The throttle goes both ways - but only one of them is fun!

22nd August 2001

California Superbike School - Thoughts from a punter...

When I started riding, I bought both the Twist of the Wrist books on recommendation, and read them. Or tried to. They are written in broad Californian, a language I'm not fluent in, and much of what they were saying went over my head anyway. I gave up and put them away. A while later, in the quest for self-improvement, I read them again. Those bits I could translate made more sense this time, and I experimented with some of his ideas, found they worked really rather well, and started to incorporate them into my riding. But some of the stuff in the book was so West-Coast (dude) that I could make no sense of it whatever, some of it wasn't applicable at all to riding on the road so far as I could see, and some of it just can't be written down - try reading a paragraph on body position with the book in one hand, while sitting on the bike on its centrestand and trying to set your body position correctly based on a textual description of where your arms and legs need to be. No chance!

It has taken me a long time to decide to open my own wallet and pay the admittedly heinous cost of a CSS course. The one I really needed was Level 2, but you have to do Level 1 first so I signed up for both of them on consecutive days at Pembrey. It's a bloody expensive school (£280 for one day at Pembrey, £530 for two), so what do you get for your money?

Well, the first thing you are paying for is a veritable mountain of infrastructure and staff. There are hordes of instructors for both the track work and the off-track sessions (see http://www.superbikeschool.co.uk/uk/ for a list), two mechanics, the Dunlop UK head tyre guru (doing lectures), the slide/lean bike, the instructor bikes (a fleet of R1 and R6 Yams), a refreshment tent, course control, wranglers (who make sure everybody is where they are supposed to be and organise the throngs of bikes and riders), as many free cups of tea, coffee, or chilled water and salt tablets, potassium pills or biccies as you can consume all day. And a free lunch.

Upon arrival (at 7am, FFS!), your bike is scrutineered, lights, mirrors, plate, and speedo are taped up or over for you, and then the tyre pressures are all lowered for the track. Meanwhile, your kit is also scrutineered for track-worthiness. Each day proper starts at 8am with introductions, and a safety briefing and then it's straight into the first classroom session, and
introducing the first exercise. In the case of level 1, for example, that would be throttle control, opening it smoothly and driving right through the turn. The classroom discussion is designed to encourage us the punters to think about the point of the lesson at hand, and work out the correct answer for ourselves. For most of the first day I was cheating - I'd read the book and was using the ideas already, but the English version of the underlying logic (delivered by ex-Fast-Bikes journo, racer and reformed serial crasher Andy Ibbott) was far more useful to me than the whacked-out surfer-dude version delivered by the books.

At the end of the classroom session, it's off either to the track or to 'downtime' while we waited for our track session. The school runs three colour groups, and each group gets 5 classroom sessions, and 5 track sessions each per day. That leaves 5 sessions of 'down time', of which 2 are taken up with off-track instruction in smaller numbers - for example, at level 1 it was a counter-steering exercise in the paddock on your own bike, and a lecture on tyres and tyre technology by the man from Dunlop. Incidentally, from the latter I can conclude that most bike journalists write utterly uninformed shite when it comes to tyres. So, no surprise there then.

We started each day in fourth gear (depending on your bike) and using no brakes. By the end of each day, we were using the entire gearbox and the brakes, but as a starting point, one gear and no brakes removes from the equation a lot of the things you would otherwise be worrying about out on the track, and lets you focus on the stuff they are trying to get you to learn. On track, the instructor ratio is one to three students per session. With 5 sessions, there are 5 specific drills you are working on cumulatively on each level, and during each session your instructor will peel out of the pits and follow you round, unseen, to check you are doing whatever the drill de moment is correctly, and he'll (they're all men at the moment, although there were a fair few women among the students) pull you in and help you if you are having trouble with the drill. For me, the first day was mostly about practice and refinement, and I got left alone once the instructors had taken a look at me, since I wasn't having any trouble with the drills, except for a debrief when I came off track. On the last drill of the day, something called the two-step, the instructor wafted past me on his R6 and reminded me with a hand-signal to separate the two actions more distinctly than I had been hitherto, and then - half a lap later - he wafted past again to give the thumbs up that now I'd got it. And yes, what he was suggesting I try to do did make a positive difference. On the second day, I had a different instructor who was much more interactive in terms of pulling me off track during sessions to chat about what I was doing, and who had much more useful to say to me as a result, but I think that was a function of the fact that much of what we were doing on the second day was either new ground for me, or cerebral stuff where he couldn't tell whether I was getting it or not without discussing it with me.

Copyright © 2003 Ken Haylock. All rights reserved.
Last Revised: April 27, 2004 .