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Faith
(by Guy 'Guido' Allen, October 2023, Travels with
Guido series #370)
Trust the bike – it’s
probably better than you
Once upon a time, in The Bulletin
magazine (RIP), Patrick Cook drew a brilliant cartoon of
the four virtues: Faith, hope, charity and rat cunning.
Let's talk about the first and leave the others to
future discussions.
What brought this to mind was
today's lurid, there goes the front and here comes the
back, slip on a patch of diesel fuel during the Oz
Triumph Tigger launch. We all came up in one piece
though, which is why this is not being broadcast via a
bucket of Dettol and complaints about the menu at the
Ararat hospital.
A quick rule of thumb here for
front-end dumps: If you can feel the front end going,
things are looking good – it can be saved. If you can't,
you're already on your back. As for a back-end lose,
there's plenty of time so just relax. But I'm getting
ahead of myself.
One of the most depressing and
fascinating sights on a trip through the nether regions
of our continent is the classic black mark on the tar, a
matching furrow in the gravel, and a bitter and twisted
tree with bits of fairing still hanging in it. The signs
of someone else’s skidding misfortune.
Where it all goes galoot-shaped
is between the "Oh phuck, oh phuck..." part of the
corner entry and the messy exit stage centre. They
didn't even try to make the corner.
The "Oh phuck" bit is all too
familiar, and part of life's bewitching travesty. Play
rough games, in enough corners, and odds are you'll get
the entry wrong some time. From there you have a few
choices. They are: 1. Freeze and do nothing; 2. Hit the
brakes and then freeze (the preferred option,
apparently), or; 3. Maybe brush the brakes and then
definitely tip in harder.
This is not rocket science.
I've ridden an interesting smattering of bikes over the
years: A lot of current current stuff plus weird kit
like a home-built Subaru-powered thingy. Forget the
Subaru.
The rest of them can/will outride 99-plus per
cent of riders in a similar percentage of situations.
It took me a while to get the
scone around that theory.
It was wet, windy, and
unforgiving mountain territory. The GS1100G Suzi was a
biggish thing and we went – for my riding ability – way
too hot into a left-hander. A LandCruiser was coming the
other way, which removed the running wide option.
Various organs and extremities puckered up, tipped in
and we made it through. Much against my expectation.
Not crunching the stop levers
and tipping in harder fights against the body's nerves
in a crisis, and I was delighted that it had actually
come together.
It paid off again some years
later in the city when someone turned right across me at
an intersection, then propped, blocking centre stage. I
was going too fast to stop and had to put the bike
(can't remember what it was) on its left ear to get
around, then flick back to stay on the road. My right
leg still aches at the thought, because it was a goner
that night if things went wrong.
Motorcycles will put up with
some horrible things. On a ride to Queanbeyan one day I
hit a hole big and nasty enough to have the pilot a long
way out of the saddle, bend the steel front rim, destroy
the main fairing mount, and break the rear exhaust
bracket. We kept rolling...amazing, really.
Or should we talk about the
Bimmer R1100RS of the late eighties that hit the right
side hard enough to dent the header and leave gouges in
the frame rails?
And the Honda CBX250 that
ground the left frame rail, skittered across the full
width of the road, and stayed on its rubber.
Then there's the dirt
equivalent which is taking me even longer to come to
terms with. I remember the advice of Dr Strangelanguage
when it came to road bikes on dirt. Essentially it was
concentrate your attention on the horizon (as you should
on the road) and stand on the pegs when it gets nasty,
with the throttle on. I wrecked a bike not listening to
that.
Then, a few years later, I went
back to the same sandy road and lived. Admittedly, the
throttle-on through the long sandy patches advice was
scary. It got to a stage, on a Hinckley Trident, where I
was on the gas gently in fifth at 110-ish and the front
end started to fold in. While the nerve ends were
screaming "Brake! Brake!", I wound on the right grip and
quietly freaked. It was a hospital visit at best,
according to the vultures in my stomach – but the bike
straightened up.
Which brings me back to the
Tigger. When the front slithered I was spooked, being
too busy to recall the "if you can feel it going, it's
recoverable" theory. However when the back let go it was
more familiar "hang in, it'll be okay" territory. It
worked. That I stuffed up the corner in the first place
is another story.
The upshot is that if you're
still on your wheels, have faith. Trust the bike – 99
per cent of the time it can out-ride you.
(Ed's note: First published
in Motorcycle Trader magazine circa 2002. Note this
was written long before the appearance on motorcycles
of six-axis inertia measurement units and the
attendant sophistication for ABS, traction control et
al. However I suspect that doesn't change the thread.)
More Travels with Guido columns here
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