Page 66 - 2022-08-01 RiDE

BE GREAT AT TAKING A PILLION

THE FIVE RULES OF ü Reading the road

PILLION-FRIENDLY well will help smooth
your riding
RIDING

The two prime objectives of riding with a pillion are
safety and smoothness. There’s nothing as certain to put
off a pillion as crashing, or thinking you’re about to.
Secondly, if you can flow like liquid velvet through every
situation, even the most nervous of pillions will soon
relax and marvel at your motorcycle mastery. And,
fortunately, being super-smooth requires the same skills
and techniques as being fast and safe. The key ones are:

1 IMPROVE YOUR

ROAD READING

The single most transformational thing you can do for
your riding — whether with a pillion or not — is to
improve your ability to see and interpret detail at speed.
This is the key to fast, safe riding and it’s what gives great
riders so much more time and space to react and handle
whatever comes their way. If you get this right, that
all-important smoothness will naturally follow and your
pillions will love you.
Like any other skill, road reading improves with
focused practice — years of riding experience can only
get you so far. The trick is to start slow and go for detail.
Ride at a speed where you have time to see and register
all the crucial details — looking as far ahead as possible. TRY THIS
Focus on how early you see new information appearing
and how much detail you gather. And if you feel yourself Add the ‘so what?’ test to what you see. This helps
getting swamped, or realise you’re noticing hazards you stop you just scanning without thinking about the
could have actually seen seconds ago if you looked significance of potential hazards. So if you look
further ahead, slow down. across some fields and see a truck approaching, your
Remember: you can only ride as fast as you can see, so ‘so what?’ answer might be that the lorry could arrive
investing in your road-reading ability will not only make at the upcoming corner at the same time as you, so
you safer, it will make you faster too. And, crucially, your you might need to adjust your line and/or slow down.
pillion probably won’t notice you’re going any faster,
because everything feels so smooth.

2 MAKE PLANS ü View through right-
hand corners can help
with overtakes
It’s no good spotting a load of hazards nice and early
if you don’t do anything — you need to come up with
a plan. On the face of it, this is pretty simple: work
out where to place the bike, what speed to go, what
gear to be in, and if (or when) you need to indicate.
The problem is that new hazards arrive all the time
so your plan has to change to accommodate them.
Before you know it, you’re juggling position, speed
and gear relative to multiple, simultaneous hazards.
Take a right-hander for example. Advanced riding
theory says you move to the left to extend your view
into it. Simple. But then you see a blind driveway on
the left, so you could move to a more central position
to stay clear (but then your view is reduced), or you
could hold your position but reduce speed. And what
if it’s wet, but with a dry line somewhere? Or if
there’s nasty-looking camber? The truth is that
many riding situations have multiple solutions — no
two bends are the same and, even if they were, no

66 SEPTEMBER 2022