By Ian Dodds of Ferntree Gully

Look where you want to go!

That's bloody difficult to do when you suddenly realise that you’re going into a bend too hard.

Maybe it’s not my fault, such as decreasing radius corners, or maybe it looked right for the car, so I thought it would be the right speed for the bike.

The adrenalin starts pumping when I get caught out like this and I must admit that playing follow the leader in a car for a living gives me some bad habits for riding.  Looking at the car in front, or looking at where my headlights shine up the road is one of the worst habits I get roped into sometimes.

Then I get on the bike and sometimes forget that my reasonable skills aren't up to the million or so kilometres of experience I have in the car.

I'm one of those idiots that spent half his budget on rider training and only a smallish amount on the bike itself. The result is quite clear though, I've gotten into some scary situations on the old motorcycle at times, yet I’ve managed to remember the "Look where you want to go" rule each time.

If any single piece of rider training has kept me upright, in all of the times that I've made that slight error of judgement, it has to be that one phrase.  It is indeed the truest single fact of driving any kind of vehicle.

Where you look is where you'll go

Given that I totally believe this to be true, I wonder how many single vehicle bike crashes could have been saved if the rider stayed calm and simply looked to where the road straightened out.  The pro's tell me that the bike will look after itself and if I don't make any nasty changes, like stand it up or hit the brakes, there is every chance that the bike will go where I look.  That, of course, is where I want it to go.

I can’t pretend to know the details of every single bike crash, and I really don't want to. I'll even bet that some of the crashes were just not recoverable situations.

But I'll also bet that some were.

Yes, I'm sure that the tyres may have been slipping for some, the road may have been dirty for some, but I'm also sure that some of the best things I've done on the road have been to simply look to where I want to go, and hope.

It isn't easy. Tearing your eyes away from the danger is very hard.  The adrenalin makes it even harder. Not knowing how close the danger is, and not seeing the thing that you were about to hit go past, is a scary thought.

It works though!