An extreme test of group riding skills -start of the 7,000 bike Wirral Egg Run!

Group riding is popular among Wingers; it can involve anything from two or three bikes going out for an afternoon in their local area to an adventurous European tour for a dozen or more bikes and sometime huge group rides like the Blackpool GoldWing Light Parade, which has involved over 300 bikes.  Large parades like that one require a special type of planning which is beyond the scope of this Article but the other two examples are fairly common, indeed I will be doing both types this coming year, so it’s worth considering how those can best and most safely conducted.

Is there a best way of doing group riding?  Some people seem to think so; they have their favoured way of marking turns and/or a committed approach to using a staggered formation for group riding, so it sometimes starts to look as if there is only one way.  Are there such a wide variety of scenarios for different types and sizes of group rides that no one solution can ever fit all of them, so that combinations of methods and a flexible approach are inevitably necessary?

And does group riding really have to be done to a method at all? Why can’t a bunch of Wingers just follow Fred as usual and enjoy themselves?

Well this last question is easy to answer because of course it’s quite possible for a small number of riders who know each other to go out together and enjoy a safe ride for the day without any formalities at all.  A few riders meet up, have a chat, agree where they are going, which route they will take and maybe where they will stop for a coffee, then off they go.  And it can work this way perfectly satisfactorily and safely, so why make group riding complicated?

With bigger groups and longer rides, especially with groups of riders who are new to each other and especially abroad, the chances of staying together and of everyone staying out of trouble will improve considerably if there has been some planning and if there is a more structured approach to briefing, leading and controlling the ride.

And weren’t the small informal group effectively giving themselves a bit of a briefing anyway, even if they were only having a chat about where they would go today?

Sharing ideas is helpful

Biking was something you taught yourself to do when I passed my test but I discovered later on that you can learn a lot more and learn more quickly if you learn from other people, so you learn the lessons of their mistakes instead of making them all yourself.  And so it is with group riding; you can either hope to pick it up as you go along, simply by watching what others do and trying to fit in.  This is what I tried to do when I joined my first GoldWing group ride. Someone helpful explained that a staggered formation was used, so I should ride either on the nearside of towards the crown of the road.  They might even have explained that this allowed each bike more room behind the bike directly in front.

I took this literally and finding myself falling into a nearside position in the sequence of bikes as we were led along a fairly major road to start with, it all seemed quite sensible.  But we soon turned off into some country lanes; these got narrower and narrower and the white lines disappeared.  Not wanting to appear to be the incapable novice, which in reality of course I most certainly was, I stuck to my position close to the nearside, sometimes barely missing hedges and bouncing in and out of potholes and drain covers.  It became really quite alarming and I can remember thinking to myself that these guys must be a bit crackers doing this all the time.  Apart from anything it was hard work and difficult to keep up.  Not much fun in this I thought to myself.

No space for a staggered formation here!

I can’t remember whether I eventually worked out for myself that this blooming staggered formation was not very practical on narrow roads or whether I asked someone at the coffee stop whether I was really supposed to ride in the gutter all the time, but eventually the penny did drop that a staggered formation is only useful (and indeed only safe) on the fairly wide carriageways of major roads and motorways, not country lanes.

The skills of group riding are not intuitive, they’re skills, so you have to learn them and it therefore helps if someone teaches you. Likewise the skills of leading a group ride take some learning, so it helps to learn from someone else before you try to do it yourself.

I had the opportunity recently to attend a training session on group riding, more of a workshop really.  It was conducted by Mark Burns who has been the Ride Out Coordinator for my local IAM Group for some years and has planned and led an awful lot of rides.  Mark acknowledged from the outset that his ideas were built on those of others who had gone before him so if others recognise their own original thinking in what follows in this Article please accept my apologies in advance for not acknowledging it specifically.  Several riders who were present had also been leading rides for some years too and the session turned into a pooling of ideas from which I learned a lot.  I had done quite a lot of group riding and led quite a few rides myself by now too, so I could ask questions from experience and chip in the odd suggestions too.  This workshop was extremely valuable and a number of things about which I was to say the least a bit woolly dropped into place nicely.

This series of Articles is an attempt to pass that learning on and I am grateful to Mark for his permission to use adaptations of his work.

The basics are obvious, it’s the detail that gets more challenging

There are some aspects of group riding which are so obvious and in such widespread use that it is reasonable to take them as cornerstones of a safe way of doing things: someone has to lead, someone is also usually nominated to stay at the back in a “sweeper” role and, unless it’s a very small group, there will usually be an agreed “drop off” system to mark turning points on the route where people would otherwise be likely to miss a turn, get separated from the group and go off route.

Hopefully, but maybe not always, there will also have been some planning of the route and where the rest or refreshment stops will be and hopefully there will also have been a briefing of some sort when all the riders will have been told at least the basics of the route, the drop off system and who is tail-end-charlie and, not least because it’s a good fallback for when people do get separated, where the planned stops will be.  And in essence that’s it, that’s how group riding can work safely and well. The rest is detail but it’s potentially very useful detail, especially for those who want to plan or lead a group ride, so let’s take a closer look.

Individual Rider Safety Aspects

It’s stating the obvious but responsibility for his own safety and the safety of his passenger does of course rest with the individual rider at all times.  Whether riding in a group and following a leader or not, each rider must keep this in mind and I have a sad experience to relate of an occasion when failing to do this cost a rider his life.  No one else can ride your bike for you and your top priority must always be to guard your own safety whenever you ride a motorcycle, especially when you ride in a group.

Some group rides are basically slow parades at times

Group riding brings motorcycles closer together than they might otherwise be to other road users when they’re on the move, so additional hazards arise and there is a need for additional care and vigilance by every rider.  Motorcyclists are encouraged to ride defensively, as if every other road user is trying to kill him and this is no less true during a group ride than at any other time.  Riding in a group can sometimes help to reduce hazard and risk, but it’s not bad things to remember that the bikes around you can become a threat too.  Other riders may get closer than you are comfortable with, overtaking manoeuvres can get more complicated during group riding and if there is a collision there can be knock-on consequences, as several Winger found out the hard way during a large club ride out last year.

I had a collision with another bike during a group ride out the year before and although there were no injuries the damage to my bike cost a lot to repair. It was an unpleasant reminder never to take it for granted that other riders in the group will do the safe thing; if I had sounded my horn, as I thought of doing a second or two before the collision but decided against, the collision could have been avoided.

What can go wrong?

All sorts of things can happen on group rides.  Some are quick and easy to resolve without even halting the whole ride, like someone dropping a map or something falling off a bike.  A ram-mount bolt suddenly broke on one ride I was on, causing the rider’s satnav unit to go bouncing down the road.  It’s not unknown for male riders, or even one of the ladies to need to stop and disappear behind a hedge for a minute or two.  In these cases the drop off system should be able to cope with getting the ride back together further down the route without significant difficulty and it may even be worth trying to let the leader know that there has been a stop.

Other relatively minor but more time-consuming possibilities arise too – like someone dropping a bike and needing a few minutes to get sorted out and confident enough to get going again, although generally speaking GoldWings tend to get dropped only at very low speed, there is little if any damage so it’s usually just a question of helping the rider to pick the bike up if necessary and resuming the ride.

On one group ride in Italy while traversing the famous (and very difficult) Stelvio Pass, CB radio helped to arrange a rescue by more experienced riders when a less experienced rider’s pillion passenger got sufficiently terrified to insist on getting off and not getting back on until they had got to the other side. This only caused a 20 minute delay thanks to CB radio when she might otherwise have insisted on walking down which would have taken a lot longer.  They’re still married and she still rides pillion but he’s not allowed to take her over difficult mountain passes any more.

And bigger or more problematic things can go wrong too, like punctures, breakdowns and of course road traffic accidents.  Really odd and unpredictable things can happen too and you may then have to work out quite a complicated solution, which might mean the ride plan has to be modified or abandoned altogether.

The classic staggered formation (in places!)

I was part of a group ride in Scottish Highlands a few years ago when a pillion passenger suddenly became spectacularly ill in the middle of nowhere – all over the inside of her full face helmet and down the back of her husband’s jacket.  Fortunately she knew exactly what it was (she was exceptionally sensitive and had eaten contaminated food) and so we knew there was nothing to be done but keep her sheltered and comfortable for the three or four hours it would take until the problem subsided sufficiently for her to be fit to travel again.  The illness developed only a couple of miles short of the pub where we were planning to stop for lunch but there was no way she was fit to be sat back on the bike to get there.  There was a somewhat insensitive suggestion that we could sling her over the saddle like John Wayne used to do with dead Indians in cowboy movies, but it was clear that realistically there was no way we could move her even that short distance on a bike.

We ended up flagging a car down to get her a lift the couple of miles of so to the nearest facilities.  I am afraid we didn’t tell the car driver quite what her problem was until we had already got her into his car but then we were short of options and as it happens she got to the lunch stop without further incident, although she make purposefully for the ladies as soon as she could.  She needed several hours staying close to a toilet before she could move anywhere at all and we ended up organising a ninety mile taxi ride to get her back to base.   Sometimes you have to be resourceful and work out the best solution to the problem when the situation crops up.

In this case the majority of the bikes continued with the planned ride and just one bike stayed behind with the casualty, so the sick lady had some company in the taxi home and her husband had a companion bike for his ride directly back to base. The lunch stop was an extended one for everyone while a solution was worked out but the planned route was completed by most bikes.  Come the end of the day, apart from acquiring the nickname of Vomiting Sue, which at the risk of a pun has stuck ever since, the unfortunate lady was safely in bed and well on the way to recovery.  She did subsequently invest in an open face helmet, which was just as well because the problem recurred few years later when again she was again given contaminated food.

The value of radio communications

This incident occurred in open countryside when the bikes in the ride were fairly close together, so the CB radios which several bikes had fitted had sufficient range to let the Leader know what had happened straight away.  As I recall however we did not have a plan for how to let the Leader know about a stoppage at longer ranges, so we were lucky that it happened when we were all bunched fairly closely together and just short of the lunch stop, otherwise it could have been much more complicated and time consuming problem to sort out.
Even if the Sweeper cannot talk directly to the Leader because he has got too far ahead, it may be possible for another rider to relay a message.  Radios are useful.

Mobile phones have their uses too

Unfortunately CB radios have a limited reliable range of a mile or so although it can occasional be much further if conditions are favourable.   Even the standard range can be shortened considerably in hilly countryside and built up areas, so even relayed messages may not be possible.  This is when mobile phones come in useful because providing there is a signal, they effectively have unlimited range, including on mainland Europe.

A pleasant potter around the North Walescoast by a group of Wings

Of course mobile phones can only be safely used to make calls when the bike is at a halt and only a minority of riders bother with a hands-free system which will allow them to take a call on the move.  If you are doing a lot of leading group rides maybe having the capacity to take a call while riding is worth considering because it is the only way a leader can be confident that he will be informed quickly of something which might require him to alter his plan.

Bluetooth technology apparently makes this sort of thing fairly easy to arrange and it’s just a question of letting the phone in your pocket talk to the satnav on your handlebars which then talks to you on the bike; I haven’t tried to do it myself yet.  I suppose if you don’t want to be pestered with other, non-urgent calls when you’re out riding you would have to go to the lengths of having a separate phone purely for this purpose, but then maybe you would have to start sacrificing those shiny bits you were promising yourself for the Wing this season and it could be a difficult choice to make.

However providing the Leader carries his mobile phone and keeps it switched on – and of course as long as he has told everyone, or at the very least the Sweeper what his number is – he will be able to pick up a text message to call the Sweeper at the next planned stop if not before.

The next Article in this series will deal with group riding on motorways.