Roadcraft, motorcycle control and mindset; how to be safer, smoother and better at motorcycle riding

How good was your riding today? How do you know? Who’s the judge of your day-to-day skills on a bike? Oh, it’s you. That’s handy.

Imagine if all assessments were that easy.

‘How good are you at cooking Mr Rose?’ ‘Well, I’m brilliant as it happens, thank you for asking.’

‘How good are you in bed lover-boy?’ ‘The best…Grr’

Etc.

Leaving that image behind, the point is that most of us never have our riding assessed after passing our tests. So, how do you know if your riding is any good? Does it bother you that you could take that blind left-hander better every flipping time you ride it? Does it bother you that you turn in too early to that uphill right hander on the B660?

Me too. Come on in and join the other 997,000 of us in the UK.

There’s a generation of middle-aged riders who survived the 80s on cross ply tyres, the 90s on sports bikes and the noughties-and-beyond on overweight, over-accessorised Buck-a-Roo adventure bikes.

Riders fool themselves that survival equals competence

We fool ourselves that survival equals competence. A psychologist would call it unconscious incompetence – we don’t know what we don’t know, and we’ve developed survival techniques rather than riding skill.

There’s a relationship between experience and confidence that you might not expect. It’s known as Dunning-Kruger was formally identified in 1999 by (you guessed it…) David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The short version is that people with low skill levels in a given discipline tend to have much higher confidence in their ability than you’d expect and as skill level increases, perceived confidence actually decreases.

Dunning and Kruger might not have identified it till 1999 but I’ve been experiencing and understanding just that on a motorcycle (and with many other things too darling, but let’s not revisit those images…) for an awful lot longer. Maybe I should have claimed it as the ‘Pompous Rosie effect’.

At his best, this fella could toy with the best riders in the world and then bugger off and make them look stupid. That doesn’t happen by luck

Practice the right things and practice them often to get better at motorcycle riding

A few years back – forgive the name-dropping – I interviewed Valentino Rossi. This was his purple patch at Yamaha when he’d toy with his rivals for 18 laps, before sailing past like they were on mopeds seemingly at will. Valentino explained how he’d choose his moment and then brake a few metres later, turn the bike even harder and open the throttle earlier, while learned experience and muscle memory took care of the humdrum, regular bits of guiding a 250bhp two-wheeled missile on worn-out tyres around the planet’s fastest riders, already on the limit, as if they weren’t there.

No one gets that good by being lucky. It’s all about the hours you put in actively learning and practicing the correct techniques.

That’s how you get to the ‘unconscious competence’ at the opposite end of the psychologist’s scale. It won’t surprise you to hear that this doesn’t just happen by riding around with your mates pulling bad wheelies.

Practice only makes perfect if you practice the right things. Otherwise, it just normalises bad habits. Watch an on-board TT-lap of Hicky or McGuinness for the very best two-wheeled examples. McPint is in his 50s and still getting faster round the IoM because he still wants to learn and get better.

Can I let you into a secret? I’m a terrible rider. I’ve had a licence for 40 years, been a professional road tester for 29 of them and I still get that right hander on the B660 wrong.

I’ve shared racetracks with GP legends, had my riding assessed (and complimented) by some of the best-respected riding coaches, but deep down, I know I should be better.

Wanting to be a better rider should be aspirational because who wouldn’t want to be better at the thing they enjoy doing more than anything else?

Post-test motorcycle training in the UK is based on the Police riding system

Much of the post-test training in the UK is based on roadcraft and the Police Riding System. It’s a good system that helps keep riders out of a tricky situation. Back in the 1960s when it first appeared, that was a smart way to operate because the chassis, tyres and brakes of the day didn’t give riders a lot of leeway when something went wrong.

Fast forward to 2024 the chassis, tyres and brakes on your mountain bike are better than any 1960s motorcycle. 21st century motorcycles have brakes, suspension and tyres that can stop in half the distance of grandad’s old BSA. We have ABS and traction control systems that work when leaning over and ignition maps for wet weather riding.

So why choose a bike with all that high-tech and not learn to use it?

Roadcraft is as valuable as ever but in 2024, we should be thinking harder about machine control skills because there is so much more we can do.

I’ve survived as a rider by using roadcraft to avoid situations where I need to be really skilled. I haven’t fallen off a bike since 1990, but I’ve had plenty of ‘non-accidents’ as an instructor I know calls them. I’ve been lucky… so far.

Dunning Kruger effect shows how many people with low skills have disproportionately high levels of confidence that decreases as skills increase.

Mark McVeigh is BikeSocial’s Motorbike Coach. He ran a riding school in Australia for ten years training more than 10,000 riders. He’s a firm believer that skills, craft and mindset are the three key elements of better riding.

You can't improve what you can't measure

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” he tells me. “Being assessed by an expert is great but you don’t have that expert on every ride. Most of us might take a couple of sessions every few years with BikeSafe or an advanced trainer, but how do I know if I’m improving in the meantime?”

Mark’s modern riding system is based on 10 years of research and scientific principles such as FLOW. Using micro-learning – incremental improvements made easy with regular, achievable practice, that quickly become second nature. The sum total of these small improvements can be a significant increase in skills in a short space of time.

Here’s a simple example that could just save your spine.

You’re riding through town at 30mph. A car pulls out 25 metres ahead. The Highway Code tells us that a car travelling at 30mph takes 23 metres to stop. Nine metres of ‘thinking’ time as your brain processes what’s happening, and 14 metres to bring the car to a halt when you start to brake.

The Highway Code doesn’t quote stopping distances for motorcycles - there are too many variables.

That statement alone should make all of us go straight outside to practice…now.

The Highway Code quotes the same stopping distance for cars and bikes, but the actual distances required can be much more varied on a bike because there is a lot more rider skill required. Mike Abbott from British Superbike School tells us that a skilled rider can brake from 60mph in 13M less than the official Highway Code distance.

Cars don’t fall over or pitch violently forwards or skid, because they have four wheels and ABS. All the driver does is stamp on the brakes. The concept of 'thinking time' and 'stopping time' is much more applicable to cars because that's essentially all a car driver needs to do. A bike rider has two independent braking systems, one tyre doing most of the work and a bike that becomes increasingly unstable as the front suspension dives.

Stopping a bike takes skill and skill takes structured, meaningful practice. If you grab the front brake too hard, the wheel locks, and you fall off. If you don’t grab enough brake, you hit the car and fall off. If you stamp on the back brake you skid, hit the car and fall off. And if you try to steer around the car while braking, you’d better be a Hollywood stunt rider because they’re the only ones who pull that one off.

ABS doesn’t reduce your stopping distance, it just lessens the chances of you falling off during the process. ABS doesn’t replace braking skill, you still have to apply the brakes at the optimum rate to slow effectively

At 30mph a motorcycle covers 13.4 metres per second

To achieve the Highway Code stopping distance of 14 metres from 30mph a rider needs to brake at a G-force of around 0.7G. Most modern bikes are capable of hitting 1G, but only if the rider loads the suspension properly to allow sufficient force through the tyre without locking the wheel. Mark McVeigh's data shows even some police riders don't hit 0.5G in an emergency stop.

At 30mph your bike covers 13.4 metres each second. Your nine metres of thinking will take two-thirds of a second. Then you must shut the throttle, move your hand to the brake lever, pull it gently to transfer weight to the front tyre. Only then you can apply the brake hard enough to generate the G-force required.

The weight transfer will lose half a second in which time you’ll travel almost seven metres and will be about to hit the car. But you have to transfer the weight, or you’ll lock the front wheel and fall off. So, you need to gain that half-second back because you’ve only got 23 metres to play with and you’ve already used 16 of them.

Knowing when to cover the brake could shorten stopping distances by 30% at 30mph.

The answer is to be already covering the brake. Riding in town is high-risk so a smart rider looks for danger and knows when to cover the brake with a couple of fingers. This cuts the thinking time (because you’re alert to the dangers), and you can gently pull the brake (because your hand is already there and waiting) to weight the front tyre and then pull hard enough to stop the bike safely and in control.

That simple action of knowing when to cover the brake saves half a second and more. Half a second at 30mph is 30 per cent of the total time it takes to stop.

That’s what Mark means by microlearning and incremental improvements. Learn when to cover the lever, practice getting weight onto the front tyre and then increase your braking force in small steps. You can do this every time you come to a halt.

Don’t be too ambitious. Aim to stop 10cm sooner than last time and then 10cm sooner again.

This will become second nature, and the improvements grow organically without putting yourself in danger.

I tried it this morning and it works. I’m still at the ‘conscious incompetence’ stage - level two of the psychologist’s scale. This time next week I’ll have it cracked.

BikeSocial and Mark will be working together to help break better riding down into simple, achievable, easy to practice exercises. Some will be here on the website, others on our YouTube channel.

We hope you find them useful.

If you’d like to chat about this article or anything else biking related, join us and thousands of other riders at the Bennetts BikeSocial Facebook page.