Saw this on a bike forum. How he lived I have no idea.
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?
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Yeah airbag suit. Seriously makes me think that’s the way to go now.
It says 16m prison sentence.
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.
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.
Absolutely shocking. Such awful, negligent driving.
That said, I keep watching this and wondering whether the biker had the time to steer off the road to the left prior to impact - the stoppy seems to have been a panic reaction when there were actually a couple of seconds to implement an evasive manoeuvre. Any other TZ bikers have a view on that please?
I think with the car doing 70 (as reported), and assuming the bike was also enjoying some spirited riding, the time for meaningful, evasive reaction would have been zilch.
Biker saw car on wrong side of the road traveling at speed, slammed on brakes, BANG!
Unbelievably lucky not to have died.
Holy crap! I actually found that quite difficult to watch. Great to hear that the rider is making a full recovery. The driver was, IMHO, lucky to get away with just 16 months, which means just 8 months will be served.
I agree, realistically there little, if any, time to avoid the collision. Even assuming the rider had time to 'think' he might have hoped that the car would make its way back onto the correct side of the road.
I thought the rider's reactions were pretty sharp to have braked as quickly as he did.
One very lucky unlucky rider.
The Pratt should be banned for life, what a failure of a driver. And what a life-saver that air suit was, amazing. Hopefully he's invested in another, there are sadly many pratts out there.
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.
I would say that corner should be better signposted too.
Nasty spot if you didn't know the road.
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.
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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.
That was a hard thing to watch, but I agree. The rider was braking as much as his bike would allow him to, and that stoppie raised his body position high enough to launch him over the car (and clear of the handlebars), rather than through it/them. There is no doubt in my mind that it saved his life.
When braking that hard there is zero possibility of evasive action, he did all he could to avoid the collision, it was left up to the car driver to get back onto his side of the road, which he failed to do.
Lucky rider, but a negligent driver.
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
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"
I disagree. He was driving a decent sportsbike and he was breaking hard for well over a second before the accident. In that situation I would have flicked the bike out of the way in whichever direction the car was less likely to swerve into even if that meant going off the road. Anything is better than a head on collision.
Active counter steering is a technique that has saved my life a couple of times and is worth practicing regularly. This chap had obviously practiced emergency breaking to the point of it being reflex, but an equally reflexive flick would have cleared the car easily.
For the non bikers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upAI5rb_pFY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF1ezf8LNNU
A decent bike at speed can flick out of the way of most things a damned sight faster than it can brake. The slower you are going the mushier the response.
Last edited by M4tt; 15th January 2020 at 23:01.
In the split second you would have to react, you could quite easily steer straight into a signpost, gatepost or other object so it's a tough call. I think the saying 'between a rock and a hard place' could easily come true.
I've had a few close calls, and some were more luck than judgement in choosing direction.
Last edited by oldoakknives; 16th January 2020 at 08:25.
The guy on the bike was probably already on the brakes approaching the corner when an understeering Subaru presented itself with around one second until impact. For all the biker knew it could've quickly regained grip and got back on it's own side of the road, or maybe kept understeering into the field. It didn't and he gave a last gasp grab on the brakes which conveniently put him into launch mode and saved his life. You can watch it over again and say could've, should've, would've, but I'd bet if the exact same situation happened to 100 experienced bikers at least 90 of them would now be dead.
As for just flicking the bike out of the way, have you ever ridden a litre sports bike at speed? They don't change direction very easily and it gets harder to do when you're already on the brakes and committed to a corner. It's certainly not like in a car where all that's required is a slight hand movement on the wheel or a bike when you're just out for a pootle and have plenty in reserve. The biker in question was on a sports bike and wearing an air bag suit which you don't see much outside of the paddock (yet), so I'd hazard a guess that he was a quick and experienced guy out for a fang with his mates and already riding close to his limits when the Subaru appeared.
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.
I was simply saying what I’ve done in the past, what I’ve practiced doing and what has worked for me. I can’t say precisely what I’d have done in terms of direction, but yes, I’d have counter steered out of the way. I cut my teeth on old brits, had a Z1000 back when they didn’t handle and the last bike of this sort I had was a Gsxr750 which would have been across the road like a scalded cat. Currently I have a CCM R30. As such, I reckon I know what I’d have done and the capability of a decent sports bike.
As far as I am concerned countersteering, even under breaking, is precisely as quick as you want with traction and strength being the key variables. Due to the physics of the manoeuvre, the faster you are going the more dramatic the effect.
I had a pretty serious off on my S1000RR back in 2016.... The gear saved my life, looks the same case here.
WTF was the car doing
That's a horrible crash, I haven't riden a bike for 20 years because I didn't feel safe.
Hmm, all good if you countersteer the right way, not so pretty if you don't. How can you know which way the car is going to go?
I met lots of folk who would've done this, that and the other with ninja like reflexes and immaculate brake modulation after a pushbike accident. Good luck to them all, and to you :)
Edit: I wonder if these narratives are a way of coping with our own mortality. It's easier to believe that you'd swerve out of the way than to accept that on any day on the road you could be coming round a corner and some twit'll be on the wrong side of the road, or a tree will fall, or a bridge will collapse and there won't be anything you can do about it.
Last edited by ernestrome; 17th January 2020 at 16:46.
I don’t think I’m claiming ninja like responses and I was explicit that, as far as I’m concerned, anything is better than a direct head on collision with a car at speed. I’m acutely aware that some idiot can hit you however careful you are, however, in this situation there was more than enough time to flick a bike and the Subaru had clearly overcooked the corner. So far I’ve had my competence questioned and been told my opinion is a coping strategy. However, swerving by counter steering is a widely accepted avoidance strategy, especially at high speed. There’s science and everything:
https://www.ifz.de/wordpress/wp-cont...016/10/ifz.pdf
I suspect the bike was over 60mph and the Subaru certainly was, so a counter steering swerve was the obvious strategy for anyone trained and practiced in doing so. If anyone trained in the manoeuvre cares to argue the point without resorting to ad hominem I’m all ears.
I know I wouldn’t. I may well have gone off the road, but I’ll take the possibility of a 60mph collision with something against a definite combined 100mph collision with a car every time. That’s why I regularly practice both hard breaking and countersteered swerves. Who else practices countersteering swerves here?
If you have a link to the crash being discussed by bikers I'd be interested to see it.