Motorcycle Forum / General / Sportbikes / March 2006

I went for a ride along one of the usual backroads on Saturday, only to
find it was covered with roadworks and loose gravel. This sort of took
the fun out of the ride, so I was just cruising along in first gear. As
I passed the 'open speed limit' sign that signalled the end of the
roadworks, I topped a small rise and the front end just washed out. By
the time I pulled it upright (things were going into slow motion....) I
was off the road and onto the grass. I looked at the thin grass strip I
was on, right next to the tree line and a drop to a creek and 'Target
fixation' (a phrase I never really paid much attention to until I saw it
mentioned a lot here) popped into my head,so I looked across to the
middle of the road, gently put a bit of power on as the bike started to
slide sideways,the front was back on the road and the rear wheel bit the
edge of the tarmac and popped me back onto the tarmac. I stopped,
freaked out, and looked back up the road to see a large oil patch with
half a dozen 'wheelie' marks coming down the hill from it. F#%*ing 'boy
racers' had been up there the night before doing burnouts in their
underpowered pieces of sh.t that need oil to get the wheels spinning,
when only 100 metres away there were 10 km of roadworks with gravel to
play in! Unimpressed to say the least!

...and onto safety gear (which I wasn't wearing). I ran into a guy who
had binned his ZX12 by locking the front wheel trying to slow down in
traffic and losing the front end (at 100+ kmh). He showed me the scars
on his leg/knee where the grafts were done and I was surprised at the
damage done, considering he was wearing leathers. It turned out that the
leathers he had weren't 'double stitched' and just ripped apart at the
seams on impact!