Archive for December, 2006

Walter Kern may have written this ages ago, but they are an excellent reminder on how to stay safe out there.

Essentially, these are ten tips concern safe driving habits and rider attitudes. I’d be interested in what other ideas my fellow riders might have, in addition to these. Feel free to post them here.

Keith Code just posted a piece on his web site about crashing. It’s good. He explores some (bad) conventional wisdom on crashing, e.g. the fallacy in the above headline and this one: “There are riders who have fallen and those that are going to fall.” (We’ve all heard that one, right?)

More interesting to me was how his attitude on preventing crashes has changed based on 25 years of teaching the CA Superbike School and millions of student track miles. At one point he believed their consistent attrition rate due to crashing, which wasn’t horrible, was due to phases of the moon or something other than observable riding patterns. But he began to take a closer look and after time, began to see the errors and what they meant. What had seemed like accidents or fate turned out to be lack of technical skills – thus correctable. Implementing some of the techniques he mentions in the article has cut their crash rate in half.

Worth a read.

I just got off the phone with Brian Steel who’d called about his experience at Keith Code’s CA Superbike School. He loved riding the new Kawasaki ZX-6R but I think what he liked best was riding without having to worry about cars pulling out in front of him, trucks dropping stuff, speed limits or lousy road surfaces and being able to concentrate solely on technique.

Maybe Brian will post some more about his experience here.