The Tale of the 120MPH Motorcycle Crash and Bad Underwear: Part 2
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In case you missed it, you can read Part 1 here:
Continued:
It was a Sunday morning when I set off in the bad underwear to attend a motorbike course run by highly qualified Police instructors. It was to teach experienced motorcyclists (in hindsight, their entry requirements were flawed) how to teach learners to pass the new two-part motorcycle test that was due to be introduced.
Digression #1 (Unless you count the digression in Part 1, which I don’t)
When I took my motorbike test, there was only one part, and it involved riding around a block with an examiner on foot, observing. In order to demonstrate the ability to do an emergency stop, he sent me off to ride around the block (repeatedly), telling me that he would step out into the road SOMEWHERE. Two weeks previously, a friend had followed the same instruction and kept going around the block until he ran out of petrol. Later, someone asked him whether or not he had noticed the ambulance with flashing lights. His examiner had stepped out into the path of a completely different, unsuspecting motorcyclist.
The main story resumes here:
The Police instructors were off duty and riding their own motorbikes. One of them was on a Honda CBX: it had three times the cc capacity of mine, and I knew he could beat me over a long distance. The course was over, and I was en route home when he vroom vroomed and glanced at me as we both waited at the same set of traffic lights. Game on.
All I wanted was to prove that I could beat him away from the lights. My bike did 0–60 in minus 5 seconds. (It might have been +2.4 seconds.)
I was winning when I fell off on the A52 outside Nottingham—sprawled all over the road in full view of the nine other highly qualified police instructors and 23 other experienced motorcyclists not far behind. There is still a dent in the crash barrier.
