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.

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.

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.