Edgework

Edgework

AT LARGE

ONE OF MY BEST FRIENDS HAS WHAT can best be described as a love-hate relationship with motorcycles. He loves how he feels when everything is working fine, when the weather’s nice, the roads are dry and he can kiss the tarmac with his pegs. He hates the Fear. And the Fear emerges for him when everything isn’t fine; when the heavens open and the roads turn to owl snot and a ride becomes—for him—nothing more than a test of will. He fears, in effect, the edge.

Being an extraordinarily bright guy, he’s developed a whole raft of intellectual abstractions about this love and hate he feels. He believes, for instance, that the basic problem is not his, but the machine’s; that the central design flaw of the motorcycle is, in a nutshell, that there is too little margin for error in riding at the edge of adhesion and control. He contrasts this with a car—even a quirky, highperformance car like a 911 Turbo Porsche—and concludes that whereas even the quirkiest cars give you some room to blow a corner and harm only your ego or some sheetmetal, doing the same on a bike can too often result in a dive into the Big Gulp.

I know a lot of riders who either secretly or openly believe this. I've listened to them for 25 years. And I think they’re wrong.

I think what’s scaring people is training. Or rather, the lack of it. With training, you can, I believe, attune yourself to the motorcycle—any motorcycle—well enough to expand enormously the difference between riding on the edge and over it. And I don’t think you have to be Kenny Roberts to learn how to do it; all I think you need is the right classroom, the right teacher, the will to learn, and the willingness always to ride with your head, not your hormones.

Every vehicle I use—airplane, car, motorcycle—gives warning signs before it departs controllability. But before I was trained, I couldn’t use those signs. From my observation, nobody can; nobody is born with the right skills and, more important, the judgment to use them. Both skills and judgment require training.

In games with wheels and wings, most of us get our training the hard, stupid way: by watching other guys. This is not only a slow process, but often a counterproductive one. When, for example, did you learn about the theory of countersteering just by watching some other rider? Most likely, the true answer is: never. That’s why new riders can benefit from Motorcycle Safety Foundation courses which illustrate it, or from high-performance clinics like Keith Code’s Superbike School. But older riders like me had to learn it the dumb way—by trial and error.

As far as I’m concerned, all of this is evidence that it’s not the bike which is at fault in keeping small the difference between riding right at the edge and going over it, it’s us. True, the fact that a motorcycle tire uses camber thrust rather than slip angles (as an automobile tire does) to get around a turn will always bring certain ultimate-grip drawbacks. But what I have seen over the years convinces me that it’s not at this limit where accidents occur; all too often, it's the ham-fisted shenanigans of the rider that create the heart-stoppers by putting the tire and the bike too violently over the edge.

Successful racers—of any variety, on any surface-learn to expand the edge, and I think street riders can, too. The question for me is not “Why?” but “How?”

The most obvious answers lie on the racetrack and in rider-training schools. But I wonder if the rarified atmosphere of go-fast is right for this kind of learning, which ought to be not just for hotshoes, but for everyone, old and young, fast and slow. I wonder if it wouldn't be more productive to take the speed out, along with the fear of falling, by using a parking lot or any other suitably wide-open area and a bike equipped with outriggers (like the ones sometimes used by motorcycle and tire companies when testing tires or brakes, and that Code now puts to good use in one of his advanced, twoday schools). These no-fall devices allow a rider to take a bike up to and beyond a tire's limits without eating asphalt. Would it not be worthwhile,

I wonder, to explore means by which new riders hopeful of getting a motorcycle permit were required—not asked—to put in time learning about edgework on such a contraption?

There are many problems with this kind of training, of course. The ignorant non-riding public, for instance, might fear that such skill and judgment training would: a) make kids want to ride in the first place; and b) teach them how to be just skillful enough at the edge to make them even more likely to go ever it.

But I don’t think so. I think that with the right curriculum—and the -right incentives—establishing baseline requirements for machine handling (such as the Federal Aviation Administration's requirements for every would-be pilot to show proficiency in inducing and escaping stalls), we might finally do more for new riders than throw platitudes about riding safely at them. We might actually show them how to do it—at any speed, on any surface, with any bike.

Would we then have fewer people who both love and hate motorcycles, as my friend does? I doubt it. Because deep down, I think that in his and many other cases, more is making him hate bikes than fear of the edge. But that’s a psychological issue, not a cycle-logical one, and only he and the others who share his problems can solve them.

The edge, though, is something we can all work on. Because sooner or later, all of us will ride on the edge. And when we do, it will make a huge difference if it’s familiar territory we've already explored. The difference. possibly, between life and death. Steven L. Thompson