I remember the first time I met an Advanced Motorcyclist, or rather a man and wife pair of them, shortly after I had bought my first Wing and probably at one of the first Lancs & Lakes Wings Meeting I ever attended, some eight or nine years ago. Their exalted status was mentioned as I was introduced to them by Bill Squires; he clearly felt it was something worth mentioning but at the time I had never even heard of advanced motorcycling.
Apart from getting the impression that being an Advanced Motorcyclist must be something special, because Bill is not one for being impressed lightly, the encounter registered in the memory banks but only just, and more because Dennis and Chris seemed to be very nice people than because they were anything exotic as riders.
Not that I remember ever riding with Dennis until many years later, by which time I has passed the advanced test myself and become an Observer, i.e. a trainer in advanced motorcycling. I had the opportunity to follow Dennis on a ride out at the Carmarthen Treffen and, in a way that you can’t really stop yourself doing when you have done the Observer training, I observed his riding. Dennis wasn’t fast; he clearly wasn’t interested in “making progress”, as the jargon has it, but my goodness he was smooth. And smoothness is the true mark of an advanced motorcyclist they say; an advanced motorcyclist’s riding looks effortless and unhurried – and this is precisely the impression Dennis gave on that day. At slow speeds he was rock steady and completely in control; embarrassingly so because I found myself weaving a little when he didn’t, stopping when he hovered. And he was reading the road ahead well too, anticipating hazards and putting himself in the right position to negotiate them safely and smoothly in good time.
You can tell whether you are following an advanced rider very quickly when you encounter one on your travels and Dennis was very much an advanced rider. And I was not at smooth as he was, certainly not on that day. As I have been reminded by experience many times over the years since I passed the advanced riding test, you are always learning and you can always get better. What advanced motorcycling does give you, which helps you to become a better, smoother and safer rider, and also a faster rider if you want to be faster too, is the capacity for continuing self appraisal and self criticism; it gives you the interest and the appetite for self improvement in your motorcycling.
So as I rode with Dennis that day I was trying to ride well and smoothly, as I always do, and not just to match Dennis’ impressive standard of riding which, as it happens, I didn’t. The next lot of advanced motorcyclists I remember meeting was a year or two after first meeting Dennis for the first time, and they did want to make progress, or at least one of them did. Indeed he acquired the nickname Stormin Norman that day as a consequence. I had recently changed my first GL1200 for another one, a 1986 GL1200SEi and therefore something special – fuel injection and all sorts of gadgets, including CB radio, most of which seemed to work. (Our new bike was also adorned with such a heavy burden of bling that she was dubbed the Barbara Cartland of the motorcycling world and she acquired the name Gloria.)
I had come across Elite Wings on the internet, spoken to Ian Cardwell by phone and arranged to rendezvous with him and an Elite Wings Tour en route to Edinburgh for a weekend. I had a battery problem and missed the original rendezvous but made it to the Little Chef near Penrith, which was their next coffee stop. They were behind schedule, possibly because of waiting for us, so we set off at pace up the M6, faster than I had ever ridden before and probably faster than my bike had ever been ridden before. Management didn’t say anything at the time over the intercom (too much wind noise) but it turned out that she had looked over my shoulder and clocked what was going on, so it did get mentioned later.
Straight line speed on a motorway does not seem difficult to do on a GoldWing and it didn’t at the time, although in retrospect I can recognise that it was probably too fast for the conditions, and of course the speed limit. But it was the next leg, on an A road heading North East from Abingdon Services where Norman had met up with us and was leading the ride, that it really started to feel like we were riding very fast, too fast for my comfort by far. Fairly soon after we set off at this very brisk pace (Norman was an Advanced Rider, presumably thought everyone else was, and that they all wanted to “make progress”) I heard Ian and Derek Cumbers (who was positioned immediately behind Norman) talking on the CB about slowing the pace down, which thankfully they did.
The rest of the weekend was ridden at a leisurely pace, much more appropriate to a couples ride and to riders of mixed ability. Even so I found myself completely outclassed as a rider by many of the people I was riding with, uncomfortably and even embarrassingly so at times. They were smooth and in control, for example when setting off at junctions to turn right, while I would have wobbly, buttock clenching moments as I looked at the kerb or bollard or pothole I was hoping I wouldn’t hit as I pulled away.
The experience of trying to follow Stormin Norman was alarming but it also showed me, as did the weekend’s riding time and time again, that my own riding skills left a lot to be desired; these guys were riding smoothly and under confident control, which was more than I felt I was doing. They could also ride much faster than I could too if they wanted to. As the weekend progressed I realised that I wanted to learn to be in better control, so I should look into this advanced motorcycling business and find out what it involved.
There are several ways of learning advanced motorcycling. The Instutue of Advanced Motoring (IAM) is very well established and has a large number of local motorcycling groups, so almost certainly will have one close to you. They also offer a package deal for motorcyclists called Skills for Life. ROSPA is another source of training and there are also Driving Standards Agency Approved independent Advanced Riding Instructors.
So Gloria and I chose the IAM and started advanced training together with my local group, with South Lancs Advanced Motorcyclists (SLAM). I fell into the hands of my Observer Ray Borg, with whom I am pleased to say I am still on very good terms to this day. SLAM’s way of teaching advanced motorcycling (IAM local Groups vary in their approach) is that each Associate (as trainees are called) is allocated a personal Observer (i.e. instructor) for the duration of the course, which lasts between seven and ten weeks and involves seven to ten rides of about one and a half hours duration, in the course of which the Associate is taken through a syllabus of hazards and skills, covering the full spectrum of advanced motorcycling. There are also a couple of classroom sessions and, most importantly, the book “How to pass your Advanced Motorcycling Test”, which helps enormously. I found the book to be extremely well written; you can skim through it and get the general idea, but you can also read it more carefully in small doses, when ever sentence seems to contain pearls of real wisdom. Lots of pictures and no fancy language too, so it is very readable.
Having a one-to-one relationship with an Observer worked well for me, possibly because Ray has emerged as someone who has a vocation to train as a Methodist Minister. Anyway Ray had lots of patience and staying power, for which I was very grateful. Both Ray and I had the option to ask for a swap if either of us felt the relationship wasn’t working but I was very happy with it and Ray managed to put up with me, and still does when I ask him to take me out for a bit of a polish up from time to time. In return for his kindnesses I converted him to a Wing and he had a GL1800 for a while.
Advanced motorcycling training does involve acquiring plenty of improved riding skills, for example better positioning on the approach to corners and junctions and for overtaking, and practice at slow speed handling – and learning to look where you want the bike to go rather than where you don’t. But in essence advanced motorcycling involves learning to read the road and the hazards ahead, so that you are in a better position to anticipate difficulties and therefore also to avoid them.
Most riders (and drivers) only look at what is happening a couple of hundred yards ahead, or less, and they only react to things as they happen. An advanced motorcyclist will be looking much further ahead and will also be planning how to avoid trouble rather wait to be confronted by it. Likewise an advanced motorcyclist will be looking ahead for opportunities to make progress; it’s not just about being ultra careful. An advanced motorcyclist will be moving into position to take an overtaking opportunity he has already identified while another rider might still be thinking about starting to look for one. Approaching a blind bend will normally be a very dangerous place to start an overtake but an advanced rider will sometimes do so, because he has been watching the road beyond the bend, of which there is a good view, for some time and he knows there can’t be anything coming the other way.
Slow speed riding is a challenge for many Wingers and I was no exception. Ray took me to a quiet corner of a huge Tesco car park and got me riding around a lamppost, looking at the lamppost rather than the ground, as a way of forcing me to look where I wanted to go, not just at the ground immediately in front of the bike. The idea was that I would gradually reduce the size of the circle until I was turning with the steering hard over, using a combination of clutch and rear brake to control speed, instead of the throttle. But Gloria was having none of this and nor was I. It felt like I was juggling too many things in the air at once and although I could sometimes ride one or two smallish circles I couldn’t get any sort of consistency at all. Ray told me to keep practising. It didn’t work.
Ray’s own bike was a Yamaha FJR1300 and on this he could do consistently small and steady circles for as long as he liked. A local Yamaha dealer had an FJR1300 demonstrator so without telling Ray I went for a test ride. As he was wheeling the bike out of the showroom the salesman was fulsome in its praise, especially about the handling and especially at slow speed. “You can pop this bike into gear, pick both feet up and then count to five before you pull away, it’s so easy to balance” and promptly did so. Even more amazingly, so did I; I had discovered at least part of the secret of Ray’s superb slow riding skills.
At our next rendezvous on the supermarket car park I arrived early and parked up. Ray arrived and invited me to demonstrate what I had achieved by practising during the past week and was more than a little taken aback when I refused. I challenged him to demonstrate what he wanted me to do on Gloria instead. Never having ridden a Wing he happily agreed to do so – and did one hesitant circuit of the car park and no tight circles before returning to say “I see what you mean”. We settled for a different approach to slow speed turns in which I rode slowly, keeping the bike as near vertical as possible and using the handlebars to turn as tightly as I could. It was the best that Gloria and I could do so I would just have to hope that the Examiner would accept it. Come Test Day I was asked by the Examiner to ride figures of eight within what seemed to me to be an impossibly small parking area which was made smaller because part of it was flooded; somehow I just managed to ride one figure of eight without looking too bad but, realising I couldn’t hope to keep doing it, I then stopped and look at the Examiner for the next instruction, as if I had misheard him. Bless him he must have decided I had misheard him and told me to move off and do something else. I scraped through the Test but I was well aware that I was some way from becoming a genuinely advanced rider.
Two years or so after passing this Test and having ridden about 12,000 miles per year, so quite a lot more experienced, I was out riding with a group of advanced riders and we were making progress, scraping the footpegs on some of the bends in fact. But from time to time I was still underestimating a bend and experiencing those buttock-clenching moments when you have gone in too fast and ended up having to take urgent recovering action. Other riders owned up to periodic mistakes like mine but one rider said that this never happened to him; he always felt he could read the bends reliably and therefore enter at the optimum speed. Was he bragging? How could he always get it right? Well, three or four years later I think I understand. I have become more experienced and I am also just that little bit extra diligent and cautious, so that I now rarely get caught out going too fast into a bend.
Several years after Ray tried to teach me I had another lesson on riding a Wing in tight circles with a bit more success. The Central Florida Motorcycle Drill Team arrived as our guests for the 2008 Blackpool Light Parade and I was present when they were practising on a hotel car park we had borrowed for the purpose. After their first practice session they cajoled me into having a go at their two basic skill tests, which every rider has to perform satisfactorily in order to be considered for Team Training. These are riding 50 feet from a standing start in 16 seconds or more, i.e. controlled, very slow speed riding in a straight line, and riding consistent 24 foot diameter circles, i.e. inside a 25 foot circle painted on the ground around a painted mark. One of them stood in the centre, like Ray’s lamppost, shouting at me to keep my eyes on him not the ground until I did so – and it worked. Wobbly (and terrified of dropping the bike) at first within only a few minutes I was able to ride something like a 25 foot circle – and then to become more relaxed about doing it and thereby achieving some sort of consistency.
At the end of two practice sessions, totalling only about an hour or an hour and a half, I was able to ride figures of eight around two abutting 25 foot circles, changing from circles to figures of eight and back again at will. It was amazing and great fun! As other Lancs & Lakes riders came along to join in, they soon had four of us riding the same 25 foot circle nose to tail and even riding figures of eight together – unbelievable!
How was this possible after my dismal performance on Gloria? Well, that would be telling. I doubt if it could be done on a GL 1200 and I have yet to try, although I plan to do so, just to find out. We were riding GL1800s, which are much easier to handle – and they are capable of steady speed riding on tickover, which is half the battle. Get into second gear on a car park and let the bike control its own speed on tickover, it won’t stall because the bike’s ECU will automatically maintain steady revs. You can then concentrate on riding a circle without having to worry about speed control at the same time – and that makes all the difference. As you gain confidence you can then vary your speed too, to slip into place 30 inches behind or in front of another bike as you both run tight circles.
Back in Florida, the Drill Team ride a mixture of G1800s, GL1500s and big Harleys, all of which are capable of being ridden in the way they started to teach us. It has to be a big bike, they told us, you can’t do this sort of thing on a sportsbike; which was nice to know. GL1800s are easiest to ride, GL1500s can do it but they need their tickover speed increased to 1300 revs and Harleys have to be ridden using a combination of throttle and clutch control, and so are more difficult to learn on. Harleys are aircooled too, which means that in Florida they have to stop to let them cool off after only 20 minutes of Drill Team riding, whereas Wings will keep going all day if needed. I suppose 20 minutes is about as long as a Harley can be expected to go between breakdowns too (!) – so choosing a Wing is a no-brainer, unless you are seriously into enjoying vibration with your recreation.
Advanced riders are supposed to retake the Test every three years or so to make sure they are maintaining their skills, and I haven’t done that yet. I did take a riding safety check last year with Lancs & Lakes (and got a lot of stick within Lancs & Lakes for missing a red light!) but I haven’t re-done my IAM Test yet and maybe I should. At least I should be able to ride those repeated figures of eights the Examiner demanded last time without difficulty now, but I will need to concentrate on not missing any red lights. Unfortunately becoming an Advanced Motorcyclist doesn’t make you infallible – and that is something it helps to keep bearing in mind, every time you ride your bike.