By Dave Abrahams
Imagine going out for a Saturday morning ride with a bunch of your mates on a well-maintained country road with lots of challenging corners and long, curving straights under dappled shade from rows of century-old bluegums.
Imagine that this road was closed to everybody except your group – no cars, no trucks, no kids, no dogs, no taxis and above all, no speed limits. Not a spietkop in sight.
No Cyril, I haven’t been sniffing your bike’s exhaust fumes; this is for real. The road was the Killarney racing circuit just north of Cape Town, 3.267km of 1960s-style Grand Prix track with one banked, one blind and one double-apex corner, three turns with intimidating downhill entries and a long, scary left-hander at the end of the main straight with an uphill exit.
The occasion was the Mike Hopkins Motorcycles track school at the weekend - a celebration of the reasons we ride motorcycles: an opportunity for the adrenalin junkies to push their personal envelopes, for born-again riders to explore the capabilities of superbikes that were the stuff of fantasy when last they rode a motorcycle and for newbies on little commuters and battered 400’s to learn - and practice - the avoidance techniques that must become intuitive if they are to survive in the asphalt jungle.
AS MUCH A SCHOOL AS A SPEED FEST
Held under the auspices of the Western Province Motorcycle Section with half a dozen instructors boasting more than a century of racing experience between them, a marshal on every corner and an ambulance on standby, the day was as much a school as a speedfest.
The participants were seeded into three groups - fast, medium and slow – and there was practical advice for riders at all levels, from how to prevent excessive nose-dive under braking on a big dual-purpose bike (touch the back brake just before you squeeze the front) to how to get a brand-new superbike to turn into a tight corner (don’t look where you’re going, look where you want to be) to really basic stuff such as impressing on a brash teenager that there is no such thing as a motorcycle tyre that doesn’t leak.
But mostly it was all about fun, about riding as fast as you felt comfortable with, enjoying your bike as it was meant to be enjoyed, whether it was a scary-fast Ducati World Superbike replica, a Yamaha TZR250 ‘stroker at least a decade older than its rider, or a Triumph Tiger adventure tourer, all at a cost of R400 – about the same as one speed fine.
And if you look carefully at the picture of the rider on the Husaberg motard, you can almost see the grin on his face - the body English says it all.
For more information on Mike Hopkins Motorcycles track schools contact Mark Livings at 021-461-5167.