We just stopped to get some lunch off the Blue Ridge Parkway at Jewell’s Restaurat and had a bit of time to reflect on how not to ride a motorcycle.
Perhaps 20 miles up the road we spotted a guy on a BMW that was riding in the drainage ditch. (!) Obviously that’s not the place to be. We pulled over at the next convenient spot a few hundred feet up and I ran back to see if he needed any help. He seemed to get out just fine so I wooed back to my bike. While getting it fired back up a giant cluster of Harleys and similar bikes rolled by — the last having been triked.
Those folks do not know how to ride. The speed limit is 45 mph and you can easily do that in most of the curves. They, on the other hand, were slowing down to 25 on some of the easy turns. If that weren’t enough, they were hugging the center line the whole time, sometimes going over the center line.
To top it off they were breaking in the turns. From the bike dynamics standpoint that’s just about the the worst thing you can do because you not only upset the suspension, but at the same time you load up the front wheel and as it to do more. If you’re on the center line, which being painted has less traction to begin with, you might use up all the traction you have and tuck the front end.
Just a chain of events that lead to statistics.