivers for it to be clear that the minibus driver wanted to pick an argument and was objecting vociferously to having to accept the parcels for onward transportation to the Castle. It wasn’t his job or he didn’t get paid for it, that sort of thing.

The UPS driver didn’t take the bait. He simply smiled and said something quietly which might have been “please yourself, I’ll take it back if you like” but his smile spoke volumes. Having finished his rant, which took a little while, the minibus driver sign the receipt and put the parcels into the back of his minibus anyway, and then slammed the door even harder than I had done.  He then strutted off around the front of the minibus back to his seat.

I’m afraid I burst out laughing long and loud at this point, amazed and appalled at the minibus driver’s behaviour, which on this occasion I had of course had no involvement at all in provoking.  It was almost childish behaviour on his part.  He said nothing more as he strutted angrily back to sit in his driving seat; maybe he was plotting to wreak revenge by making the next lot of passengers wait even longer for him to open his door than usual. The lady sitting next to me on the bench, who clearly was waiting to take the bus and looked puzzled by what was happening right in front of her, was clearly going to have to await a little while longer, perhaps even longer than usual, to be allowed to take a more comfortable seat inside the minibus.

The minibus driver knew of course, couldn’t help but know, from the UPS driver’s smile and especially from my completely uninhibited laughter, that at least two of the three of us present thought he had made a complete prat of himself.

Bill preparing to be photographed

As I walked the few yards back to the bikes Bill was already there, accepting the compliments of the tourists who had recently dismounted from the minibus, and who were now admiring our bikes. One of them, an American lady, was volubly appreciative and we fell into conversation.

She was delighted to learn that the bikes were made in Maryville Ohio and no, we explained, they weren’t Harleys and no, they weren’t quite identical either.

This was my cue to explain, as I take every opportunity to do when I’m out with Bill, that while my bike is genuinely Honda Pearl White, Bill’s is a one-off colour, basically whitish and pearlish but with a gold, or perhaps brownish sheen on the edges, a colour which I feel is best described as Last Week’s Papal Robes.  Bill, well used to this unwarranted verbal abuse of his immaculate pride and joy, smiled tolerantly as usual.

It emerged that Betsy, as the American Lady turned out to be called, had also suffered the burden of the minibus driver’s unsavoury approach to customer service.  And she was so complementary about our bikes too, chivalry required that she be offered a ride on one.   Bill was already mounting up, so I helped Betsy to board his bike, with careful regard to his paintwork, and she was ridden the few yards down the Car Park to her own vehicle grinning happily.  It was a bit like a scene from Driving Miss Daisy, except of course Betsy was far too young for the Miss Daisy part and Bill lacked the baritone gravitas to be a credible Morgan Freeman. They were both smiling far too much.

It was at about this point that I realized that my prospects of assistance getting back on my own bike, still leaning tightly up to the railings, had just ridden off down the Car Park with Betsy.  So as I hobbled over to it to take stock of the challenge, a dreadful foreboding crept up to join me; this was not going to be easy.

Reversing the forward roll manoeuvre which had got me off it was not going to be an option and it was soon apparent that there wasn’t any other way short of hiring a crane to mount the bike from the uphill side.  So I squirmed alongside the railing and managed, eventually, to get over it into the narrow gap alongside the bike. A precarious manoeuvre followed, involving leaning backwards along the railing in order to get my right foot high enough to lift over the saddle but this didn’t work at all; I nearly fell backwards over the railing. There just wasn’t room to swing my right leg up.

Bill captured this moment of quiet contemplation

Eventually I resorted to mounting the bike conventionally by folding the rider’s backrest down, then standing on the left footpeg, then leaning as far forward and across the bike as space would allow in the hope of getting enough legroom to lift my right foot over the back seat. I had to lean so far forward and across the bike to do this that I nearly got my helmeted head wedged irretrievably between the handlebar and the edge of the windscreen and there was clearly a developing risk that I was transferring so much weight over to the right that both bike and I would end up toppling over. I just managed to get my leg over and sit down; it was quite a relief.

While all this was going on there was, mercifully, no one else around. But I couldn’t dismiss from my mind how ridiculous it would have looked to a spectator – this fat guy with a big flash bike struggling so much to get on it – that I couldn’t stop laughing, which of course didn’t help.  At one stage I was stuck, spread-eagled over the bike, as if trying to mount it in the non-vehicular sense.

No doubt Bill, generous soul that he is, would have helped if he had been around and he wouldn’t have stood back videoing my performance for posterity, as I so richly deserved for mocking the colour of his beloved bike. My resolve to get my hip fixed, and to lose some more weight, was strengthened by this experience.

Riding Ms Betsy

So I got my bike moving again and joined Bill further down the Car Park where Betsy was still sitting on his bike having photos taken. Her husband and the Dutch couple who were their companions were there too.

It turned out that Betsy was a Travel Writer and when I confessed that I was a would-be writer, having started this Blog a few months ago, she readily agreed to have a look.  I was hoping she would give me a few professional tips but Betsy rejected the idea that she is a professional writer, describing her writing as an avocation, her day job being a lawyer back home in New York State.

So I had not only insulted my friend Bill’s bike, I’d had him giving an uninsured ride to a New York lawyer without a helmet.

Thank goodness that most people, including most minibus drivers and maybe even most lawyers, are nice friendly people with whom you can really enjoy a chance meeting.  National stereotypes are not a useful predictor of whether you will find any individual likeable or not.

As a GoldWing rider touring at home or abroad, rewarding opportunities to give real pleasure to an interested stranger often comes your way because your bike attracts admirers almost everywhere you take it.  Shame on the GoldWing rider who doesn’t spare a moment to do this.  You even get to spread understanding that GoldWings aren’t quite the same as Harleys.

It was a good couple of riding days and Bill and I really enjoyed ourselves. Sadly on the next day, all too soon, it was time to head for home.

The photographs with this Article include some by Bill Squires and Betsy Shequine and I am grateful for their permission to use them.

It takes a lot of work to earn the right to wear one of these

On a recent holiday to Florida I had the opportunity to renew friendships made at last year’s Blackpool Light Parade, when the Team Captain and three other Team Riders came over to show us their skills. They ‘re a great bunch to spend time with.

This further contact also gave me the opportunity to learn more of how they go about things, including how they train up new Team Riders. Training to be a Drill Team Rider is quite a complex and prolonged business and building up the level of skill and consistency, especially consistency, takes quite a while.

The Team, still the reigning World Champions, is thriving and busier than ever, with a programme of twenty or so Displays planned for this year.  And in between Display weekends, a regular weekly Practice Session gets a pretty full turn out ever time, so one way and another getting involved with the Central Florida Motorcycle Drill Team takes up most of a rider’s leisure time.  They’re off to Americade this week, which is a huge biker gathering which takes place at Lake George in New York State, which is of course quite a long ride from Central Florida, even by their standards. And, incidentally, the Drill Team are one of the highlights of the show this year. They will be there for a week, which because some Team Members couldn’t get time off work (leave allowances in America are less generous than UK) has meant more changes and substitutions than usual.  The Team has a pool of a dozen or so Full Team Riders from whom eight are usually required to mount a Display.

The Team at Practice, posing with Tourists

Although some of the Team will be using Amtrack’s equivalent of UK’s long defunct Motorail service to get up to New York State, letting the train take the strain, some will be riding all or most of the way.  These guys think nothing of riding very long distances to get to their displays – riding anything up to 900 miles in a day. One Team Member has a 2005 GL1800 which has has clocked up 71,000 miles already, and he owns a Harley too; I didn’t ask how many miles he’s done on that bike.

Mileages on this scale are almost unthinkable to a European rider, except perhaps as a special endurance feat, like the 1,000 miles in under 24 hours which a Lancashire rider did on a Wing some years ago, repeating the endurance feat on a GL1000 in the States shortly after the GoldWing was first released.  The most I have ever ridden in a day was 450 miles to get back home from somewhere in France to save an extra overnight stop.  And by the time that was achieved, getting home by 8.30pm after 350 miles of crowded UK motorways from the Eurotunnel, I had had quite enough thank you.  So how do these guys manage such long mileages?

Turning an eight-bike diamond

During my Florida holiday I had a chance to find out when, without checking how far it was going to be from our holiday base in Orlando, I arranged to join them in Pensacola, at the West end of Florida’s Panhandle, to watch a display they were scheduled to give on our first Saturday. When I found out it was over 450 miles from Orlando to Pensacola I began to dread what I let myself in for in the way of extra travelling – despite that fact that unlike them I was going to be doing the trip in an air-conditioned hire car.

In the event my car journey to Pensacola on the day before the Display was painless and we covered the 450 miles easily in under 7 hours, including a stop for lunch and another short break.

There are clues on this photo about why you shouldn't risk messing with the owner, although he's actually a really nice guy!

Light traffic, interstate highway and 70 mph on cruise control all the way made it a much more straightforward journey to make than I had anticipated. We were easily able to rendezvous with the Team for dinner near the Naval Air Station, where they were staying courtesy of the USN for the two nights they spent up there.

The Team Riders had also eaten up the miles to Pensacola effortlessly on their bikes and, thanks to “gas” prices which are half those in UK, at relatively reasonable cost too. Gas was selling for around $2.25 per US gallon while we were over there, which is the equivalent of about 37 pence per litre.  (For US viewers of this Blog, gas currently sells for the equivalent of about $6 per US gallon in UK.)

I’m told that unless the air temperature gets above 95 degrees Farenheit, which of course it does in Florida quite often, motorcycling is bearable, although almost all riders will wear light clothing, such as a shirt and jeans.  Teperatures below 90 are needed to be comfortable.  But when the temperature gets above 95 the hot airflow become difficult to tolerate and the GoldWing’s windscreen vent becomes your enemy – it has to be closed to cut off the blast of very hot air to which the rider would otherwise be subjected.

So when making a long transit journey, these guys use highways and they try to make a very early start and try to finish their journey by early afternoon – it’s a lot cooler in the mornings, or of course overnight, which is another way they make some of these journeys.  They stop for fuel only, so every 200 mles or so they will fill up and maybe chew on a cookie, but otherise get going again without delay. Eating a bigger meal makes life more uncomfortable and, in my own experience, increases the risk of drowsiness.  (My problem is that boredom on a long motorwayjourney makes it even more tempting to break off to eat, but maybe the heat would cure me of that!)

An eight-bike pinwheel - awesome!

In UK and when European touring, many of us are used to opting for a slower journey, avoiding motorways as far as possible in favour of some nice twisties and a bit of scenery – with which UK is of course well provided.  For example when I ride to East Anglia from my home in Lancashire, I use motorways to get to the other side of Manchester because there no atractive alternatives, but then divert Southwards to take in the A537, Cat & Fiddle, Macclesfield to Buxton road, which is a motorcycling road the like of which Floridians riders can only dream off, and then work my way South East through the Derbyshire National Park.  When I go to the Mosel in a couple of weeks or so, I will use motorways to get from the Ferry into Germany as quickly as possible, then come off the motorway in favour of cross country roads, even though it adds journey time.  Motorcycling journeys are made primarily for pleasure, so why rush the process unless you have to.

But to make a 1,000 mile round trip to give a one day display over a short weekend, a leisurely journey across Florida is not an option for the Drill Team and Florida does not offer many scenic or even remotely twisty motorcycling roads, so a fast trip along the Interstate highway is really the only way to go.

PapaTom leading the Team out for the Display at Pensacola

So eight Team Riders plus a trainee who wanted to come along for the experience of watching, plus their mascot Tom, who rides a Pearl Yellow Trike and leads the Team out flying three huge flags, PapaJoe style, made the trip to Pensacola, largely at their own expense, to give support to their Navy’s efforts to reduce motorcycling casualties among their Sailors and Marines.  During the past three years motorcycling casualties have exceeded combat casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan put together.  The US Navy is taking the promotion of safe riding programme very seriously and the US Army is doing the same sort of thing, for the same reason.

So Pensacola Naval Air Station, the home of US Naval Aviation and the location of the excellent National Naval Aviation Museum, itself worth driving 450 miles to see, had laid on quite an event – and the Drill Team’s Display was the highlight.  There was also an interesting display by the Florida Panhandle “Ride Like a Pro” team, who conduct riding training.  (If you haven’t heard of it, the Ride Like a Pro approach to rider training was started by a US Motorcycle Cop called Jerry “Motorman” Palladino; he has franchised his training system and it is now offered widely across the States.)

Motormen Cops with their Harley

The Drill Team deployed eight riders for this Display and so it was quite a bit bigger and more elaborate that we could manage at Blackpool; it was an impressive and indeed spectacular display of skill.  As Randy explained when he tried to teach some of us the basic skills when they came over to UK, everything they do boiled down to a combination of sectors of 25 foot diameter circles and straight lines – but the permutations of these which they contrive and the resulting visual spectacle is really quite amazing.

They conducted the display in two squads of four and the routines often involve interactions between the two squads as well as formations of all eight bikes. There were many impressive routines but one which I found most  impressive involved the two squads riding towards each other from oppostite ends of the arena in parallel files about 50 feet apart then, as they the two squads came alongside each other all eight bikes simultaneously turned inwards to complete a 25 foot circle, timing the manoeuvre so that each bike “matches wheels” with a bike from the other squad.  It really makes you stop breathing as it seems inevitable that there will be a synchronised clash of heavy bikes.  The tyres of the front wheels virtually touch as the opposing bikes pass each other along the centreline – and that’s what’s supposed to happen, a bigger gap is an error.

If you ask them nicely they let you sit on their bike!

Another routine involved all eight bikes riding in four pairs around the same spot like four spokes of a wheel, the inner one riding a 25 foot dimeter circle and it’s partner riding close alongside, and so just slightly wider and of course slightly faster, to stay in line.  Then they transform this formation, as if by smooth magic, into two lines of four bikes riding the same circle opposite each other as two spokes of a wheel, so that all eight bikes are in a straight line across the circle as they rotate.  I found this manoeuvre, which they sustain for several rotations, extremely impressive.

Their high speed crossover was pretty heart-stopping too and they have another routine called a box cross, when four bikes approach “Show Centre” at high speed from each corner of the Display Pad, pausing simultaneously in a box formation around Show Centre before accelerating away again, also simultaneously – and of course, since Harleys are involved as well as GoldWings, with a distinctly audible roar.  Harleys have their uses.

It helps to change your posture from time to time when riding long distances

Timing – and complete confidence that all the other Team Riders will get their bit completely right – is the key to the awesome precision which they achieve.  Which is why they take the training and qualification of new riders so seriously.

Before a new Rider joins the Team on Displays, he or she must pass a skill test and then serve at least six months in the “Demo” team, attending the weekly practices and learning the display routines, riding with Team Riders.   Not until the Captain thinks a new Rider is ready will Full Team Membership (and therefore participation in actual displays) even be considered.  Even then each Full Team Member has to agree that the new guy is ready, so effectively they vote on whether to admit a new rider once his or her training is complete, the criterion being that they all feel comfortable enough riding routines with the newcomer to trust riding with him or her.

The idea is to circle the bike around your heel while siting on the footpeg - another one of Gregg's solo tricks

The basic skills test, a prerequisite to starting to learn any display routines during Team Practice  involves, obviously, being able to ride a tighter-than-25 foot circle either way, left or right, starting immediately as necessary, combined with stable and confident slow riding and the ability to make momentary halts without  putting a foot down, which is what the riders have to do during some routines, as well as when they have to slow down or tighten up suddenly, to cope with cock ups.  (I should perhaps explain for American viewers of this Blog that in this context “momentary” means for a brief period of time and not, as they will understand the word to mean almost immediately.  It’s always puzzling to Brits who are visiting America for the first time to hear an announcement that a theme park ride will “be restarting momentarily”.)

The Drill Team’s slow riding test used to be 50 feet in no less than 16 seconds without deviating more than one foot from the centreline and of course without putting a foot down.  But they’ve now tightened this to 40 feet in no less that 16 seconds.  That is extremely difficult to do; I’ve tried and, so far, failed miserably but I am working on it and I hope to get there eventually.

Smiddy's bike gets some unfair wear and tear

Last year in UK the four Riders who came over very kindly gave some of us Lancs & Lakes riders tuition on the basic skills of doing tight circles, which we very much enjoyed – indeed we even got keen enough to want to keep on learning and then form a Lancs & Lakes Drill Team, and although it’s gone fallow for the time being, that idea hasn’t completely gone away. They managed to get four or five of us Lancs & Lakes riders doing 25 foot circles reasonably consistently when they were in UK last year on the Practice Pad we organised for them at the Trafalgar Hotel.  And riding those circles, more or less, turned out to be rather easier to start getting right than you might expect, once you started to trust the bike to keep going round and round without falling over.

The moment when they got me doing a figure of eight repeatedly around two adjacent 25 foot circles was sheer joy; I couldn’t have believed I could do it.   And when four of us were riding the same 25 foot circle nose-to-tail on the Practice Pad at the Traflgar Hotel we were grinning from ear to ear with delight, it was really something.  They even had four of us doing a mini drill routine and we did, after a certain amount of chaos here and there but fortunately no crashes, and in a fairly ragged way, get through it.

So does his left footpeg

There was even talk of the four of us doing this routine at Blackpool and those of you who were there might have seen two Lancs & Lakes riders, Graham Coleman and John Brayshaw, doing some circles in the Arena between Drill Team Displays. They were very good.

But it was very much a case getting us to master the beginnings of the requisite skills and we certainly weren’t good enough to risk four of us doing even the special mini routine we had practised with members of the public within striking range, so I’m afraid I vetoed the idea, hence Graham and John settled for doing their ad-hoc duet.  We had  started to get the basic skills right (we didn’t try the slow riding test) but we were taking only the first hesitant (and terrified) steps of the six or more months of personal skill development and pracice routines which the Team put their own newcomers through.  It is necessary to develop, above all, robust consistency and reliability before you can hope to make the grade for the Display Team proper.

And of course his highway peg mounts

Developing this degree of skill and interdependence among a group of men (so far all men in the Team itself, but there are two or three women in training, one of whom is conspicuously good and the other very good) inevitably brings about a close bonding in other ways too, so they are also, palpably when you are in their company, a very close group of friends. Everyone has respect for each other’s skills, which is a pretty good foundation for friendship. They are reasonably tactful about pointing out each others errors during practice between routine – actually that’s not true, they’re not tactful at all, but no one seems to take it personally.  They de-brief and criticise (and self-criticise) like the real professionals they are, pointing out errors and inconsistencies (including their own) freely in pursuit of excellence.  And there’s none of the chest-beating “we’re the best dogone riders…” stuff either; they don’t brag at all, they let their riding do the talking.

And getting a full display routine completely right is clearly very difficult to achieve, even for them.  There always seems to be scope for improvement here and there and occasionally somebody makes a bit of a bollocks of something – maybe half forgetting which bit comes next, or not being quick enough or slow enough or tight enough or too tight at a particular point, so that another Rider has to make a radical emergency adjustment to avoid a collison.

Florida Panhandle Ride Like a Pro Team

When you realise that the normal separation (nose to tail) between a squad of bikes in file is thirty inches and that a 25 foot circle isn’t much above a GoldWing’s minimum turning circle (of about 18 feet diameter) there isn’t a lot of room for error.

Crashes do occur because of misjudgements and the Team operates on the basis of a Gentleman’s Agreement that no-one ever tries to blame anyone else if a bike is damaged, everyone pays for his own repairs regardless.  And sometimes crashes occur because Sod’s Law has taken charge rather than an error of skill.  Last year Randy, the Captain, hit the tarmac hard and broke his right humerus (upper arm) because one of his footpegs suddenly broke off at a critical moment. This was during a Display in Tampa on Florida’s Gulf Coast; Randy presumably got some help picking the bike up before he rode the 250 miles home across Florida to the Atlantic Coast – and only after getting home did he seek medical attention! That’s perhaps a rather extreme example of their ability to pick yourself and the bike up, get back on and try again when you get something wrong.

Teresa, Ride like a Pro Instructor

Only once during the times I saw them practising did they congratulate themselves for having got the while thing more or less spot on. Normally they would de-brief noisily and more often than not walk the routine again so that everyone could see what had gone wrong.  Walking the routines, both before riding them and as part of the de-briefing process  is a vital part of both training and practice processes.  They had us walking the mini-routine we were trying to learn back in UK before we tried to ride it; it’s a vital stage, lest multiple crashes result.

There is however one routine which they have never been able to walk successfully, even though they can ride it.  It’s also impossible to descibe, you just have to watch it.  It’s called, very aptly, Confusion.

Smiddy (and admirer)

Blokes being blokes however, squaddy humour is also the order of the day and Smiddy, whom you might remember as the guy who provoked  Michelle Hill, the Honda lady who lent us the bikes for Blackpool, to ask if he could possibly scrape the bike’s footpegs on the ground just a little more quietly, turns out to be the current, and possibly the permanent, butt of the Team’s humour.  Smiddy is a long-time batchelor.  While most of the Team are married – it goes without saying that they are married to saintly women who tolerate their obsession with Drill Team riding, a week is a long time for Smiddy as far as relationships are concerned.  So they mock his inability to form long term relationships although maybe, although they certainly don’t let it show, they also envy his capacity to attract a continuoing stream of female conquests.  Smiddy is something of a cool dude and he reaps the benefits of being an unattached Star Rider in the way (metaphorically speaking) that Tom Jones used to attract showers of lady’s underwear when he performed.

Girl Up - Randy riding formation on Smiddy while the Lady straddles the bikes

The price Smiddy pays for his lifestyle is to have his Team Mates taking the p**s at every turn, which fortunately he seems to enjoy.  The running joke is that Smiddy can’t keep a woman, so he needs to take a plastic inflatable companion along on Team trips as a substitute.  I explained that in certain remote parts of UK, where they have also been known to play Rugby in red shirts, sheep are apparently regarded as an acceptable substitute companion for a needy man in such circumstances, but of course there arn’t any sheep in Florida.  I found myself tasked by the Team with sourcing and sending to Florida a plastic inflatable sheep for Smiddy – so if anyone can help me track one down, I would be most grateful.

Mark, who also came to UK is, in contrast with Smiddy, firmly attached to his Ladyfriend “Muss Karen”.  Karen also came to UK and incidentally turned out to have a remarkable capacity for enjoying specialty English beers, so she’s quite a Gal; good choice Mark.  Mark is no shrinking violet but nor does he strut his stuff; he is scrupulously courteous, the stereotypical Southern Gentleman, even though he hails from California.  Nevertheless he has Harleyism deep and maybe incurably in his soul and it’s perhaps as well that he is selling his GoldWing, or at least talking about thinking about it.  Bit of a schizophrenic impact it’s had on Mark buying a GoldWing.

Despite his outward manliness (Mark is fighting fit ex-US Army and  proud of it) he was revealed during our holiday to have a touchingly soft centre.   He bought his Gal a diamond ring while we were over there as a token of the duration and durability of their relationship – and was consequently subjected to all sorts of helpful advice from married Team Members about the profound implications, in terms of  toeing the line from now on, of this cataclismic gesture of commitment.

Mark is also, as many Team Members are, of strong and open religious faith – although his quasi-religious endearment to everything Harley Davidson shines even more brightly through.  As his recent decision to sell his GL1800 suggests, his flirtation with a Honda has had negligible impact on him culturally, although he does still like the Gl1800 as a bike and I would guess he might never actually sell it.   His batchelor home, which he may now

Don't you dare diss Mark's Harley Shrine

of course have put into great jepardy, contains a veritable shrine to Harley Davidson.  His settee has a huge Harley throw on it and his table lamp, also pictured here, makes a noise like a Harley starting and warming up whenever it’s switched on – and when a Harley starts and warms up it’s neither a quiet nor a brief business, as the lamp faithfully represents. Incidentally Mark’s camoflage pattern T shirt bears the slogan “Ha! Now you can’t see me” which gives assurance that he dosn’t take himself all that seriously, even if mocking his Harley Davidson, except in a light-hearted way,  would cause offence.

Nevertheless I expect he might be told that his Harley Davidson table lamp is unsuitable for bedside use in a marital home.  At the very least, if it’s allowed to move in with him, he will have to develop the capacity to get up for a pee in the middle of the night without switching on that particular light.

Mark’s a very good and dedicated rider, as are all Full Team Members, but he’s also conspicuously diligent in his efforts to continue improving, as he showed on the last Practice I witnessed, when he was suddenly asked to switch to an unfamiliar position in the Squad.  He was perhaps riding a little higher in the saddle as he concentrated even more than usual on where he should be and what he should be doing next.

This lamp sounds like a Harley when it's swiched on - and starts reliably every time!

In the Team’s efforts to stay being the best, they are planning to introduce more in the way of role changing during Practice, so that they are better prepared to make substitutions when a key Team Rider becomes unavailable for a particular Display.

John, the third Team Member who came to Blackpool, has since retired from the Team and although he still has his bike, has almost given up riding in recent months and so we didn’t manage to catch up with him or his wife Janet while we were over there, but we heard they were both otherwise well.

Randy, the Captain, as well as being an exemplary leader of men who has clearly had a very positive impact on the Team since he took over, is also a very acomplished rider – even with a broken arm.  Interestingly apart from his duet “Girl Up” routine with Smiddy, he tends to take a non-directive role within the Squads structure, even though he clearly can (and did in Blackpool) take the lead role and call the timings of the moves.

As Captain, Randy can pull the younger ones!

You may remember the “Girl Up” routine from Blackpool, in which his own exceptional riding ability is given an airing.  This routine involves Smiddy picking up a girl side-saddle on his pillion seat by stopping momentarily alongside her as she waits (English meaning again) without of course putting a foot down.  Then Randy comes up very close alongside as Smiddy circles the Arena, matching Smiddy’s pace and line so steadily that the bikes appear to have become joined at the hip.  The pair of bikes proceed so steadily together that the lady passenger (who has usually been plucked from the audience and had no special training or practice) can stand up between the bikes, one foot on each bike’s inside footboard. When she’s ready and feeling steady, she raises her arms high to show it her confidence and then sits back down on Randy’s passenger seat rather than Smiddy’s, and Randy then breaks away and rides off at speed, as if she’s been stolen.  It’s presented in a light-hearted way as if it was easy, but of course it isn’t at all easy.  This routine depends on rock steady formation riding by the incoming rider and Randy delivers this in spades.

And Randy is also a modest man.  All the Team members I met this year project modesty, or at least complete lack of any arrogance or self-promoion.  They are very much team players.  When I first heard Randy respond self-deprocatingly, when he was being interviewed by the BBC last year, I’m ashamed to say that I wondered at the time whether it wasn’t just a clever PR soundbite, and even whether it wasn’t false and contrived modesty.  But it wasn’t and isn’t; I got to know Randy quite well over the past year and he’s a genuinely modest and remarkably capable rider and leader whom I am proud to call a friend.

The local GWRRA Chapters turned out to watch, one towing this unusual trailer

Disappointingly for me, Randy actually prefers bourbon and Coke (or alternatively bourbon and Dr Pepper) to proper whiskey, but then no one’s perfect.  As it turned out this time in Florida I quite took to bourbon and Coke myself and somehow I ended up drinking quite a bit of one evening, under tuition; it must be the climate.

And Randy is a gun owner, which shouldn’t have surprised me but it did.  Lots of Americans own guns of course, and this doubtless includes several Members of the Team; I didn’t ask.  It just came out in conversation that he had forgotten to take his handgun out of his bike, where he normaly kept it,  before riding into the Naval Base at Pensacola.  It seems that taking a gun on to a military base happens to be quite seriously frowned upon under US law, so it’s just as well he didn’t think of it until afterwards – and of course that he wasn’t stopped and searched at the Gate.  It would never have occured to me that deciding whether to take your gun out of its usual stowage in the GoldWing before embarking on a weekend trip needs to be one of the things you might need to have on your checklist if you live in Florida.

Different countries, different cultures and of course different laws, including motoring laws.  I had made many trips to America before but this time, thanks to our friendship with these lovely people, we got off the regular tourist trails and into places – and above all among company – that took our American holiday and our new friendships, into a new dimension.

Of course there are lots of differences between UK and the States other than Drill Teams and guns, including road traffic laws and practices – and not just that they drive on the wrong side of the road and don’t really do roundabouts.  But it took a long time to realise, having scared a few people, that  pedestrians have more or less an absolute right of way on roadways in a car park, so that cars have to halt and give way every time a pedestrian might cross their path.  In UK of course car drivers expect pedestrians to keep out or their way on car parks unless they’re actually on a marked pedestrian crossing.  Not so in America, so Brits on holiday over there beware. And if a Cop turns on his lights and/or siren behind you that constitutes a temporary arrest – if you don’t stop and cooperate you commit an extra offence.  And if you rent a motorcycle in America don’t try filtering through traffic as you might in UK . If the police don’t give you a ticket for doing this, which is illegal, there’s a fair chance someone who’s stuck in a car in the traffic will feel an urge to get his gun out out of his glove compartment and shoot you!

Having got to know Randy (and Mark) I have no reservations about them being trustworthy with guns but I happened in a bookshop, to come across a coffee table book called “Armed America” which contained a series of portraits of people and families with their gun – or in many cases collection of guns, including what seemed to be military-type weapons.  Some of them were scary-looking people.  In UK these days personal firearms, especially handguns, are held only by those who do so outside the law, but there seem to be plenty about and they are increasingly being used.

The differences between our UK laws and ways and those of America don’t strike me as worth asserting as better or worse and certainly not as right or wrong.  Both sets of laws and customs are the result of many generations of evolution and refinement and they are what suits the particular time and jurisdiction.  The fact that there are differences (including between States in America and between England and Scotland in UK) illustrates that neither set are yet perfect in character; they are just current custom and legal practice.

During rainfall pictures were impossible - this was during a break

And I learned something else this year.  The sun shines in Florida doesn’t it – day after day, with maybe just the occasional  heavy but relatively short shower in the afternoon? They were begging for rain to reduce the risk of brush fires.    We in Lancashire know what proper rain is like, don’t we?  During our last week in Florida we saw hardly any sun and long periods of very heavy rain  A one stage the rain was falling at the rate of 3 to 4 inches per hour and one town suffered a total rainfall of over 25 inches in less than five days.  There were extensive floods.  So that’s why Florida has all those lakes and every road has a deep ditch alongside it; that’s somewhere for the rain to go when it’s falling so hard and fast. Driving becomes hazardous of course, and the sheer volume of water forces traffic on the highways to slow to as little as 10 mph. There was so much water around that I became convinced that Florida, which is very low lying  was actually sinking. And back in Lancashire they were enjoying an early Summer.

So thanks to the Central Florida Motorcycle Drill Team for being so welcoming and hospitable and above all for allowing my wife and I to get to know you a little better.

There's Group Riding and there's GROUP RIDING! The Central Florida Motorcycle Drill Team at the 2008 Light Parade

This is the final part of this series of Articles and it’s mostly about how to lead a group ride.  It’s a bit long in order to cover the necessary ground, so if you find it too long to be bothered with please forgive me – and you might still want to read the Summary I have written at the end, which provides a concise summary of the whole subject in the form of a checklist, from which you can choose the things which you think are important.

And by the way this series of Articles was always intended to be a basis for discussion and suggestion, so if you have any experiences or ideas which other Wingers could benefit, or of course criticisms of the ideas I have put forward, please add them as comments.

Leading a group ride can be very satisfying and there are perks – for example you get to the destination first, so you get first pick of parking spaces and if you decide not to wait to see all your flock parked safely up, you can also be at the head of the queue for refreshments or checking in at the hotel.  Of course if you are the noble, self-sacrificing sort, you might stay to ensure that everyone else gets parked up safely, but then you end up at the back of the queue.

And by perks, do I mean perks!  On one foreign tour I was on a few years ago it became clear to us during our evening in the bar that the Tour Leader was getting some very serious attention from one of the unaccompanied lady riders on the tour, suggesting that he might be in prospect of some rather special leadership perks.  His hotel room-mate subsequently reported, maybe a tad disloyally, that he didn’t get to bed, or at least get to his own bed, until nearly breakfast time. That’s never happened to me, I hasten to add, and of course at my age it’s far more important to be able to decide when to stop the ride for a toilet break than anything else.

Nevertheless in a variety of ways I have found leading group rides to be very rewarding, so I would encourage all Wingers to at least consider giving it a go.

But it isn’t without its challenges and I found it very challenging indeed the first time I did it, so the tips in this Article could help some of you avoid at least some of the mistakes I have made along the way.

My first go at leading

Half a dozen of us were riding cross country back to North West England through the Borders on the way back from a weekend in Scotland with a larger group; the Yorkshire/Derbyshire element were heading South and we needed to head south West.  I had ridden with another group in the same area a few weeks earlier, I remembered that we rode some very some nice biking roads and thought I could remember the turning points too so, thinking it couldn’t be all that difficult, I offered to lead.

Fortunately I was with friends and they helped as well as laughed at me when first of all I turned too early, into a little cul de sac, and then missed the same turn again and took them on a detour up and down a hill on a steep and rough farm lane instead of the nice tarmac road we could see meandering along the valley below us.

My own riding fell to pieces under the weight of the extra responsibility too that day; I experienced more than a few wobbles and buttock-clenching moments as a consequence.  But I was lucky; we got back into Lancashire eventually and I didn’t quite drop my bike, although it was a close run thing.  I can’t say I enjoyed my first experience of leadership of a group of bikes, indeed it turned into quite an ordeal.  I had got so flustered (and overloaded by what I had taken on without proper planning) that told myself never, ever to volunteer to lead a group again.  It was a useful lesson in how not to do things; a vaguely remembered route, no experience or planning – awful really, when I think back.

But you can learn from your mistakes and hopefully I did so.  As I gained experience, mostly by watching how others led groups, and did a bit more ad hoc leading myself, I gradually developed the confidence to plan to be a leader and I now feel reasonably confident about taking it on.   So one way and another, despite the fumbling beginning, and mostly by watching how others do it, and of course by attending Mark Burns’s excellent IAM training session on group riding, which gave me the idea of writing this series of Articles for Wingers, I have learned how to enjoy leading a group.  It can add to the interest and challenge of riding without overloading you – providing you put the effort in to think and plan ahead.

Suddenly you’re the Leader!

And these leadership tips are not just for people who volunteer to be leaders; sometimes you suddenly find yourself leading a group by accident – then what do you do?  The bikes ahead have disappeared and you find yourself at the front of part of the group and suddenly everyone’s following you!  I told a story in an earlier article in this series of a rider who found himself in this position by accident and made a fatal mistake.

I have found myself suddenly having to become a leader too.  I was part of a group tour in the South of France a year or so after my own first fumbling attempt to lead a group (during the period I was still resolved never to lead again) and we were heading for Monte Carlo for a couple of nights, to see how the other half live.  I was comfortably placed mid-way back in the Ride as we approached the City/State on a coastal motorway; we had a very capable Leader and I had more than enough on my plate staying alive when the traffic on the motorway became very heavy, indeed it quickly turned into a three lane commuter race track with no holds barred and car and lorries changing lanes all the time, seemingly for fun.

Within a few minutes I got separated from the bikes in front by traffic and lost sight of them.  I had effectively become the unwilling and distinctly unhappy de-facto leader of the five bikes at the back of the group.  Thank goodness for satnav I thought to myself, at least that’s working well, which it was.  We were on route and it was warning me and counting down to the exit we were due to take.  I managed to get over into the exit lane with all the bikes following me and we all made the right slip road.  And that’s when the fun started.

Monte Carlo turned out to be built on and under and inside lots of cliffs, so that as soon as we came off the motorway we were into a series of rock tunnels and galleries, twisting and turning, stopping at traffic lights, then disappearing into another tunnel.  The last mile or so to our Hotel, and it could only have been a mile or so, had suddenly turned into a navigational nightmare.  My satnav kept losing its signal; if it wasn’t the tunnels then the tall buildings hid the signal.  We had twisted and turned so many times that I had lost my sense of direction completely.  I could tell which way was up and down but that was it.  The road ahead went up a bit, it went down a bit, it went left and it went right.  I didn’t know whether we were going North, South, East or West. If we weren’t in a tunnel we were on narrow roads between high buildings. The satnav didn’t stand a chance of keeping up.

There were very few directional road signs and none of them meant anything to me.  There was nowhere to stop even one bike safely in this crowded and busy place, let alone five. Thankfully I could at least remember the name of the hotel we were heading for and there were some signs pointing to individual hotels which gave me hope, but not of course to ours. But the satnav would occasionally get a bit of a signal and sort of catch up with what was happening – and from time to time it seemed to confirm that we were, seemingly quite by accident, still on route.

Eventually we rode into a square where there were lots of chaotic-looking roadworks in progress and it wasn’t obvious that there was an exit road at all.  I had no alternative but to stop.  I looked around and could see anything to help me work out what to do next.  After what seemed like a lifetime but was probably only a few seconds one of the riders spotted a sign naming our hotel to or right.  I turned out that I had stopped, because I had run out of options, only 50 meters from the entrance to our Hotel’s underground Garage.  There is a God, I quietly concluded, and in we went.  Unfortunately I had already owned up on the CB to being lost and stuck for options  by the time someone spotted the Hotel sign, so it was too late to try to look relaxed and gracious while accepting the credit for getting us there in one piece.

Monte Carlo is an interesting place to visit and on our rest day we enjoyed it as tourists on foot. We didn’t even think of trying to ride the Grand Prix course, we did that on a tourist tram instead.  Riding the bikes out of Monte Carlo the day after was not without its challenges but it was much easier that getting in.  Visiting Monte Carlo by motorcycle is not something I would recommend to the feint hearted.  Clearly it’s possible to do it and we all enjoyed being there.  But it’s the sort of place which calls for serious concentration to ride into on a GoldWing, not to mention lots of planning if you are likely to end up being the Leader of a group of GoldWings doing it.

GoldWing Group Rides vary enormously

GoldWing group rides are distinctly variable in scale, scope and style, so that there is really no such thing as a typical GoldWing group ride.  At one end of a spectrum it might be a small group just heading for a familiar watering hole together after a social meeting, which with hardly need planning or leading at all, and at other could be a group of a dozen or more bikes on a long European tour, maybe into East Europe, with or without trailers and camping gear.

And there are also massed GoldWing group rides too, like the Blackpool Light Parade or the Treffen ride-outs, when several hundred GoldWings might be taking part; these are special cases and they require special planning and control to keep them safe – often including special marshalling arrangements and even police assistance, so they are outside the scope of this series of Articles.

Somewhere along this spectrum, of different types and sizes of group ride, there comes a point when planning and skilled leadership become desirable and eventually necessary if they are to arrive safely at the destination and still riding as a group.

Clearly it is possible to lead a group successfully without elaborate route planning, but planning the route (and even riding yourself in advance to check it out) certainly helps things to go smoothly, especially for more ambitious group rides.  If you are taking a group into strange territory and especially a strange city or through a complex motorway intersection, especially if it’s also in a foreign country, planning the route carefully, studying it and committing the important bits of it to memory is the key to successful leadership.

Keeping it simple can work

But my good friend Francis, after whom I named our new goldfish recently, has survived for years leading groups with little or no planning and not much in the way briefing or specifying a drop off system either.  He can lead afternoon ride-outs completely successfully without planning a route and without even telling anyone where they are going or where they will stop for refreshment until the urge tells him what he is going to do that day as he does it.

Don't forget to arrange a stop for a photo opportunity!

He achieves this by leading at a measured pace along relatively traffic-free country roads so that he can be confident that the procession of bikes will keep together. He relies on CB communication with his Sweeper to keep things this way.  He also knows the area in which he is taking the ride very well indeed.  And if he gets lost, which he confesses has occasionally happened, he doesn’t tell anyone, he just keeps going until he works out where he is – and then pretends he was planning to take that route all along.

This technique, which might be called, albeit with a pun, “Winging It”, clearly can work and it illustrates how, given good local knowledge and a measured pace to keep the group intact, it is possible to lead a group successfully without much preparation or briefing and without bothering with a drop off system.

The key to its success is effectively keeping the group bunched together in what is effectively a processional ride.  This is perfectly workable for many GoldWing club ride-out and far be it for me to suggest that you need t make a meal of planning and organising or leading them.  If what you do works, stick to it – although these days it would perhaps be worthwhile checking what your PLI insurer expects you to do in the way of safety planning for ride-outs. These days if someone does get badly injured the motor insurer should take care of it all but might not do so; if you organise or lead anything these days there is at least a theoretical risk of getting sued if something goes wrong.

For difficult junctions, have the target road number in memory

But Winging it (as in ‘doing it off the cuff’) cannot be relied upon for longer group rides, away from your home territory, when route planning, a proper briefing and a drop off system which everyone understands becomes much more important.  The idea of bunching the group up in order to keep it together through a difficult or risky section still applies, but planning and organising the whole ride moves into a different ball park.

I was leading a group of bikes along Dutch motorways past Einhoven, where there are a confusing set of junctions to negotiate around the City’s Ring Road.  At least two miles before the turn, which the satnav helpfully counts down as you approach it, I moved into the relevant lane and slowed down to bunch the group up behind me.  At this intersection some of the exit roads split almost immediately and unless you have memorised the road you are trying to leave on, even satnav cannot be relied upon to keep you out of trouble.  There is a limit to how well satnav can give directions at complex junctions: “Exit right then keep left straight on” springs to mind as one I heard which was difficult to make clear sense of.

I slow down even more if necessary in order to stay in the correct lane, rather than risk lane changes close to an exit; too much can so easily go wrong and be hard work to recover from.  So you need to have the target road number in your head, whether or not you are using satnav.

In Europe there are two sets of road labelling numbers, so each motorway has two numbers, the national ones (usually starting with A, which changes as you cross a national border) and the trans-Europe numbers, which all start with E and stay the same across borders.  Some signs give prominence to the national numbers, some to the European numbers.  Knowing both can therefore make the difference between making a difficult turn successfully and missing it.

On a safe section, loosen the reins

But further along the route with the same group on the same day, on a country road with no turns for ten miles or so and some enjoyable bends to negotiate, I opened up the pace and stopped worrying whether anyone was keeping up with me along that stretch, because I knew I could dawdle for a while at the end of it to let everyone bunch up again. Staying bunched up unnecessarily will make a boring ride of it for at least some of your group, even though others might well be perfectly happy to bumble along in a procession.  Varying things is a way of pleasing most of the people most of the time; you cannot of course hope to please all of the people all the time.

Leading a ride of this size requires lots of planning and lots of assistance!

So keeping everyone tightly bunched unnecessarily for the whole of a ride makes it boring.  If you have done your route planning and you know when there is a safe stretch coming up when they can’t easily take a wrong turning, open up the pace a little and give everyone a chance to enjoy riding at their own pace instead of the group’s. Briefing riders that it’s OK to overtake helps to achieve this too.

Not that I’ve found many decent biking roads in Holland so far by the way.  Their country roads seems to consist of long straight flat stretches alongside long straight canals with limited overtaking opportunities and a speed limit of fifty mph, so I tend to stick to motorways to get through Holland without undue delay – but there is a very nice town called Helmond just East of Eindhoven which has the advantage of being a nice lunch stop and a way of bypassing the dreaded Eindhoven motorway ring road with its complex and confusing intersections. Once you’re into Germany there will be a much better choice of country roads for your route.

Navigational aspects of Group Leadership

Whenever he is in unfamiliar territory, a group leader has the problem of navigating himself along the planned route as well as keeping the group with him. The challenge of navigating a group are of course similar in principle to those of navigating yourself, but it’s not quite so easy to pull over to check the map with a group of bikes behind you, so quite a bit more forethought and forward planning about navigation becomes worthwhile – and that’s as well as reading the road as far ahead as possible to ride in a way which helps the whole group to stay safe and on route.  No one said that leading a group of riders was supposed to be easy!

Towns can be a pain

I’ve already mentioned the challenges of complex motorway junctions, when it can be difficult to spot the particular exit road you’re after among many.  Towns are a nuisance on a group ride too, especially when a turn has to be made on to a new road coming out of it.  And big cities are of course even worse.

They are easy places for some of the group to get separated, go off route and to end up getting really quite lost, especially if there are series of traffic lights or roundabouts and enough traffic to make it  impossible for the group to stay together all the way through, which is often the case.

A town big enough to generate traffic and having several roads in and out will be very likely to split up a group unless drop offs are used.

On a local ride out on home territory, when the riders can simply be told which exit road from the town to make for there may be no real problem, but in a strange town and a strange country it becomes much more problematic.  The map reproduced here shows a small town in Germany where several roads meet, so riding through it and emerging on the correct road and still intact as a group presents quite a challenge for everyone in a group, not just the leader.

Big Cities are a nightmare

Riding into a foreign city to find the hotel for an overnight stop as a group can also present real difficulties of getting everyone safely to the hotel – not least because you will often be arriving towards the end of the afternoon after a day’s ride and this may well coincide with the city’s rush hour.

Keeping together as a group while you are doing so is often completely unrealistic because traffic will inevitably spilt it up.  Very small groups of bikes, no more than four or five, can hope to stay together while riding through a city but any  more than this makes getting split up by traffic lights almost inevitable.

So briefing your group (maybe at the lunchstop) how you plan to cope with entering the city can be invaluable.  Nominating subdivisions of the group prior to the approach to a city can help, so that if traffic breaks the group up, for example riders who have satnav can be asked to spread out along the group’s riding order, so that each bike without satnav is positioned behind or fairly close behind one which is.  Riders of satnav-equipped bikes can be briefed to try to stay with the bike (or bikes) immediately behind them which aren’t.

Marking all the turns through a city using drop-offs is unlikely to be viable and so the leader should tell the group that this is not in the plan unless he knows it can be done.  But the leader can (and should) plan to mark the final turn into the hotel’s parking area or garage, to make it easier for the following bikes and sub-groups to spot where this critical turn is.  In spite of a hotel usually being labelled fairly conspicuously with its name, and in some cities there being signposts to the various hotels at junctions, riders will tend to have their eyes very much at ground level and on the traffic flow while riding into a city, so someone wearing a Hi Viz vest and waving enthusiastically near the entrance to the hotel is really useful.  Pillion passengers can serve this role particularly well because they can dismount quickly in order to stand at the turn while their rider completes the process of parking up, which may not be easy.

Satnav – the Group Leader’s Best Friend

I’ve already made clear that satnav can help enormously with difficult navigational situations, indeed I don’t know how anyone could be brave enough to take a sizeable group of bikes into a big foreign city during the rush hour to find a specific hotel without satnav.  Of course motorcyclists have been doing this long before satnav, but satnav was already on the scene when I started European touring, and I would want to have to do without it.

But even the latest satnav maps may not be up to date with the latest changes to one way streets or junction layouts in cities, which can change far more frequently that country roads and highways.  Even the latest maps on satnavs are based on two year old information.

Satnav, some types more than others, are prone to losing their signal among high buildings, which can present a bit of a challenge en route into a strange foreign city, to say the least.  Garmin’s Street Pilot 2610-2820 series are more prone to losing signals if they are installed with a Turatech bracket, which encloses the unit with a metal cage-like grip, than with other, more pen brackets systems, to the extent that i can help to install an additional external aerial in order to reduce the incidence of loss of signal.

It is not essential for all the riders if a group to have satnav of course, but it can help if several riders in a large group have it and not just the Leader.  As I mentioned, this will allow small sub groups of riders to be formed for the ride into the city, each following a rider who has satnav, in case separation of the whole group becomes unavoidable.

Pillion Navigators

All this talk of satnavs ignores the value of a good city map and a talented, map-reading pillion passenger.   She might lose her concentration or her bearings or her cool and her map might prove to be out of date or have insufficient detail or it might blow out of her hand, but unlike satnav, at least she won’t lose her signal among high buildings and she might be amenable to helping to wash the bike as well as pairs of socks, for which satnavs are completely useless.

But I’ve only ever met one pillion passenger who likes fast riding on twisty roads, navigates well and helps to wash the bike.  I don’t know her well enough to know whether she ticks all the boxes for being a perfect biking partner and she has satnav on their bike too, so maybe the idea of the perfect biking partner who can even make satnav superfluous is too much to expect.

Briefing for Drop Offs

I mentioned in an earlier article my preference for the drop of system which involve the leader signalling a drop off to the rider immediately behind him.

But it will only work well if the leader ensures that everyone in the group knows tha this system will be used and understands how it works.  Just saying “the usual drop of system, OK guys?” is not good enough unless the leader knows for sure that everyone is thoroughly familiar with it.  It will nearly always be worth at least offering a reminder of how it works, even if you think they all understand it.

The essentials, always worth a quick reminder, are that the leader signals when to drop off his following rider, the rider decides where it is safe to stop and then he must stay there until the Sweeper appears, no matter how long it takes.  And overtaking is OK for anyone who wants to ride a bit faster and doesn’t mind being dropped off more frequently.

Briefing for difficult navigational sections

If the route involves any is navigational difficult section, or any other section where there are special hazards or risks of getting separated or making a wrong turn, the leader should mention those before the ride too.

Group riders cannot be expected to remember all that much in the way of navigational detail, so you have to be selective, but failing to warn about a particularly awkward bit of the route can have far more time-consuming consequences that taking the few moments necessary to forewarn.

Public (or these days Civil) Liability Insurance for group rides

Ensuring that you have adequate insurance for what you are doing is a bit of a hobby horse of mine, so forgive me if I bring it out for yet another bit of exercise.

If we’re going to get lawyerish about these things, it can at least be argued that any organiser (or organising Club) or leader of a group ride takes on a duty of care of some sort for those who take part in it and maybe also for anyone else who might be affected by it, such as other road users.  If so, and depending on the circumstances, a compensation claim against the organiser or leader of a group ride for neglect of that duty of care might succeed.

Since I am not a lawyer and haven’t researched this in any detail I cannot really go further than saying that in the compensation culture which exists in our society, if you are going to volunteer to be organiser or leader or any other identifiable role, such as sweeper, which might be deemed to imply any sort of duty of care to others, it would be sensible to have appropriate insurance cover.  Thankfully we have not yet got to the stage in our Country where you can’t blow your nose in anyone else’s company in case they sue you for psychological distress, but personal injury lawyers have no scruples about suing whoever might have a duty of care and also enough money or property to make it worthwhile.

I have been told by my own bike insurer, Aire Valley, who insure lots of GoldWings, that I am covered if I act as a volunteer marshall or leader of a group ride as long as I am not being paid for doing so. That would not cover anyone else, just me.

If your group ride is a club activity there is also a case for ensuring your Club has public liability insurance (PLI) cover for all its activities.  It’s available and it’s not expensive.

The Club scheme being arranged by the Federation of UK GoldWing Clubs will apply to all ordinary club activities including organised group rides without special notification or approval and that’s the sort of thing that is needed. Latest information about last year’s accident at the British Treffen is that the motor insurers are not planning to recover their costs from the organising Club, the Leader or any of the marshals as such, but that may be a commercial decision rather than a legal one, and it isn’t yet cast in stone and it doesn’t guarantee that a personal injury claim couldn’t be made for any future adverse event.  (The word is however that that particular accident may prove to bring about the end of that special insurance scheme for GoldWings however, because the cost have been very high.)

As Secretary of FUKGWC, I intend to distribute copies of all PLI documentation to all affiliated Clubs, including details of the insurer’s guidelines on organising rides.  The days when Clubs can take this cover for granted as something which someone else has arranged are passed.

I would be the first to acknowledge that I might be a lot more risk averse than the average Winger in these matters but I am near the end of my working career, my mortgage is paid off and so is the bike.  I don’t want to give anyone any opportunity to what I have built up over my career off me, so I don’t leave things like this to chance.

Novices

Novices to group riding (who may or may not also be relatively novice riders) are worth a special mention because a leader should give them special consideration.  Some riders (and pillion passengers) are really quite anxious about the idea of riding in groups, so it is important to be welcoming and understanding of the needs of newcomers.

One of the commonest concerns is about whether they will be able to keep up with the pace of the group and how they will cope is they lose sight of the bike in front and miss a turn.  Misunderstanding the use of the Staggered Formation, as I did on my first group ride, as described in Part One of this series, can also be pretty scary.

The classic way to make life a bit easier for a newcomer is (as well as explaining when and when not to use staggered formation and the drop off system) to suggest they ride immediately behind the Leader. (Normally the pace will be steadier towards the front of a group ride and it’s the guys near the back who have to work at keeping up.)  If a drop offs are being used this would however result in the novice being the first bike to be dropped off, so the leader should suggest a position further back, so that other, faster riders will overtake and do the dropping off, yet the novice will stay close enough to the front to have no difficulty keeping up with the pace.

Of course the leader should be setting a pace so that the group can more or less stick together, except perhaps for sections when he knows there are no turns, so the pace can be opened up temporarily.  I is of course important that novices are briefed about an such sections and encouraged not to try to keep up with the bike in front in those circumstances, but to ride strictly at their own pace.  Novices should be encouraged to do that throughout the ride of course and positively discouraged from riding faster than their own comfort zone.

Trikes and Sidecar Outfits

An additional problem with dropping off arises when there are trikes or sidecar outfits in the group, because their extra width makes it much riskier to stop at the roadside to mark a turn, even if the rider is otherwise experienced and confident enough to cope with being dropped off.

I know one trike owner who thinks that the proper and only place for a trike is right at the front of a group ride, as its vanguard and flag bearer, as is their right and due as the giants of the GoldWing world.  (Not giving too many clues away there am I PapaJoe?)

As with inexperienced riders who would prefer to avoid being dropped off, it’s best to position trikes and sidecars a few places back from the Leader and encourage them to encourage solo bikes to overtake and to make it as easy as possible, consistent with their own safety, for them to do so.  And of course there’s no reason why a trike rider can’t be just as much of a poser in the middle of a group ride as at the front, with or without flags.

Allow overtaking – it is fun for some and it’s useful

A leader should brief the group before the ride about his overtaking policy:  when it OK and not OK.

In some circumstances (like heading for the last parking slot!) overtaking within a group is considered bad manners.  Likewise there are types of roads (like motorways and in town and city traffic) when overtaking within the group will create difficulties and should be discouraged.

It can be useful for the tailgunner to warn of "sports bikes coming through", especially if other members of the ride have CB

But with these few exceptions, I think overtaking should generally be encouraged among group riders. It helps to overcome the frustrations of getting stuck behind a rider whom you don’t enjoy following (because of his pace or riding style) and it helps novices avoid being dropped off before they have acclimatised to group riding sufficiently to cope with it.  As Leader I would encourage everyone to welcome and accommodate overtaking by other riders in the group – and of course non-group riders who might want to get ahead of the group b overtaking it is stages.  Riding in the group is no excuse for abandoning frequent rear observations while you are riding; just because one of the group was following you patiently ten seconds ago doesn’t mean he’ll still be there – anything could have happened, so you need to look and check a least as often as when riding alone.

Of course we are talking about group riding on open country roads here, not motorways or town riding, nor of course on very narrow country lanes.  Overtaking should only happen where it’s safe to overtake, not otherwise.

So, those riders who enjoy riding a bit faster than others and are prepared to overtake will do so.  And in doing so they will of course end up nearer and nearer the front of the ride, and eventually they will get dropped off at a turning point, have a rest while everyone else passes them by, then start the overtaking process again. This pattern of sprint and rest, sprint and rest, is attractive to some riders and they are quite happy to do it throughout the ride.

Other riders prefer to cruise along comfortably, following the guy in front but having no desire to go faster, no matter how much of an invitation to others to swing the bike about a bit on a set of sweeping bends.  And if there are a few riders in the group who do like to stretch their legs a bit when the opportunity arises, the steadier riders will tend to remain somewhere in the middle  of the group and won’t be troubled by having to be dropped off at a turning point – which might suite them very well indeed.

Dangerously Bad Riders

Finally, before I round off with a summary checklist, I should mention the sensitive subject of bad or dangerous merely riders within a group – should, and if so how, does a Leader deal with them?

It’s not all that uncommon to be unimpressed by someone else’s riding but that is usually something you can deal with by keeping out of his way.  But what if a rider looks to be really dangerous, what do you do then?  In my experience encountering a really bad or dangerous rider is very unusual.  But of course it can happen.

I remember a touring ride some years ago when one rider, new to the group and on his first day with us, was clearly riding dangerously.  Most if not all of the rest of the group not only noticed his aggressive riding but were alarmed by it.  His riding generally was unimpressive too, but the really dangerous bit which sticks in my mind was when he repeatedly tailgated cars whenever they were in his path – deliberately and closely, to show his frustration to the car driver because he was being held up.  And he was doing this with his own young daughter on his bike as pillion.  If any of the cars had even touched their brakes he would have had absolutely no chance of avoiding a serious collision.  I wasn’t a particularly experienced rider at the time but even I could see that what he was doing was really stupid as well as dangerous.  And it was creating danger for the rest of the group too, especially those behind him who would be next in turn to try to overtake the same car.

That night in the hotel bar the Leader, who had of course noticed this guy’s riding style himself anyway, was approached by more than one rider about their concerns.  Among the group happened to be a retired traffic cop who is well known in the GoldWing world and is somehow the sort of guy that no-one would try to ignore or argue with, possibly because as well as having the acquired self-confidence of a man of his background and training, he also happens to be built like a block of flats.  I don’t know whether he was asked to have a quiet word but I suspect he was and he did.  At any event the offending rider was a changed man the following day and his riding style caused no more concern at all during that tour.

One way to decide who leads the ride next day!

Mind you, on that tour our Leader, who is not particularly well known for his physical presence, beat the traffic cop at arm wrestling in the bar that night, or at least he appeared to beat him, so maybe he did his own dirty work in having the necessary quiet word. And quiet word is was, certainly nothing was said publicly.

I’ve ridden in a lt of different groups and that’s the only experience I’ve had of a rider having to be tackled about his riding style because it was dangerous and presenting an unacceptable risk to others in the group.  Hopefully there’s only a small chance that I would have to face that  particular diplomatic challenge as leader of a group ride and it’s not happened so far.  It is of course only ever likely to arise if you are riding with strangers.  But if someone was riding so dangerously as to be causing a significant problem for the group as a whole, maybe the leader would have to face up to intervening.  Better to risk causing offence and even to cause offence if necessary than to end up having to scrape someone up of the tarmac after a nasty accident.

Summary

This is a list of some of the things you might want to tell novices about group riding and which can also be a check list from which you can choose things to brief riders about before you lead a group ride:

1. Don’t be frightened of group riding, it’s enjoyable, otherwise riders wouldn’t do it.
2. Group riding is done for companionship; it should never be allowed to develop into a competition and especially not into a race
3. You remain responsible for your own safety while riding your bike at all times, so don’t allow group riding to encourage you to do anything which is unsafe
4. Listen attentively to the Leader’s briefing and try to remember at least the basics of the route and the location of any planned refreshment stops; that’s te information you will need if you do get separated.
5. While you’re riding take such action as you think is necessary for your own safety and maintain all round vigilance, as you would normally do to ride safely. Other riders in the group are a source of risk to you as well as other traffic, so keep your eyes peeled.
6. Frequent rear observations are particularly important.  Other road users can look upon groups of riders, especially GoldWings, as an irritating obstruction and they may try to overtake the group aggressively; such people are dangerous to a biker at close quarters so it’s generally best to let them pass without hindrance.
7. No one expects you to ride faster than you feel safe just to keep up, ever.
8. Don’t allow yourself to ride faster than you can cope with safely just to avoid losing touch or a navigational turn; getting lost is much easier, quicker and less painful to recover from than an accident
9. A staggered riding formation is useful on main roads and motorways because it allows the group to ride closer together without sacrificing safety because each rider still has a two second gap behind the bike directly in front. Each rider occupies half of the lane, riding in the centre of his own half, so about a quarter of the way in from your side. It is not necessary or desirable to ride very close to your side of the lane.
10. You should not try to use a staggered riding formation on narrow country roads or on roads where it is safer to choose your own safe line around bends.
11. At roundabouts or junctions when bikes in the group end up queuing to make the turn, it can be helpful to close up into a staggered formation in the queue with your front wheel spindle roughly aligned with the rear wheel spindle of the bike ahead of you.  This allows more than one bike to have a view of oncoming traffic and may also allow two or more bikes to move off and make the turn in fairly rapid succession when a gap in traffic appears. But don’t take undue risk or hurry to move off when others do; don’t move off until you are satisfied you can do so without hitting the bikes near you as well as traffic on the road you are joining.
12. Overtaking is acceptable during group riding except on motorways and in towns but you should feel no obligation to do it.  Make it easy for other group riders to overtake you if they want to do so.
13. If you find yourself immediately behind the Leader at a turning point on the route you might be “dropped off” to act as a marker for the turn.  The Leader will indicate with an outstretched arm, pointing to where he would like you to stop. You must make your own assessment of whether it is safe to stop and if so where, the Leader is inviting you to do so by his arm signal, not ordering you.
14. Normally the safest place to stop is at the nearside kerb, either well back from the junction or roundabout for a left hand turn or just beyond a right hand turn, where riders approaching the turn will be able to see you across the junction or roundabout.
15. Sometimes, at complex or obscured junctions or roundabouts, the Leader will drop off more than one marker.
16. When you stop after being dropped off at a turning point you must wait there until the Sweeper (the last rider in the group) approaches, no matter how long it takes.  You will not be left alone for ever; if there has been a breakdown someone will come and tell you sooner or later.  But you must wait, if necessary adjusting your position to move to a safer one, otherwise you will probably make a problem situation considerably worse.
17. When you see the Sweeper approaching prepare to move off just in front of him; he should slow down to help you achieve this.
18. Don’t feel you have to ride fast to catch up or keep up with the riders ahead, the whole point of the drop off system is that there will be someone marking the next turning point on the route when you get there, so you don’t have to keep the rider in front in sight.
19. If you wish to avoid being dropped off at a turning point you are welcome to do so; you should position yourself towards the middle of the Ride and make it easy for other riders to overtake you, so that they end up in the drop off position behind the Leader rather than you.
20. Group riding on motorways requires a different approach (eg no dropping off) and needs everyone to try to keep up with the bike in front; the group needs to ride at a similar pace if not faster than most other traffic in order to be able to ride defensively and to avoid being at increased risk from other motorway users.
21. If you don’t feel comfortable doing the pace the Leader is setting on a motorway you should consider leaving the group as soon as practicable and making your own way instead.
22. You must always be prepared to back off and create a gap to allow other motorway users to break into the group in order to change lanes, especially in order to enter or leave the motorway.
23. If you have a bike-to-bike radio by all means enjoy chatting during the ride if you wish (unless the Leader asks you not to) but don’t prevent the Leader exchanging safety messages with the Sweeper, so quick one-liners rather than long-winded stories.
24. Group rides are sometimes an opportunity to show off and most Wingers like to do a bit of that when the opportunity arises. So be charitable and wave to the poor people who don’t own a GoldWing and will probably stare at your group in wonder as you pass through their towns and villages.
25. So enjoy your group riding, it’s great fun. But never forget that you are riding a large, powerful and heavy motorcycle in fairly close proximity to other traffic and in particular other large bikes, some of which may be ridden by people who are distracted because they are showing off, or are less skilful in their riding than you would hope.  Never forget that group riding is potentially hazardous, so never drop your guard or take undue risks with your own safety.

This list is a composite of the ideas which I have picked up from a number of people whose leadership of group rides I have admired and at the IAM Training Session I mentioned in Part One.  Having ackowledged the fund of knowledge on which I have drawn, I must however emphasise that no-one else should eb blamed for any mistakes or bad ideas which they might contain, the mistakes will all be mine.

Enjoy your group riding, it’s a great way to enjoy a GoldWing.