Absolutely unbelievable that he wasn’t killed
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rong-road.html
I grit my teeth just watching the video......
Absolutely unbelievable that he wasn’t killed
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rong-road.html
I grit my teeth just watching the video......
Saw this on a bike forum. How he lived I have no idea.
Wow.
Air Bag Suit - think that saved a lot worse damage.
It seems he had the time to return back onto his side of the road though. Perhaps it’s just the video.
What prison sentence did he get?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
16 months.Originally Posted by moelycrio
Watching the dash cam video reminded me of mad Max 1 , the bike chase at the end of the movie and I'm sure Mel Gibson took someone out in a similar fashion .
That bloke was lucky
Sent from my ANE-LX1 using Tapatalk
Expect him to be held partially to blame for not wearing reflective clothing!
I just hope that the rider isn’t crippled by this. He was certainly a lucky lad.
If you read the full story, it says he is making a complete recovery, hence my surprise!
These country roads are not far from me. You see a lot of wannabe rally drivers around. The biker was very lucky to survive, let alone be on his way to full recovery.
Just lucky. Could have gone very differently and often does in rural Wales where I live.
Cars pull out of junctions on windy roads with blind corners
and the biker having ignored all common sense goes speeding around the corner much too fast and dies half way around the bend.
Happens all the time.
Yeah airbag suit. Seriously makes me think that’s the way to go now.
It says 16m prison sentence.
Ah missed that. Thank you!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Recently bought an airbag jacket from Helite. They are really helpful and even brought some different types to my house to try on.
Started out with nothing. Still have most of it left.
How extremely fortunate for the rider to have survived (though very unfortunate to have encountered a complete moron) and also the driver of the WR1, whom I'm assuming would have received quite a different sentence had the rider died.
Sobering.
As to how he survived, the suit certainly helped, but the fact that he ended up airborne and then skidding along the road will have helped. If he had gone into the car or hit something (roadsign, fence post, barrier) then I suspect a very different outcome.
This is very true. A guy I ride with was killed a few years ago after a van pushed him off the road and he hit the only road sign for 3 km. literally 1 metre left or right and they say his kids would still have a dad.
I would say that corner should be better signposted too.
Nasty spot if you didn't know the road.
I was thinking the same. The driver was going too fast but even allowing for that the bend still seemed to come out nowhere.
I just watched that footage again and looking at the data line on the bottom of the screen it says he was doing between 53-55mph at the point he exits the corner and strays to the wrong side of the road. At that relatively slow speed and in that car there was ample time for the driver to get back on to the correct side. Makes me wonder what he was really looking at because I don’t think it was the road.
After reading all your comments I don’t think I want to watch it.
Been riding for 50 years now.
Every time you go out. You don’t know if it’s your last.
I don’t recognise the road where is it ?
The driver was either on his phone or talking to a passenger, at 66mph there is no reason he should have drifted so far over the road especially in am Impreza.
The biker reacted so quick, he slammed on very hard looks like his back wheel is well of the floor which I recon saved him. If he had not slammed on his would have smashed head first into the car and he would have died, the fact that the bike was nose down and the back end was already off the ground helped on impact as it would have flipped the back over so throwing the biker over the car. Very lucky which ever way you look at it.
The rider is very skilled or very lucky as he was braking with maximum effort on the front as the bike is in the process of doing a ‘stoppie’ (the exact opposite of a wheelie) where the rear of the bike is trying to pivot around the front wheel. This is very difficult to control and anyone who has ridden a motorcycle will know that it’s very easy to lock the front wheel under emergency braking which is almost guaranteed to end up with the front wheel sliding out from under the rider & both ending up on the floor. The bike is at a perfect angle to launch the rider over the car, a VERY lucky chap given the other possible circumstances.
- - - Updated - - -
Last edited by hops; 14th January 2020 at 19:34.
“Pratt swerved on to the wrong side of the road...”
Agreed.
So clever my foot fell off.
Its Mortimer Road, and the biker was heading from the A57 end and riding towards the Peak District, about half a mile in from the A57. Actually a very nice road to ride. If you look at the road on Google Maps and take the cars route, you will see the bend is blind and sort of dips away from you. The view round the bend is also obscured by the farmers wall. You may ask how I know this, well ALMOST the same happened to one of my mates on his Diavel last year, exactly the same bend, exactly the same place, but the car didn't come over quite so far. And he has it on video as well, I actually have the footage on my phone and its scary, so this isn't the first time a car has misjudged this particular bend. IMO there should be a road sign prior to this bend, or something else to make drivers slow down.
In relation to Tony thoughts on pulling off the road, I personally think the incident happened so quick the poor rider did what comes natural and simply braked hard, very hard. With the benefit of more time to consider evasive action, maybe just a few seconds of realising the car was there he may have done something different, we'll never know.
Stuart
Thanks Stuart,so the biker was going from just above Ladybower to Strines,I know it well and use it when the M1 south from Leeds is at a standstill,it is treacherous even if you know it well.
Last edited by SeePee; 15th January 2020 at 21:41.
Agree with others, can’t really understand why the car supposedly under steered onto the other side of the road. I read somewhere that the driver had just switched on his dash cams so I think he must have been distracted as he does little or nothing to correct.
Horrifying, isn't it. If the bloke in the Subaru knew the road he should have been given a proper sentence. If he didn't, it's the kind of corner there should be proper signs warning people about.
I used to live near the A339 from Alton to Basingstoke, an undulating road with around 50 corners in 10 miles. Bikers were constantly coming a cropper, usually on the double- and triple-apex corners. I wrote to the council and pointed out they needed to put up warning signs, specifically warning of the double-apex corners. They actually did put up warning signs going into the worst corners and put down high-grip surface. Thing is they put the warning signs at the turn-in points of the corners, by which point it's going to be too late. I wrote to them again (and the local paper) and a week later the signs had all been moved 100 metres or so in advance of the corner. I wrote to the council again and told them it was great but they really should invest in some signs warning why some of the corners were particularly dangerous and they replied that people shouldn't be breaking the speed limit or riding/driving too fast, and that a sign at each end of the road, saying it was a dangerous route and XX many people had died or been seriously injured on the road in the previous 10 years, and ones saying 'Warning! Bend!' or whatever were adequate.
The corner in that film doesn't appear to have any warning signs at all, plus there's a rise in the road before it turns into the corner so the car's going to be a bit unsettled if carrying any speed.
I genuinely believe there need to be very specific warning signs going into corners like that, especially where someone's crashed before. It's always sobering going round a tight corner and seeing a tree on the exit with bark missing where someone's hit it (why don't people cut down trees on exits of corners when that happens?). Yes, the Subaru driver was horribly at fault but a good start would be to put in warning signs.
"A man of little significance"
Looking at Mortimer Road on GoogleMaps there are very few road signs. A Z-bend does get one, but most bends don't...apart from the centre line markings.
Search 53.39337, -1.66484 on GoogleMaps...http://google.co.uk/maps/place/53°23...1.6670287,17z/.
As others have commented I don't think he was paying proper attention to the road. To me it looks as though he put his nearside nearly off the road where the surface is crumbling and that may have caused him to over-correct to the right and onto the opposite side of the road. His rear view camera shows a following vehicle and other shots show that it managed to round the bend successfully on the right side of the road and pull up onto the grass verge. I have to presume that the following driver could not see what was going on until he was in the bend.
The biker certainly reacted very fast and, as others have said, was on his front wheel under braking when they collided. A question for bikers on the forum: would front wheel ABS still allow you to pull a 'stoppie'? I've read that some later systems also detect any lifting of the rear wheel and so wouldn't allow this and so it could mean that earlier systems might aid a high speed stoppie by keeping the wheel rotating under maximum braking. I may well be wrong...hence my question.
The A57 is now mostly 50 mph isn’t it?
I’m sure the car driver didn’t set out to injure or kill anybody that day, and I’d say the car driver is lucky too that the biker went over the car and not through the windscreen. He’ll have plenty of time over the next few months to think about what happened anyway.
Sympathy will naturally gravitate to the injured party here, understandably, but my ex-colleagues have attended many incidents over the years where bikes had run wide on a bend and they’d either gone off the road or hit an oncoming vehicle. The squishy pink bit behind the wheel or on top of a bike are human, and they sometimes make poor decisions. Not blaming the biker here, but it happens a lot.
When I was on police helicopters, speeding and dangerous driving/riding on the A57 became such a problem that air support units were deployed to catch them for a while, along with days where the roads policing units stopped bikes to check for road worthiness and exhaust noise checks.
I’ve no idea whether things have improved any in the last few years, but for a while Sunday’s were like the Isle of Man TT.
That's a horrible crash, I haven't riden a bike for 20 years because I didn't feel safe.
I doubt I would have been able to avoid the collision, and I’ve been riding 45 years. I’d also suggest the vast majority of road riders would have ended up the same as that poor guy. I simply think given the closure speed and lack of time to process whats about to happen, theres no way to avoid the inevitable here. I doubt any form of ‘counter steering’ or ‘flicking’ the bike would have avoided some collision. Large sports bikes simply wont change direction quick enough. I think the best you can hope for here is possibly to jump off the bike and hope the grass is soft, but again, lack of reaction time probably counts this out. Like I have said previously, the same thing on the exact same bend happened to my mate last year, but the car didnt travel over as much and returned to the correct late. My mate is a very experienced rider and in his words he effin sh!t himself. He reckons no way to avoid a head on if the car was fully on his side of the road.
As a side issue, Matt how and where do you actually practice these avoidance manoeuvres?
Stuart
Sent from my iPhone using TZ-UK mobile app
At this point I'm just confused. I assume that everyone can see that at the point that the Subaru is clearly into the other carriageway (14) there is around fifty meters (the road lines - 1004.1 - in use are nine meters a dash and space between the two vehicles) and just under two seconds before the crash. You can also see that the Subaru is doing just under forty at the point of collision, while the bike, tracking its shadow against the final line is doing well under half that - he nearly managed to stop.
The scientific research I posted a couple of posts back gives unambiguous average data on bikers trained in countersteering swerving by 3.5 meters:
https://www.ifz.de/wordpress/wp-cont...016/10/ifz.pdf
Table 22 and 23.
In this case, they'd have needed to do less than half that to get past on either side. They'd also have had less time for obvious reasons.
You can see in the data that on average completing an emergency break and a 3.5m swerve are fairly comparable. This chap almost stopped before the Subaru ploughed into him. As such, based on the data for average motorcyclists above, I think an average motorcyclist who had trained to swerve until it was as reflexive as breaking and had opted to swerve would have got past with room to spare.
Here's an example of a large motorcycle countersteering effectively at speed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgSktPy-orE
see about 1 minute in.
As for where I practice, the same place as everyone else: any empty roads; I assume everyone does.
If only that accident had been in an empty car park with cones...
Makes a great quip, but a skill is a skill. He damn nearly stopped. That shows how much time he had to manoeuvre. The data from the experiment showed that if he had time to break he had time to swerve - and that swerving would have got him out of the path of the car.
Ok Proff👍 You stick with your data from the experiment....
Unfortunately for that rider, he was riding in the real world. The news article stated very clearly that he was a very experienced rider. The fact that he’d spent a lot of money on a nice bike and proper riding gear shows he took his riding seriously.
But in your head you could have avoided that accident??
Carry on👍👍
I still think that most if not all riders in that scenario would have crashed. I have watched your clip Matt, and its all very well swerving ‘violently’ at a given point to avoid cones on an unused bit of road, but having a car coming at you is a whole different ball game. Anyway, if you could have avoided that collision I take my hat off to you. We’ll agree to differ on whether most riders would.
Stuart
Sent from my iPhone using TZ-UK mobile app
Cool, we disagree. I do think it's a skill and one that take significant practice. Perhaps you are all just better at it than me, but self consciously steering sharply and hard in the opposite direction to that desired to initiate and end a manoeuvre at speed isn't a manoeuvre I use at any time other than when I'm practising it and when I need it.
I’m with Enoch, Cinnabull et al, there was no time to react and countersteer in order to miss the car (which is just steering at speed anyway, not some special skill!).
It all well and good being a super riding god and counter steering around this but what does it get you? Oh yes his mate that following in the face because your on the wrong side of the road on a blind corner.
Sent from my iPhone using TZ-UK mobile app
Actually, I'm pretty sure that in that situation whichever way I went, I'd have been off the road. I don't think I'm a 'super riding god' merely someone who practices more than one way of avoiding a crash. However, if I had managed to stay on the road, you have a point.
Last edited by M4tt; 17th January 2020 at 22:43.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
