Take It Easy – By Phil Hall
I love this picture that someone posted the other day and it is relevant to my post this morning.
One Winter weekend a while ago, my brother and I did another Hunter Valley run and as always it was fun, but more than just a little challenging for a number of reasons.
It was quite a cold weekend and, despite having a set of heated handgrips in the garage, I still haven’t got around to fitting them so it was a bit cool on the fingers, though not uncomfortably so. 20 plus years of riding in Canberra winters does toughen you up a bit.
Secondly, while there hasn’t been any rain for a few days, the area has had heavy dews during the night so there were many patches of road, especially in the shade of the trees and the cuttings, that were quite damp even till late in the day.
I have never liked riding on wet roads, or even partially wet ones so the situation called for some extra caution. In fact some of my favourite sections of road were very sketchy indeed and that, combined with a front tyre almost down to the wear markers meant that the confidence level was not high.
Being a weekend, albeit a cold one, the roads were filled with bikes, with riders out to enjoy a dry weekend before heading back to work. But, in spite of the less than ideal riding conditions, I saw some pretty marginal riding and we witnessed the aftermath of two accidents, neither of which were explainable except for being the result of rider error.
On the run down into the Colo Valley we came upon a bike up against an armco fence, with two people in riding gear standing next to it. The corner is not an especially tricky one, being a downhill right hander but with a constant radius. It is well signposted and known by most riders who ride the road as one that requires a little bit of caution.
Then, a few kilometres further on, on the climb up out of the valley, we were slowed by another accident, this time far more serious. The ambulance was in attendance and it appeared that the rider had crashed into the cliff on the right hand side of the road while heading east, downhill. Again, what was so perplexing was that the section is made up of several gentle bends with nothing to trouble even a relatively inexperienced rider.
Further along where the road is flat and straight there was a late model car buried in the bushland beside the road. Now that one was probably the result of the driver simply falling asleep and running off the road, but, even so, three accidents within a hundred kilometres or so just seemed bizarre.
It got me thinking about the song title that goes with the picture at the head of the article today. Over the course of the weekend, we travelled over 800kms. Road conditions were far from ideal and as already noted some sections traversed – Wollombi Road, for example – were positively diabolical. Yet we completed the lap without incident and had a huge amount of fun in the process. So, taking it easy and having fun are not mutually exclusive.
I think this does illustrate better than almost anything else the reason why I do not go on group rides. Over many years I have seen and heard of more incidents taking place on group rides than on solo rides.
Why? The reason is pretty obvious. It has been said that the first motorcycle race took place the day that the second motorcycle was built and there is more than a grain of truth in that.
Most keen motorcyclists are male and most group rides are made up almost exclusively of male riders – note I said “almost”. When groups of guys get together to do anything, it doesn’t take long for the competitive spirit to emerge and the results of this are almost inevitable.
Now I’m a male and I’m as competitive as the next bloke but I learned a long time ago that, in any group of guys, there will inevitably be some riders who are way better than you and some who are way worse. I am content with that. How long it takes for a rider to learn his limits and be content with them is something I do not know, but I personally have.
And I have an empirical method of judging this that is ever-present. My twin brother and I started riding at the same time, independent of any discussion about the subject I might add (twins do some strange things).
Paul rode for about ten years before family commitments and numerous other issues brought his riding to an end. Then, in 2005, he got the bug and bought a bike and started riding again.
On the other hand, I continued riding and have ridden pretty much straight through since 1974. But Paul was always a faster rider than me for reasons that I have never been able to determine.
Since my accident in 2010 and my return to riding in 2012 it has been even more obvious that he is a faster rider and I believe that knowing how much it hurts has tempered my desire to emulate Marc Marquez.
However, when we ride together, which is often, there is no question that he takes the point in the twisty stuff and I make it my business to not fall too far behind. We ride similar bikes but he is always more prepared to commit than I am and I probably keep a little more in reserve than he does (witness my reference above to pain).
Now Paul and I are fiercely competitive, we always have been, but riding is one area where I will not compete and it has been my choice to make it that way.
This is not to say that I couldn’t. I remember well a group ride to Batemans Bay, not long after our local bike club was formed. Mostly sports bike riders of course, and mostly young as well and I was part of the group – the older, sedate rider on his VFR.
We had done the loop in reverse, heading up the mountain from Wollongong, along the tops to Goulburn and past Wakefield Park to Braidwood and lunch was scheduled for the Steam Packet Hotel at Nelligen.
Those of you who know the route will know that the run from Braidwood to Nelligen is filled with exhilarating sets of sweeping bends as well as many rises and falls in elevation – a real rider’s road. Leading the group were the “gun riders” of the club on a Ducati 916, a 954 Fireblade and a K6 GSX-R Suzuki.
When we left Braidwood after filling up the guys let me lead for a while and I was confident that, once the twisties came along they would blast by and disappear. Except that it didn’t quite work out that way.
When the bends came I decided that I’d have some fun too. So I clicked it down a couple and started hustling a bit. Hanging off the seat and leaning over far more than what I would normally do, I saw that the boys were crowding my mirrors and I knew it was only a matter of time before they rounded me up.
But I decided that I’d make it as hard for them as I could so I upped the pace a little more and started answering their pace in the corners. I don’t know how long it went on, certainly it was 10-15 minutes at least and I arrived at the hotel first!
The Ducati rider, high on adrenaline, overshot the turn-off and had to turn around and come back! No sooner had the others arrived than they came over to my bike and one of them said, “Where the hell did that come from?”
The rider who they believed was sedate and slow had shown another side of his character! To say that I gained some cred that day is an understatement. My answer to the question was that I have always been able to do that but that I just choose not to.
Later the group leader told me what I already knew, they could have passed me anytime that they wanted too but, they chose not to because they were having so much fun watching the VFR do its thing!
The other side of the coin is a ride I went on with a Sydney group around about the same time. It was a ride on the Old Road and the meeting place was the Caltex at Berowra. It took nearly two hours for me to get there from Wollongong so I’d had a pretty good run already.
After we fuelled up I noted that, again, the group was mainly made up of young blokes, sports bikes, custom leathers, you know the deal. And there was a lady in the group, so I introduced myself and told her that I was just along for the ride and that I wouldn’t be doing anything fancy. “Then I’ll ride with you,” she said, “These boys all think that they’re Valentino Rossi!” So we did, and they did and we all had a great ride.
The bottom line is that, on the weekend, we rode over 800kms, me on a barely acceptable front tyre (I had tried to have it replaced on Friday but had been unable to), and we had no dramas at all. It isn’t rocket science – ride to the conditions and don’t get sucked into riding faster than you know you are capable of riding.
We stuck to the speed limit, had a huge amount of fun and arrived home, our bikes and our bodies intact. How hard can it be? As the song says, take it easy.
