Keeping Focus

Keeping Focus

UP FRONT

MARK HOYER

PANIC CAN PRETTY MUCH RUIN ANYthing. After all these miles and all these years of riding, much of the time as fast as I can, the absolute number one thing I’ve learned to avoid is panic. Well, that and crashing.

But panic and crashing often go hand in hand. The first time I wrecked a streetbike was a perfect example. Like any smart, 16-year-old kid, I’d purchased an excellent bike for learning the streetriding ropes: a pearl-white 1979 Yamaha RD400 Daytona Special. Then I did the second thing a smart kid does, which was to have somebody install expansion chambers, thereby moving all the power even higher up in the rev range. Sure, there was no bottom end, but at least delivery was abrupt...

Naturally, it wasn’t long after the pipes were mounted (and I aligned the rear wheel, as described here last month) that I went into the local hills to try out all this newfound power. I was bending the RD deeper and deeper into comers as I became more comfortable on the bike and started learning how it behaved. I came upon a nice straightaway and let it rip toward the next left turn.

Then it was the classic chain of events that has been repeated countless times: I got in “too hot,” freaked out, locked elbows, clamped brakes, stood the bike up and rode off the road.

But the only thing that I’d actually done was to outride my perception of the corner. I’d barely scraped the kickstand; the bike itself had plenty of performance left to make that corner at the speed I was traveling. It was my brain that didn’t have any performance left, and my response was to panic.

Luckily, I didn’t get hurt too badly as I shot into the orange grove. And I was fortunate to have a sympathetic insurance adjuster whose response to my inquiry was this: “Dude, RDs are awesome! I wrecked mine when I did a wheelie in an intersection. It popped up so high I blinded myself and put the front wheel right through the back window of a station wagon! Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you...”

I got more than full market value for my totaled bike. (Thanks, brah\) But I also got full market value on the experience. Wearing a decent enough jacket and my coveted first helmet, an Arai Freddie Spencer replica, I escaped with some road rash, a cracked rib and a well-cushioned whack on the head.

The latter was probably needed, and in the aftermath, I thought a lot about what happened.

It was difficult to apply the lesson when trying to ride my next bike fast (an ’82 Suzuki GS550), but I remembered vividly the result of panic, and this was a real aid in keeping my head clear when facing the unexpected or reading a corner wrong. Panic had a bad result, so while I’d have that initial twitch, I’d quickly breathe and relax and continue to operate the motorcycle.

I still wasn’t fast, but I was getting faster, smoother and thinking more while riding. I was also thinking farther ahead. Progress!

That’s why, after all these years, I would say the number-one riding skill I have developed is the ability to remain intellectual when things are going way wrong. I’ve learned not to panic at a much higher speed now!

Fortune, of course, has smiled on me in many situations. In fact, I can’t even count the number of times that I’ve lost the front or the rear and had it come back before it was gone, so to speak. That is, it all happened so fast that by the time I was finished screaming in my helmet, the wheels, and the universe, were back in alignment, all with no thanks to any of my actions. The lesson there is that sometimes doing nothing except continuing to ride the bike and acting like nothing’s wrong is the best thing to do.

A kind of example of this took place during the 1998 Honda CBR900RR press introduction at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where we got to ride the bikes with custom-made Bridgestone slicks. It was my first time on real racing tires, and the feeling was incredible, like I could do no wrong. Except, of course, that I could do wrong. I kept pushing the entrance of infield Turn 2 harder and harder until this one time... It was a shock when the front tire let go, but my knee was down and there were no riders nearby. I’d never been in that situation before, but at least when I had that initial moment of freezing, my right leg went stiff enough to hold the bike up for the short time necessary to reduce corner speed, and the bike began to turn before I ran out of track. The success was that after that initial shock, I continued to actually ride the motorcycle instead of doing what I’d done on the RD. Still, this was when I coined the phrase: “Luck makes me a hero, once again!”

These days, I almost never freeze. A recent example? I was at Phillip Island in Australia for a Suzuki GSXR750/600 launch a few years ago. I was running around at a decent pace, occasionally probing the stock street tires’ limits of adhesion when, lo and behold, who popped up in my rearview mirror but the Kevin Schwantz.

As any “intellectual” rider will tell you, it’s always those moments when you absolutely have to prove your manhood, particularly on the brakes, that you lose your head with a kind of primal, angrymonkey response. Yes, you’re going to show one of the demon late-brakers of all time how good you really are. Of course, I got in to the Turn 4 hairpin way too hot and had to run it quite wide. By that time in my track-riding career, I’d blown enough apexes that my first feeling was not panic, but simply embarrassment. I knew enough not to freeze up, and that there was plenty of track left to gather it up and get it turned with no danger of falling off.

I talked to Kevin about it afterward and he said, “Hey, at least you knew what to do about it.”

I replied, “Yep, plenty of practice!”

So while I may never outbrake Kevin Schwantz or intentionally save a frontend slide on my knee, I do try to learn something every time I ride, and the best way to do that is by keeping focus. Now if I could just control my inner primate... □