Enhanced Riding: March 2014

BETTER RIDING DAYS WITH HOPP RIDER TRAINING AT CADWELL Martin Clark Track days, don’t you just love them? There’s the gimlet eyed racer type, all scuffed leather and limp looking to improve his overtaking technique. Then there’s the track day hero;; latest Ducati, new Mercedes Sprinter van, thousand quid Honda generator to get his tyres all toasty and colour matched Kushitani leathers. And worst of all there’s a wannabe Rossi on a knocked off sports bike hot from eBay. He, and it will be a he, uses his Vauxhall Corsa on the road cos he’s just so fast. Well, probably. Any one of these will use you for extra traction out of Coram, Barn or the Karrussell given half a chance and that’s your ride to work or ride to the south of France bike wrecked and no insurance because it’s a racetrack and you’ve got a month off work. Well, sort of. It doesn’t have to be like that. There are some really nice guys who use the truly fantastic Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire to teach performance riding for riders who ride on the road and want to improve their skills in a safe and controlled environment. This is Hopp Rider training (http://www.hoppridertraining.co.uk/). And no, I’m not in their pay. Unfortunately! Hopp Rider Training look after this as well as other training venues. Locally you might have met them at the Lincolnshire Road Safety Performance Plus Event which majors on the important issue of stopping one’s motorcycle using only the brakes and not other road users. The instructors at Hopp are all proper bike teachers. Not the sort of superannuated racers you get at your common or garden track day. Track day riders will have met these guys who are the motorcycling equivalent of the French ski instructor. “Bend ze knees… Vollow me“. Yes, we all know how cool and fast you are but how exactly is this helping me? I’d say the key message and the key selling point of the Hopp Rider Training Days is learning to corner at speed for people who ride their motorbikes on the road. We all know about throwing our vision wide. We know about counter steering. We know that just about any motorcycle made in the last 30 years good it is to ride with design limits way above those that we’ll approach in ordinary use. Think for a moment; the performance of your machine would probably stagger a neophyte. But when you’re spending your own Keith Code’s 100 cents of attention on a road ride then that’s 20 cents of it gone on the oncoming people carrier and another 30 cents on that recently cut hedge. Then there’s the worry about allowing your machine a full head of steam and making the policeperson’s day which has got to take another 30 cents. How much of your attention goes on machine control on any one ride? So would any sentient being explore the physics of riding a single track vehicle at speed on a crowded road? This is possibly not the best way to spend your leisure hours. Unless, that is, you want to make the full acquaintance of those nice ladies of the orthopaedic ward at Lincoln County Hospital. So what’s one of these Hopp Rider training days at Cadwell like? Just how far could you lean your BMW flat twin over if you really had to? First up there’s the noise testing which is not a problem except for the hard of thinking who equate decibels with willie size. Then there’s a briefing looking at safety and a little bit on the science of what keeps you upright. Next you choose your group. There are at least 15 of these ranging from Gosh That Doesn’t Look Very Safe in group A to the Simply Glacial in the restful end of Group C. You choose, I’ve done the lot. It’s your call with most riders choosing the modest end of the scale. This says a lot about the day. The bikes must have mirrors and indictors. They are ridden to the event. There are no tyre warmers. Being nice is compulsory. You’ll find a good mix with sports bikes being in a minority and BMW’s the most popular brand. I like seeing like the cruisers and touring bikes on the racetrack, I took a Morini 350 with perhaps 20 of your Japanese horsepowers left to one of their days but my only problem was a facial ache brought on by a stupid grin. Morini, Triumph and the police Morini, Triumph and the police The track is obviously well surfaced and one way. This is nice. Your ride is complicated by a variety of corners with a mixture of technical hazards; off camber, downhill, blind entry, turning at the crest of a hill and the potential for high speed. You can explore the reaction of you and your bike to these sort of real world problems with no distracters and no pressure. The setting is lovely; it really is Cadwell Park. Not a race track in an industrial estate like Donnington or Brands. Next you move to the track to meet your instructor who will be a nice guy, no ladies sorry, and you’ll follow him onto the track. Let’s be clear. This is a race track with marshals and ambulances and a big history. It’s been on television and everything so you’d be stupid not to be the tiniest bit petrified. To be honest that nice little road between Horncastle and Louth is more dangerous. The sessions all follow a briefing on stuff you’ll know;; looking where you want to go, counter steering, using the throttle to turn, you can fill in the script. The difference is that there are no distractions. You. Your machine. The finest track in the country. Or. In my case “why am I such an arse…”. After each session each group of between 3 and 5 riders has a debrief with the instructor. I found it difficult to remember my own shortcomings but somehow the instructor man manages to remind me (in the nicest possible way) to turn my head and to soften my inside shoulder and to separate the braking and turning inputs. He also somehow remembers how your new friends have done. And he does all this while riding his own machine and smiling. There are 4 themed sessions with briefing and debriefing in the morning followed by the free riding on the track in the afternoon. Those of you who do the ordinary track day will know about the curse of the red flag. The riding is stopped because some riding god has lobbed his bike. Oh, it’s happened again. It honestly doesn’t happen at the Hopp because of the tight organisation and because of the self-selecting customer group. The niceness is just infectious, how could you possibly inconvenience all your new friends by crashing your bike? My choice for the afternoon is to grab an instructor with what my psychotherapist would call my current issue and ask him to fix it. He does. I go out with a nice instructor man behind me for 10 minutes. He waves me past and I follow for a bit. We have a nice chat back in the pits. It all works so well. So my BMW isn’t very much like my beloved KTM at speed. The Morini is dragging bits of metal which turns out to be because I’m not using the full road and moving my weight. You want to get your knee down, Sorry, it’s frowned upon. This is a road riding day. So is fiddling with the bike’s settings;; “don’t prat with it”. Case histories? Student nurse managed to drop her 600 sports bike at Saxilby roundabout. New tyres, performance machine, inexperience. You’ll know what happened next, she was scared to take her bike a degree off the vertical. At the Hopp rider training, Martin Hopp takes her under his wing (I can’t think why eh Martin?) and at the end of the day she has moved from group C to group B. There was no silverware, no body fluids changed hands so far as I know, but she was very happy. And she has a picture of the sainted Martin on her bedroom wall. Friend 2 returns to biking and buys a recent Yamaha R1, well, it is very nice in matt black. On the other hand it’s probably not such a good idea in terms of longevity. His and the bike’s. At the end of the day’s riding it’s fair to say that Cadwell’s lap record was under no threat at all. But he had a good day and he’s begun to explore his bike’s potential and he goes home a happy man and a better rider. Problems? It’s not cheap at £165 for a day but it is good value in terms of both learning and fun. If you go several times then the teaching can become repetitive. The weather’s not always good. The food is expensive. If I hear the briefing joke again about the marshals at the hairpin “pulling you off” I’ll commit murder. You’ll not get mirrors and reggie plates and road tyres in the fast group at a track day I like riding my bike fast. I think that track day organisers have painted themselves into a corner and that lots of people like me are staying away. Instruction on the racetrack is the way forward for performance riding and safety on the road. And, most important, it is a lot of fun and it’s local. Give it a go. What can possibly go wrong?

Enhanced Riding

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Hopp Rider Training - customer review

Hopp Rider Training 2014 dates