Stuart’s GoldWing Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.