killerkeith
Well-known member
Lucky the first guy didn't get killed.
[video=youtube_share;YtgR6bYIAiA]http://youtu.be/YtgR6bYIAiA[/video]
[video=youtube_share;YtgR6bYIAiA]http://youtu.be/YtgR6bYIAiA[/video]
This is why I'm not into "track days"
- Thread starter killerkeith
- Start date
shootingrubber
Well-known member
I get what you're saying, but that's like me posting a video of some guy getting into a terrible motorcycle crash and saying: "this is why I don't ride".
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That's a dumb thing to say Keith. You think any of your "spritied" riding on public roadways was somehow safer than a secure and controlled environment like a racetrack? Think again.
I am not saying for one minute that I am not also guilty of moronic street riding (because I certainly am) -however, I am not deluded into thinking that somehow participating in that was less dangerous than the potential dangers at a trackday.
Imagine on any one of your crashes, had you been unlucky enough to have any other traffic oncoming or otherwise at the same moment.
It would have ended alot worse than the video above. Even your Deals Gap lowside could very well have ended exactly like this had any one of us been directly behind you.
On a racetrack, all bikes are similar in size and weight- no transports, no Oldsmobuicks. No cell phones.No DUI's. No debris. No oil, no sand, no gravel no potholes. Everyone is moving in the same direction, no intersections, no curbs, no poles, no walls, no blue haired old ladies who can't see over the dash or out the back and side windows. All riders are forced to wear all of their gear. All bikes are inspected and much of the mechanical problems that are overlooked on streetbikes is caught.
The only difference is that at a racetrack, so many of the unforseeable variables of street riding is removed, that it becomes safer to exploit the rider's and the bike's furthest performance reaches.....and when exploring these reaches to find the edge, once in a while, riders will fall over that edge.
I just watched somewhere between 15-20 crashes of various sorts this weekend...some of them up close and personal, as in guys I was racing with crashing in my race.......had one myself 3 weeks ago.....and those same guys watched me loose the front at 75 mph and tumble and cartwheel along the asphalt....to hop up and sprint into the grass. Of all those crashes, one beginner rider of the race school left the track with a concussion, one licenced racer left for a checkup at the hospital and was released with no injuries, to return back to the track. All the rest stood up, dusted themselves off, picked their bikes up and most raced again, many of them racing again minutes later. One guy fell twice on Friday, bad enough to render his bike unrideable......only to see him work all night on it and proceed to kick my *** again on Sunday. One 15 yr old kid wiped out his Ninja 250 about an hour into the endurance race. Duct taped fairings, zipper tied windscreen, and a sigh of relief got his bike re-tech inspected, hopped back on after a bottle of water, and finished out his 3 hr race, alone, by himself. You don't see many street riders crashing at 60 mph, hopping back on and continuing to ride at an amped-up pace for 3 hrs,LOL
Show me 15 to 20 street bike crashes in a day, at any speed other than tipovers at a stoplight, where 95% of the riders walk away without a scratch.
That's a dumb thing to say Keith. You think any of your "spritied" riding on public roadways was somehow safer than a secure and controlled environment like a racetrack? Think again.
I am not saying for one minute that I am not also guilty of moronic street riding (because I certainly am) -however, I am not deluded into thinking that somehow participating in that was less dangerous than the potential dangers at a trackday.
Imagine on any one of your crashes, had you been unlucky enough to have any other traffic oncoming or otherwise at the same moment.
It would have ended alot worse than the video above. Even your Deals Gap lowside could very well have ended exactly like this had any one of us been directly behind you.
On a racetrack, all bikes are similar in size and weight- no transports, no Oldsmobuicks. No cell phones.No DUI's. No debris. No oil, no sand, no gravel no potholes. Everyone is moving in the same direction, no intersections, no curbs, no poles, no walls, no blue haired old ladies who can't see over the dash or out the back and side windows. All riders are forced to wear all of their gear. All bikes are inspected and much of the mechanical problems that are overlooked on streetbikes is caught.
The only difference is that at a racetrack, so many of the unforseeable variables of street riding is removed, that it becomes safer to exploit the rider's and the bike's furthest performance reaches.....and when exploring these reaches to find the edge, once in a while, riders will fall over that edge.
I just watched somewhere between 15-20 crashes of various sorts this weekend...some of them up close and personal, as in guys I was racing with crashing in my race.......had one myself 3 weeks ago.....and those same guys watched me loose the front at 75 mph and tumble and cartwheel along the asphalt....to hop up and sprint into the grass. Of all those crashes, one beginner rider of the race school left the track with a concussion, one licenced racer left for a checkup at the hospital and was released with no injuries, to return back to the track. All the rest stood up, dusted themselves off, picked their bikes up and most raced again, many of them racing again minutes later. One guy fell twice on Friday, bad enough to render his bike unrideable......only to see him work all night on it and proceed to kick my *** again on Sunday. One 15 yr old kid wiped out his Ninja 250 about an hour into the endurance race. Duct taped fairings, zipper tied windscreen, and a sigh of relief got his bike re-tech inspected, hopped back on after a bottle of water, and finished out his 3 hr race, alone, by himself. You don't see many street riders crashing at 60 mph, hopping back on and continuing to ride at an amped-up pace for 3 hrs,LOL
Show me 15 to 20 street bike crashes in a day, at any speed other than tipovers at a stoplight, where 95% of the riders walk away without a scratch.
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While getting tangled up with another bike can be an ugly situation, the situation on track is that at least everyone is going in the same general direction. Head-on collisions with vehicles coming the other direction don't happen, and those are FAR more serious to get involved with. Low-side on a street ride, and if you do it in a right-hand corner, there is a darn good chance that there will be a vehicle much much larger than you, coming the other direction in the lane that you slide through.
Certainly there is risk in riding on track. There have been two fatalities locally at roadracing events this year (and the last one before this in Ontario that I recall was 2005-ish), and I recall three fatalities at track days over the last several years. The circumstances involved are generally more known and are more controllable than on public roads. You don't know who you are sharing public roads with. I'd wager that there were more motorcycle fatalities on Ontario roads just this week than in the last several years combined on all tracks in Ontario.
Certainly there is risk in riding on track. There have been two fatalities locally at roadracing events this year (and the last one before this in Ontario that I recall was 2005-ish), and I recall three fatalities at track days over the last several years. The circumstances involved are generally more known and are more controllable than on public roads. You don't know who you are sharing public roads with. I'd wager that there were more motorcycle fatalities on Ontario roads just this week than in the last several years combined on all tracks in Ontario.
killerkeith
Well-known member
How I ride a bike has nothing to do with why I don't like track riding. The video I posted can happen at any track day. Yahoos who don't know each other with nothing to lose and everything to prove.
Comparing a 20 mph single vehicle accident in an empty hairpin on the street with a 70 mph crash on the track resulting in a guy getting run the **** over is ludicrous. Come on Scott...this is really reaching. I would hope that any rider behind me could react in time at 20 mph with clear visibility of the road ahead. Not the case for our friend in the video. (For those of you who have never been to Deals Gap, there are several hairpins you can see on coming traffic before entering the corner).
Here's the money quote. 15 to 20 chances of being involved in a serious accident that could not end well for someone in a weekend. ONE WEEKEND!!! Is that ever the case for street riding, even for a poorly skilled rider like myself? Well, maybe for someone like me. (Saved Boooya the trouble)
killerkeith
Well-known member
Thanks for the Hello Kitty bandaid.
killerkeith
Well-known member
No problem, I got your back lol.
Was waterproof too
It helped wipe my tears.
Track days, perhaps, but in roadracing, generally everyone knows almost everyone else in the paddock. If it's not that way to begin with, it becomes that way in short order. (I prefer racing to track days ... the on-track competence level is generally a lot higher)
The process of training for, and then obtaining, your competition license makes sure that everyone has had at least a basic level of training, and filters out most of the worst idiots. Sloppy, careless riders either don't get through this process, or if they do, they either smarten up and get a lot better, or they get out of the sport - and in the meantime, they'll be at the back of the pack, where the rest of us only have to deal with them one at a time after several laps of them getting separated from the faster riders.
Can the incident shown in the video happen - sure, and it's a scary thought - but it's a lot less scary than meeting a dump truck coming the other direction in the adjacent lane ...
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You happened to run out of luck in a 20 mph turn....but how many other corners did we ride those weeks at many times higher speed? What if your luck ran out up there, or even worse, maybe an oncoming rider's luck ran out, and you, coming the other way were collateral damage? If we are playing a game of "what if".........the "What ifs" involving cars, trucks, van, tourists, transport trucks, road hazards, intersections, retired leaf-lookers etc, will always carry more treachery than a racetrack. One trip across the Skyway is much more dangerous the way we ride it, than a trackday. Knee down at 100mph, thru blind turns, almost everyone of them with a lookout that could have cars pulling out of them, roads that could be littered with gravel, mere feet from steel gaurdrails and sheer dropoffs.......forget about oncoming traffic for the moment. Don't delude yourself into thinking that your life wasn't in the hands of many people who you had never met. They are every day.
15-20 crashes, with 200 riders.....let's say 10% chance then, so we can err on the high side. Every time I take a group to Deals Gap, it's less than 10 riders........more than 10% of them crash. Your chances of a crash were already higher than 10% the moment you asked to come.....and it did come true. And that's not even counting the potential crashes where many of them ended up way outta their lanes, but got lucky enough to find no oncoming traffic there at that moment. ( I will call those theoretical crashes). We have GoPro of more than a few of those....sometimes multiple angles of the same crash...... And here's the funny part......if we are using the number of 15-20 crashes in a weekend......where 200 riders, in practise, qualifying, sprint racing and endurance racing, between them all, turned many thousands of laps, each lap consisting of 10 or more turns taken at the rider's maximum ability...... so tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of turns in one weekend, resulted in a mere 15-20 crashes......and of those 15-20 crashes, none were "serious accidents" as you refer to them. Their outcomes were no different than your small mishap......because of the controlled environment. That is exactly my point. Take those riders, and their speeds, lean angles, riding aggression etc, and move their location from the controlled environment of a racetrack to the unkowns of the street, and the likelihood of tragedy would greatly rise.
You happened to run out of luck in a 20 mph turn....but how many other corners did we ride those weeks at many times higher speed? What if your luck ran out up there, or even worse, maybe an oncoming rider's luck ran out, and you, coming the other way were collateral damage? If we are playing a game of "what if".........the "What ifs" involving cars, trucks, van, tourists, transport trucks, road hazards, intersections, retired leaf-lookers etc, will always carry more treachery than a racetrack. One trip across the Skyway is much more dangerous the way we ride it, than a trackday. Knee down at 100mph, thru blind turns, almost everyone of them with a lookout that could have cars pulling out of them, roads that could be littered with gravel, mere feet from steel gaurdrails and sheer dropoffs.......forget about oncoming traffic for the moment. Don't delude yourself into thinking that your life wasn't in the hands of many people who you had never met. They are every day.
15-20 crashes, with 200 riders.....let's say 10% chance then, so we can err on the high side. Every time I take a group to Deals Gap, it's less than 10 riders........more than 10% of them crash. Your chances of a crash were already higher than 10% the moment you asked to come.....and it did come true. And that's not even counting the potential crashes where many of them ended up way outta their lanes, but got lucky enough to find no oncoming traffic there at that moment. ( I will call those theoretical crashes). We have GoPro of more than a few of those....sometimes multiple angles of the same crash...... And here's the funny part......if we are using the number of 15-20 crashes in a weekend......where 200 riders, in practise, qualifying, sprint racing and endurance racing, between them all, turned many thousands of laps, each lap consisting of 10 or more turns taken at the rider's maximum ability...... so tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of turns in one weekend, resulted in a mere 15-20 crashes......and of those 15-20 crashes, none were "serious accidents" as you refer to them. Their outcomes were no different than your small mishap......because of the controlled environment. That is exactly my point. Take those riders, and their speeds, lean angles, riding aggression etc, and move their location from the controlled environment of a racetrack to the unkowns of the street, and the likelihood of tragedy would greatly rise.
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Holy ****, you are serious??? I would have sworn the thread title was in jest.
Lol
This thread gave me diarrhea.
FWIW I was at Grand Bend this past weekend and experienced some brake problems during the Open Sprint race. Complete front brake failure on the back straight. I used a few hundred feet of flat grassy runoff, turned around, then slowly rode back to the pits and fixed my brakes. Finished 6th in Expert Superbike a few hours later.
Had that happened on the street they'd probably still be looking for pieces of me and my bike.
Ya... track is super unsafe.
FWIW I was at Grand Bend this past weekend and experienced some brake problems during the Open Sprint race. Complete front brake failure on the back straight. I used a few hundred feet of flat grassy runoff, turned around, then slowly rode back to the pits and fixed my brakes. Finished 6th in Expert Superbike a few hours later.
Had that happened on the street they'd probably still be looking for pieces of me and my bike.
Ya... track is super unsafe.
gs500f
Well-known member
