Preventing Track Day Crashes: Is it Possible?

Can we prevent crashing? It’s an interesting question isn’t it.

I strongly believe that not a single rider on the track wishes to crash, and given the choice, anyone would opt for a crash free life riding in circles around their favourite circuits. But it doesn’t stop a number of riders throwing their bikes up the road on any given track day does it?

I once heard of a comment made by Neil Hodgson when talking about track day crashes. I’m paraphrasing but it was something to the effect of ‘how can riders crash going so slowly?’

Now, he was only saying that out of curiosity and in jest, as opposed to being arrogant about it, but it is a very valid question.

So given that we are riding so slowly – relative to the motorcycling elite – and given the fact that riders can get their hands on the same machinery and rubber that even some of the top race championships use, can we prevent crashing on our journey to become better track riders?

I’ve already covered some of the common causes of crashes in this article, so here I want talk about some wider issues of why people crash, rather than the surface causes. This, I hope, will stand you in good stead to maximise your track-time to crashing ratio.

Early Days of Track Riding

I had my licence for 3 months before I did my first track day. When the time came to venture out onto the track, I had thoughts of being one of the fastest out there, that I’d be scraping my knee with ease and impressing everyone with my natural talent.

Well, it’s safe to say it didn’t end that way.

I was going quite well in relation to the novice group I was in, and I was indeed one of the quickest, but it wasn’t long before my inexperience and my exuberance got the better of me and I ended up on my arse, with a £500 hire bike excess to pay.

I see this trait with many newcomers to the track. The type you look at and can just sense “they’re going to come off”. It’s the no fear attitude mixed with the desire to go quicker and a lack of knowledge and experience that has this type of rider off. Just like it did to me.

If you take the time to learn how to do things right from the very beginning, either from free resources like this one, books and DVDs, or from coaching/riding schools, then you will massively decrease your chances of having one of these early track life crashes.

Stepping Too Far into the Unknown

A goal for many riders is to go faster, but as we learned with the inexperienced riders that are too keen to prove themselves, this approach often results in a trip to the gravel trap.

We should most definitely look to push our boundaries if our goal is to go faster (if we didn’t, we would merely get the same results we always get) but you don’t have to go full Evil Knievel and race right into the unknown.

Straying too far away from what we already know is a sure-fire way to get those panic lights flashing and have us making all kinds of mistakes and silly decisions as a result.

Push your boundaries, but be in control.

How We Deal With Mistakes

This is a tough one to discuss here, because learning how to correctly deal with mistakes largely comes from the experience of dealing with them the wrong way.

Take rear end slides for example. Every part of me knows that I shouldn’t shut off the throttle when the back steps out, but can I honestly trust my instinct to keep that throttle open as I pick the bike up to realign the wheels and prevent a crash? I’m not sure I could.

A big reason why top level riders are so good at stopping a crash, mid crash, is because they’ve had years of experience getting it wrong.

The only thing we can really do is to learn how to correctly ride our bikes and deal with certain situations, and hope that the deeper recesses of our brains will spring into action when the time comes that we have to deal with such a mistake or situation.

So Can We Completely Prevent Crashing?

Well, I’d say it depends on the riding goals.

If my goal was to go to a track and ride around for a bit and come home, I could quite easily move down to a lower group and ride to that level all day long and have no dramas whatsoever, obviously discounting strange events like fluid on the track or someone hitting me.

However, if my goal when turning up to a track is to go faster than I did before, I will be faced with variables and situations that I haven’t faced before and stepping into an area unknown to me, so there is chance I could make a mistake because of that.

But pushing boundaries doesn’t automatically mean a crash will occur. I am a perfect case for this.

Since my second crash early in my track life, I went from an average novice group rider, to an above average fast group rider, all without incident. But even now I do believe that at this point I am still comfortably within the limits of the bike and its tyres, and as I continue to push on to go faster and get closer to those limits, my chances of crashing will increase because I won’t have as big a margin for error.

I don’t think there is a simple answer to this question, simply because there is such a vast array of variables involved, but as a track day rider I do believe that with a logical and methodical approach to improving your riding, you can get to a fairly decent level of riding without having a single crash.

And while I will continue to improve in a way that minimises my chances of crashing, I fully accept that the chance of crashing does exist.