25 ft diameter turns
I suspect that most Wingers get anxious about turning the bike in a confined space, for example doing a U turn is something most of us will try to avoid if we can reverse direction by different means. Even when you have acquired what you think is the necessary skill, if you forget the basics or make a poor assessment of whether a turn is viable or not you can easily end up dropping the bike, as I did with my brand new 2008 GL1800 in Germany last Summer.
Somehow there’s always an audience when you do this sort of thing and on this occasion there was also audience participation by one of the bikers present which, together with the sight of me rolling down the hill out of control for a few yards after dropping the Wing, would have provided excellent spectator value if anyone had been watching.
I was second in a ride of three bikes who had got separated from the bikes ahead of us. Our leader had taken a wrong turn up a lane and we found ourselves needing to reverse our track for a hundred yards or so to get back on route. My first mistake, as number two in the line, was following number one when I guessed from the satnav that he had probably turned too early, but you tend to assume that the guy in front knows something you don’t, don’t you?
We stopped facing uphill on a fairly steep and narrow lane leading out of the village, with no obvious turning place other than a passing place a bit further up, where the road was a bit wider, although not by much. Our leader, on his Triumph Tiger, did a slightly hesitant but nevertheless successful left handed U turn back down the hill. Well, you feel pressure to follow suit, don’t you? So I did.
I should have realised before I started that it was really a bit narrow for a Wing to get round and settled for a three point turn but I didn’t. Having started the turn however and got to a position about half way around and in the centre of the road I realised I wasn’t going to make it, dithered a bit and then tried to stop. I must have had a bit of a left hand lean on, so when I stopped the bike started to drop to the left. After it was a question of too little leg (not long enough!) and too late, so down the bike went.
If I had had the presence of mind to get the the bike vertical as I stopped I might have been able to get it to lean to the right and put my right foot down. But I didn’t, so the Wing did a passable impersonation of a felled tree, dropping more than ninety degrees left onto the roadway and landing on its crash bars. (Wings which fall through more than ninety degrees often keep going, rocking on the crash bars and hitting the mirrors on the ground but this time I was lucky, it didn’t.) I stepped or fell off to the left as the bike dropped, staggered sideways, then hopped and staggered a bit further downhill gathering speed trying to keep my feet, failed, then rolled down the hill a bit further still. AS i said, it must have been good spectator value.
Chris, our Leader, might not have seen this bit, which he didn’t deserve to really because he was the one who had taken us off route. So when he stopped and looked back he probably guessed why I was on the ground – but why was Mary, the pillion passenger on the third bike, also on the ground while Mark, its rider, was standing next to his bike which was still facing uphill, parked neatly on its side stand?
Truth can indeed be stranger than fiction bt how had this odd disposition of bikes and bodies come about? Mark, already at a halt behind me, waiting his turn to reverse direction and still facing uphill, saw me tottering and, quick as a flash, dropped his side stand and swung his leg over to get off his bike, completely forgetting about Mary, who had therefore been unceremoniously kicked off the bike, ending up on the ground with me!
It is a great testimony to the design of the GL1800 that they can take this sort of abuse in their stride, so when I (or rather we, they stopped laughing eventually) picked the bike up there was nothing to show for the incident at all except a slight roughness on the contact area of the rear crash bar – which I knew from past experience would easily polish out. Such is the quality of the chrome plating on these components; well done Honda America. So fear not if (or rather when) you drop your GoldWing, it will probably survive the experience with no real damage, unlike your personal pride of course, which inevitably suffers. Chris and Mark were very kind and didn’t take the p**s out of me until we got back to the hotel, when of course everyone else on the tour was present to join in.
So what did I do wrong, and how can you turn a GoldWing tightly and safely, including on a hill, without falling over? Well my mistake on this occasion to was to attempt a turn which was almost doomed to failure from the start; I should have realised that and done a three point turn instead. Turning a GoldWing tightly on level ground is one thing, trying to do it on a substantial slope is quite another.
Roundabout Jo
At the time of this misadventure my method of turning tightly was the same as Chris’s, which is to move slowly, keeping the bike nearly vertical and turning the handlebars as far round as confidence permits. As I mentioned, this is a hesitant approach to making a tight turn, so that as long as you are moving slowly (and keeping your hands off the front brake!) if you have to abort, you should be able to stop and put your foot down. But on a slope this doesn’t work because your left leg (I was turning anti-clockwise, big mistake) simply isn’t long enough.
So rule number one (as well as keeping your hands off the front brake when you are riding slowly) is don’t make tight turns on anything like a serious slope. It’s a recipe for falling over!
How do you learn to make reasonable tight circles with confidence – especially when you will be doing inside kerbs on a raod which is likely to have at least some camber on it?
The way I was taught when I did my IAM training involved riding round and round a lamp post on a Tesco car park while my Observer kept telling me to look at the lampost and not at the ground. The idea was that I would gradually reduce the size of the circles until I had the bike hard over on full lock. I was to stay in the friction zone (clutch slipping) and maintain my balance by easing out the clutch a little as necessary to increase speed when I needed to get more upright and reduce speed (by pulling in the clutch and/or dragging the rear brake) when I needed to turn tighter. I couldn’t get the hang of this at all, indeed I was hopeless. I was riding a GL1200 at the time which might have had something to do with it – but anyway I gave up on the attempt and so did my Observer when I made him have a go on my bike. We settled for me turning slowly while keeping the bike more or less vertical and turning the handlebars as far round as I felt I could manage – hoping the Examiner would make allowances for a big bike, which in the event, happily, he did. He probably made lots of allowance that day too, but that’s another story; I did more or less get the hang of Advanced Riding eventually.
And this same hesitant approach is how most people approach tight turning. It has the advantage that if it does go wrong you should be able to stop (using the rear brake remember!) and get your foot down – providing your leg is long enough. Like any skill you need to practise it, not just tackle it, buttock clenched, only when circumstances force you to do so.
Supermarket car parks are handy for this sort of practice. Start by trying to do a U turn within thirty feet (aim to turn within the appropriate number of car park spaces – they vary, so pace out ten strides) which shouldn’t be too difficult, then try to work your way down to twenty five. The tickover riding technique which I described in the Article on Slow Riding and Stopping without Dropping is useful; it lets you concentrate purely on direction without having to worry about speed control too; your GL1800 will not stall, I promise.
As an aside, I could perhaps mention that I learned from the Drill Team when they came to the Blackpool Light Parade this year that, much to my surprise, I could ride much tighter circles than I had previously thought possible. We were all riding inside a 25 foot diameter circle, either direction, time and time again. So could three other Lancs & Lakes riders too once they were taught how.
Side Saddle needs extra practice
The Americans taught us to do this using the 25 foot circle we had painted on the tarmac for their display practice purposes. One of them stood in the centre of this circle and turned around in a circle as e rode around him, so as to keep facing us – and shouting at us continually to look at his eyes and not at the round. It worked. A bit wobbly (and buttock-clenching) at first but within only a few revolutions some sort of stability in the turn had been achieved and we were beginning to get the hang of it. After three or fours goes I was able to relax enough to start fine tuning the circle by looking at the markings at they went under the inside mirror out of the corner of my eye. In less than an hour I was riding figures of eight using two adjacent circles and yelling Yee Haw! the top of my voice in celebration. It really was quite an exillarating achievement. Three other L&L riders do it too and the following day they had all four of us riding nose to tail in the same 25 foot circle, all grinning like Cheshire Cats!
The Practice Pad we were using (a hotel car park) was almost perfectly flat but the Display Pad on the Promenade at Blackpool had quite pronounced undulations on it, so the bike’s speed varied considerably going around the circle. When I had a brief go on that Display Pad I had considerable difficulty riding the circle because of this and gave up. Two other L&L riders persevered however and they got the hang of it. So in theory at least, if you practised those circle-riding techniques on increasingly sloping ground (eventually on ground like the side of a skateboard ramp!) you might just have enough confidence to throw your bike into a tight turn on a narrow lane up a hill. In theory.
For all practical purposes however, riding really tight turns on a GoldWing is strictly for making U turns on smooth and essentially flat surfaces when there is at least 25 feet of width between kerbs, preferably a little more. Practising tight turns using a painted circle on a car park as the Drill Team taught us is useful because it gives you confidence that you can dive into tight circle at tickover speed and get round. Much better than riding round a lamp post! As with any tight turns, you have to force yourself to look where you want the bike to go, not at the kerb you want to avoid.
Attempting tight turns on gravel (or even grass) is much more risky. The Florida Drill Team told me that they do not attempt to display on grass and indeed they looked very carefully at the tarmac on St Chads Headland at Blackpool because 4000 tons of beach sand had been on it a week before our Event and although it had been swept mechanically, we got it swept again for safety.
With teaching and practice, you can hope to make turns with confidence – and of course you will impress the spectators no end if you get good at it. (Refreshing these skills is on my agenda for the start of next Season, although on the road I might settle for doing U turns only on roads which are a little wider than 25 feet, just to have a bit more margin for error.)
If in doubt, do a three point turn!
And I worked out after my spill in Germany that there is a safe and an unsafe way to do a three point turn on a slope too. You need to ensure that the foot you are going to put down when you stop is on the uphill side of the bike, so you can be sure it is long enough. The rear wheel brake works also better than the front one when you are rolling backwards downhill, because the weight of the bike transfers backwards when you brake while moving backwards, so you really do need the left foot on the uphill side of the bike. ( And we never use the front brake when we are manoeuvring slowly anyway, do we?)
So if you are doing a three point turn starting off facing uphill you start your manoeuvre on the left side of the road and rotate clockwise. Conversely if you are doing a three point turn facing downwards, to turn back up a hill, you start on the right side of the road and rotate anti-clockwise. You can do a three point turn to go back back down a hill on any GoldWing (because you can roll backwards on the second leg of the turn) but you will need a reverse gear to make a three point turn safely to go back up a hill, or alternatively a pillion passenger to give you a push.
Rolling a Wing backwards down a slope can be done under positive control using the footbrake while keeping your left foot on the ground. Move slowly and deliberately, in stages if necessary, keeping enough lean to the left to ensure that the bike cannot go the other way – but not so much lean that you have difficulty moving your left foot backwards in steps to keep up with yoru progress.
Rolling backwards using the front brake is unsafe because it will have poor grip in that direction because of weight transfer to the rear wheel – the front wheel will easily skid (and therefore may also slide sideways) when you apply the front brake for the same reason. (But we never use the front brake when we are manoeuvring slowly anyway, do we?)
These techniques are not the only way to perform these turning manoeuvres but they do provide a way of doing them which minimises the risk of dropping the bike.
Of course no matter how good you might get at riding tight turns you will need to keep in practice to stay good at it – and there will always be someone who can do it better, or at least with more style, than you can. Part of the IAM training sylabus in my Club, South Lancs Advanced Motorcyclists, is called the Cones Day. All Observers are encouraged to bring along their associates to a car park where there is a narrow roadway between kerbs, probably about 25 feet in width. Cones are laid out along the centreline at about twelve foot intervals and the riders are expected to do a slalom along them, a U turn at the far end and then a slalom back the other way.
The Obersvers have to do it too, or face some ribbing, to show they can pracise what they preach – and some always struggle a bit; it ain’t easy. Most use the “hesitant” technique I described earlier and with these dimensions, some of the sports bikes fnd it difficult to get round. Fireblades for example have very limited steering angle and a significantly larger turning circle than a Wing.
On one recent course an Associate turned up on a Ural combination outfit and staggered everyone by throwing it effortlessly up on to two wheels, then riding an equally effortless slalom, U turn and another slalom back to the start before dropping it back onto three wheels, also under perfect control. He had of course done that sort of thing before!
If you would like to find out about Advanced Motorcycling in your local area vidit the Institute of Advanced Motorists website and look up your nearest Club. There will be a contact phone number and someone will be delighted to explain what’s involved. (And you don’t have to learn any trick motorcycling to pass the Test!)