How to crash a motorcycle

If you’re going to crash, then the lowside is the biker’s friend – assuming you’re wearing the appropriate gear and have plenty of space to slide into (on which more later). It doesn’t hurt too much (hip pads definitely recommended) and damage to the bike is relatively slight.

I have lowsided three times, on three separate bikes. The first was on a track day at Bedford Autodrome on my 2006 Honda Fireblade. It was a cold morning in March on one of the first track days of the year. I was leaving the pits at the start of the second session, and approaching the first corner – a left-hand hairpin. Everyone knows you need to warm your tyres up before getting bang on it, so I approached the corner at around half speed, and thus half lean.

The next thing I knew I’d slammed into the ground and that awful, toe-curling noise accompanied the ’Blade as it skidded off the track on its fairings ahead of me. It was my first ever bike crash, and I had absolutely not seen it coming. ‘It didn’t look like you did a lot wrong,’ said the following rider a little later.

But obviously I had done, given the irrefutable evidence supplied by the broken clutch lever, mashed up fairings and scuffed leathers. So what was it? I had misjudged just how little grip those tyres had, in 8 deg C ambient temps on a cold track. Had there been a few gentle corners before the hairpin, the same half speed approach through it would likely have proceeded without incident. But straight out of the pits, in those conditions, I needed to be at more like quarter speed to account for the scarcity of grip.

Turns out I’m not the only one to make this mistake: 54 per cent of all motorcycle injuries occur within three miles of leaving home. A cold, greasy roundabout just down the road from your house is the stuff of bikers’ nightmares. It’s just there, never sleeping, waiting to take you, and your cold tyres, to the cleaners.

Slightly rarer than tucking the front is the loss of the rear tyre under power. This one usually gives you a little more warning, and can sometimes be saved. But not always. Jimchoob tries to blame the surface in this clip – I dare to differ. He was simply far too greedy with the throttle given the knobbly (and thus not very grippy on the road) tyres his Honda Africa Twin was fitted with.

So that’s lowsides. Another top scoring answer is, you guessed it, the highside. These happen when the rear tyre loses traction under power, slides, then regains grip and kicks the back of the bike up like an angry bronco – frequently into the air, and sometimes a full somersault. Can’t quite picture it? The MotoGP boys love a highside – find a compilation on YouTube and substitute for your Friday night horror movie.

Highsides are one of the worst ways to crash. Damage to rider and bike is usually severe, broken bones and totalled machines being frequent outcomes. Modern traction control, and a huge amount of respect for the twist grip, mean that the chances of one happening to you can be dramatically reduced.

Touching every piece of oak, pine or MDF furniture nearby, I have yet to fully highside a bike. I have however been kicked out of the seat and off the pegs on that same Honda Fireblade, getting on the power out of Murrays at a damp Snetterton. It was so terrifying (along with a chastening day at Oulton Park in the streaming wet) that it was the cue for me to decide that 900bhp/tonne without any form of traction control was simply a big one waiting to happen. So my 2006 model was duly replaced with a 2019 Fireblade SP with a full suite of electronics.

If you’re a Family Fortunes hotshot, you’ll already know the next answer to shout at the screen. It is, of course, target fixation – a phenomenon first observed in WW2 fighter pilots who became so fixated on their targets they sometimes flew directly into them. I’ve spoken about it before, but in a nutshell the human brain is a primitive thing. As my instructor at the California Superbike School claimed, we’re biologically programmed to respond to three things: food, sex, and danger. It’s the third that’s a killer on a motorcycle, as your inner Neanderthal can’t help but stare at kerbs, lampposts or drain covers. All of which will have you off your bike faster than you can scream ‘our survey said…’

The problem with the staring is that your motorbike will go in whatever direction you’re looking. Don’t ask me how, it just does. So you have to consciously override that Neanderthal and turn your attention away from the danger, mid corner. Easier said than done. The vast majority of single vehicle motorcycle accidents, especially with new riders, will be a consequence of target fixation.

I’ve deliberated over putting our next answer at number four, because there’s a good case for it being number one – it can certainly be a major contributing factor to each of the answers so far. It is of course irregular surface conditions – whether they be moisture, oil, sand, gravel or just polished tarmac. Any deviation in our favourite coefficient of friction, μ, can have instant and devastating consequences. Hence the danger associated with metal drain covers, which when damp are like hitting sheet ice.

I have crashed twice in this category, both lowsides. The first was on a Yamaha XT600 in Corfu. Coming into a slow hairpin at about 20mph, the front washed out and before I knew it I was skidding down the road, the bike ahead of me, making that gruesome noise of shame. This is the Way.

I had disobeyed the primary rule of ATGATT (All The Gear, All The Time) and as a consequence had lost some skin I was previously quite fond of. The bike’s rear brake and foot peg were slightly bent, and the fairing scuffed. Why had it happened? Sand on the road, combined with 20-year-old UV-hardened tyres meant that even half normal speed was too much on that particular corner, at that particular time.

The guy who ran the hire shop was apoplectic and extracted €150 from me for the damage. I’m quite sure that bike had been chucked down one sandy road or another by every other tourist who’d got on it the last 20 years. Still, I was rather embarrassed, having survived dozens of full bore 180mph-tastic track days by this point.

Rather more upsetting was the next one: watching my mint BMW S1000RR M Sport slide down the track ahead of me at Nelson, a sharp right-hander at Snetterton. There had been an oil spillage from a car track day the previous day, and all morning it had been claiming victims in each and every session. Over lunch the circuit claimed to have sorted it, taking an extra hour to be absolutely sure.

Still, just to be careful, I came in at half speed, taking a slightly different line than usual to cope with traffic ahead. And the next thing I knew – slam. Fortunately I had crash bungs on the bike, but it was still £500 of damage I wasn’t expecting, and a sore ego for good measure.

Crashing in a straight line is also absolutely possible, in several different ways: you can lock up the front wheel under braking, lose the back under power (I came dreadfully close to this one at 110mph on that aforementioned wet day at Oulton), fall straight off the back of a bike with an uncontrolled wheelie, or crash upon bringing the front wheel back down (even MotoGP ace Jorge Martin managed this recently).

Then on bikes without a slipper clutch, you can lock the back wheel on a downshift – which if you’re dropping into a corner can have you off in a flash. You can spin a race car doing this too, but you tend not to be ejected in the process.

And no list is complete without the ubiquitous superbike experience of the 1990s – the tank slapper. It’s rare to experience on modern bikes with sophisticated steering dampers, but on older crotch rockets a tank slapper could be absolutely lethal. So what exactly is it? When the front wheel gets deflected at high speed, the bike’s geometry, steering angle and natural resonant frequency can all interact, amplifying the oscillation of the bars – which proceed to slap back and forth so fast the naked eye can barely track them, and you certainly can’t hold onto them. Needless to say, when this happens you have lost control of the motorcycle, and crashes that result from tank slappers tend to be very big ones.

This more or less completes the list of how to crash all by yourself, but we haven’t even begun to account for the ways others can take you out. The classic is the SMIDSY – Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You. It’s why bikers develop a spidey sense for cars’ body language at junctions, especially any joining from the left with their right indicators on.

Motorcycles’ relatively small profile mean they can be easily missed by a driver, and there’s an excellent biological reason why. The human eye doesn’t scan smoothly, but moves in rapid discrete jumps called saccades (about 3-5 per second). During each saccade the brain suppresses visual processing and fills in the gaps using prediction, meaning it tends to see what it expects to see. Which, given that motorcycles consist of 0.6 per cent of road traffic, probably isn’t a bike.

It’s one of the reasons for my motorcycle instructor’s immortal words, ‘they’re all trying to kill you’. Not intentionally, of course, but these are certainly good words to live and ride by.

The subject of motorcycle roadcraft (and its extensive overlap with car roadcraft) could fill an entire series, so I won’t dwell here, other than to say one of the best things any road rider can do is to complete either of the advanced rider courses offered by the IAM or RoSPA. It’s quite possible to ride for a lifetime on the road and never have any kind of accident.

To which I would also add something that may sound counterintuitive. Passing your bike test only teaches you how to follow the rules of the road. The advanced riding courses will teach you roadcraft, a very different (and crucially important) skill. But neither teach you how to actually ride a motorcycle.

For that you have to go to the track, where the probability of crashing rises significantly. But having the space to slide means that doing so will likely only dent your ego and your bank balance (watch some MotoGP crashes at 150mph+ if you don’t believe me), whereas falling off on the road carries potentially far more serious consequences.

So my riding these days is mostly contained to traffic and road-furniture free race circuits, and I choose my days for road riding very carefully. Having blown off steam in a safe environment, I feel no need to get my knee down on a B-road or indulge in the behaviour that gives some bikers a bad name.

I can’t compete with the world record holder when it comes to injuries, for I have only a week spent in hospital with a broken pelvis to show for my assorted motorcycling calamities. That came as a result of a freak accident (a story for another day perhaps) – but it has not changed my personal outlook on risk management. Yes, riding motorcycles can be dangerous, but they’re also absolutely bloody awesome, and no car I’ve ever driven (outside of a race environment) gets close.

So don’t be afraid of crashing. Just make sure you’re in the right place and wearing the right stuff when it happens. ‘If you fall during your life, it doesn’t matter. You’re never a failure as long as you try to get up.’ Perhaps, alongside the madness, the flying daredevil with the cape had a little wisdom after all.