bhtooefr

Reducing radius corners can be damn terrifying, but in this case, the guy was nowhere near the cornering limits of his motorcycle.

northernlights

Don't try this at home.

Motorcycle Racer Dies After Reaching Speeds Of 285 MPH
July 15, 2013
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3596740.html


Holy...285 mph on a modified turbocharged Suzuki Hayabusa.

Good thing he was on a track (closed runway) and not a public road, which I respect him for. RIP

Keith99

This in Mulholland Highway, not some side street. It is at least a 45 MPH road. Speed bumps are out of the question.

Nice road the whole way if you are fit enough for it, except for some of the crotch rocket jerks. I did this on a weekday and got buzzed on a straight section on the top of the ridge. Later got passed by a Hells Angel who was quite considerate. The guy throttled down and coasted past me. It was only a few miles from The Rock Store and I talked to him there over a beer.

Sharpshin

I'm not aware that there are many of these videos out there, unlike motorcycle wrecks which are all over youtube. This video taken on Mulholland Drive, at a location notorious for motorcycle wrecks.

Unskilled motorcycle rider target fixates on bicycles, predictably rides right into them. On the bicycle your pelvis gets it first, then the back, followed by the whiplash, then the four-foot drop onto your head, all that followed by the ol' whip your knees around your ears ankles up over your head in case you ain't bent that far in a while.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNFa...7A2492C0B9CBFF


The morals of this story being....

When needed to take evasive action, LOOK WHERE YOU WANT TO GO, not at what you dont want to hit.
Stay off Mulholland Drive when the motorcycles and running it.

Mike

ItsJustMe

This happened over a year ago and there have been several threads here on it.

When I see stuff like that I rehash an idea in my head:

I'd like to see automated "severe tire damage" strips in the road. If you're going > 20MPH over the limit, they flip up and shred your tires.

jrickards

I scared the sh-t out of a motorcyclist the other day and it was my fault: in planning to shift a lane to the left, I looked back over my left shoulder, saw a small dark object, assumed it to be a car in the distance, put out my left hand and moved across my lane to the one to the left and, it turned out to be a motorcycle, at a decent speed, much closer than I realized, and he locked his rear tire avoiding me. My bad and I honestly feel bad about it, I'll have to pay more attention to the size of the object when I look back like that. He yelled and swore at me but I deserved it.

CbadRider

New thread from Commuting merged with the old thread in A&S.

JoeyBike

That is an old video. Even though I have seen it multiple times I still can't figure it out. Target fixation? I dunno. More like the MC guy was looking at his tach or speedometer and not the road ahead. "Oh look...my odometer is turning over 999.5 - 999.6 - 999.7 - BANG! It almost appears as thought the MC was going off the road anyway, cyclists or not. What an unnecessary mess.

mrodgers

This in no way relieves the motorcyclist from responsibility, but....

We see the view from the side of the road. What is the view from position on the road? Is it possible upon entering the corner, you can not see through this turn what is ahead? Motorcycle enters corner and sees cyclists appear as he navigates through. Reacts and grabs the brakes which will immediately stand the motorcycle upright, especially a sport bike. Once that happens, target fixation comes on and motorcyclist can not avoid the bicyclists. Target fixation is real. You will go where you are looking. At a high rate of speed on a motorcycle such as this, grabbing a bunch of front brake will immediately stand the motorcycle up.

To avoid, the motorcyclist needed to get off the brakes, take eyes off the cyclists he wants to avoid, go back to looking through the turn and push hard on the handlebar to lay it down and cut around the corner sharply. This is difficult to do because it is a major "Oh Sh**" moment and your reflexes are frozen.

vol

Don't all motorcycles make loud noises so one knows immediately what's coming?

jrickards

I thought so too but I don't recall hearing anything particularly loud at the time: there was other traffic around and that could have made its noise less identifiable.

no motor?

Only the ones riden by the "outside noisy, inside empty" types do. The racket makes it hard to ride long distances.

Notso_fastLane

Simple target fixation combined with a probably inexperienced motorcycle rider. Although, even very experienced (i.e. world class racers) can target fixate. It's actually pretty common, not so much stupid, though.

Chris516

I was thinking the same thing. Because, He was going at a high speed.

ItsJustMe

They make really loud noises behind them, even the ones that are painfully loud are not really easy to hear from the front. I live near a "scenic drive" where a lot of Harley clubs spend their weekends, and I hear a lot of them. "Loud pipes save lives" is a load of baloney - even on a bike, I can't hear them any better than an average car until they catch up with me; I doubt someone in the car with the windows rolled up can hear them at all from the front. After they pass me, they're so loud that it's physically painful, like someone's driving nails into my ears. not a fan.

Chris516

Wasn't that video, part of something? Not just something caught on camera?

kickstart

Professional photographers make a living on these destination roads, they take actions photos and videos on tight radius corners to sell on their websites. Riders and drivers will hotdog it to get good pictures of themselves, but some exceed their skill level and crash. Some motorcycle forums have entire threads dedicated to the "rider fail" pictures.
I think some of the photographers also sell action shots of cyclists too.

kickstart

Professional photographers make a living on these destination roads, they take actions photos and videos on tight radius corners to sell on their websites. Riders and drivers will hotdog it to get good pictures of themselves, but some exceed their skill level and crash. Some motorcycle forums have entire threads dedicated to the "rider fail" pictures.
I think some of the photographers also sell action shots of cyclists too.

killboy.com is probably the most famous... or infamous....

Darth Lefty 

Oh God, Mulholland, the Rock Store, the Snake, Jay Leno. Just stay away. And Palomar, and ACH up to Newcomb's, and basically any mountain road near LA. Full of motorcycles and sports cars going way over the speed limit. I survived my days of being so dumb. I had several wrecks that could have been so much worse if not for good road engineering. They still got my collarbone, and ankle twice, at different times.

Sharpshin

Well, I'm clearly late to this particular party....


I DO have lots of hours on motorcycles; from age 27 through 38 whatever motorcycle I had was my only transpoortation, put in around 250,000 miles all told.


First off, if you look at the other Mulholland motorcycle wreck videos Cops ARE all over the place, but a motorcycle can accelerate very quickly and in not very far at all after passing a Cop, likewise since they dont weigh much they slow down real quick too. So if you knew where the Cop was, which is likely given all the other motorcycle riders you'd talk to, you could blitz every stretch except for the part where the Cop was.

Now, the suggestion of putting SPEED BUMPS on that road complete misjudges the mindset of a bunch of guys out to blitz down a set of twisties Guys would hit them as fast as they could without wrecking, and if they were the sort of speed bumps with gaps to let rainwater drain past, the motorcycles would just blitz through the gaps.

Cameras might work, but net time you are around a bunch of sport bikes, take a look at how the license plates are fitted: Guys will mount them under the taillight but angled forward towards the bottom, this cants the plate and makes it much harder to read from behind or to read off of a photograph, especially if the camera is mounted up high.

IMHO this was an new motorcyclist out riding for one of the first times, maybe the first time on a place like Mulholland. A cardinal rule true of all moving vehicles but especially true of motorcycles: LOOK WHERE YOU WANT TO GO. On turns you look all the way around the turn ahead rather than in front of your front wheel and the bike almost leans itself as you ride to where you are looking. In avoiding wrecks like this one had the guy merely looked to the point where he needed to go rather than fixating on the cyclists and grabbing the brakes he almost certainly would have missed them.

Anyhoo... both cyclists got up and walked at least a short distance after the wreck and sat in the shade waiting for EMS. I'd be really interesting in knowing the long term injuries sustained if any.

Mike

Sharpshin

A decreasing radius corner is the stuff of which motorcycling nightmares are made

You pick your line and your speed going in, only to find when leaned over near the limits of traction that you have to slow down real quick or run off the outside of the road. Most of your braking power is up front but grab too much and the front wheel snaps out from under you and you "low side" into the railing. Even just rolling off of the throttle can break the rear wheel loose so that it slides out laterally, catches traction again sideways, and then slams you in a "high side" onto the road in front of the tumbling bike.

In my own big speed wreck I was just very, very lucky is all.

Mike

Chris516

That is an excellent description and can even be applied to cycling.

ItsJustMe

I have this idea that stories like this brings to mind. I'd like to see those severe tire damage strips built into pavement, retracted. Attach to a radar. Someone approaches over a given speed (say 30 over the limit, whatever), they pop up. You probably don't want the full strip that shreds the tires instantly, because that would kill a motorcyclist, but puncturing the tires so they went flat in 60 seconds would be good.

For bonus points, put hidden security cameras nearby so you could prosecute the people who would inevitably come and vandalize the system.

You wanna go fast, fine, go pay your fee and run on a track.

italktocats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FONN-0uoTHI

italktocats

and burn the bodies afterwards!