Don’t race the locals
Photo Jusdevoyage / Unsplash
Age and experience does beat youth and exuberance discovered Nik Berg on a motorcycle ride to Barcelona.
Tom’s list was extensive. It covered all sorts of stuff from where to keep your wallet to make passage through France’s péages painless, to the correct earplugs to purchase and how to ride in convoy so as not to lose your travelling companions.
But number one on the list was “Don’t race the locals!” And it was of course, the first of our road test editor Tom’s rules of motorcycling abroad to be broken.
I was riding down to Barcelona to watch the Moto GP with three Top Gear chums, Marcel, Sock and Hayley. Marcel had been the previous year and was therefore loosely in charge of navigation and the like. Hayley, Sock and I had only recently passed our bike tests and there was a wager back in the office on who wouldn’t make it back in one piece. Apparently, I was top of that list as well.
Nonetheless we had made it to Portsmouth, the overnight ferry to Caen and Marcel had steered us all rather well, mostly on tree-lined Routes Nationale, down through the middle of France. Rapid progress was made and, after a long, hot day in the saddle, we arrived at our overnight stop in the pretty walled city of Carcassonne.
It was the next day, on the run down to Barcelona, somewhere south of Perpignan that Tom’s number one rule got ripped up. As the road began to climb as it skirted the edge of the Pyrenees, Marcel on a Honda Fireblade and I, on a Suzuki RF900R dropped the other two. (Okay so maybe that was actually the first rule we broke).
Although still rather new to motorcycling I was full of the confidence of youth, experimenting with counter-steering and getting more and more lean angle into the corners. It was then we caught up with a chap on a custom cruiser who, upon seeing us in his mirrors, promptly picked up his pace.
We tucked in behind, forming a train of fast-moving metal, sweeping through the hills on this glorious summer morning. Our local lad was doing remarkably well, sparks flying from the underneath of his bike as he tipped into to bend after bend.
Right up until the moment that he didn’t.
Midway through a long left-hander he suddenly sat the bike upright and speared off to the right. It was all we could do not to follow in his wheel tracks as we’d been mimicking his every move for miles. We watched in horror as he careened over the grass, through a drainage ditch and, thankfully out the other side. The bike was definitely airborne at one stage, his legs up near his shoulders, but somehow he clung on and steered back on to the road.
We pulled over as soon as we could, but too far to go back and check on our Spanish stunt man. So we waited. And as we waited the giggles came. I laughed so hard that I couldn’t get off my bike. Marcel was lying on the grass, tears streaming from his eyes. We were still laughing ten minutes later when Hayley and Sock showed up. And still laughing when, in another five minutes, the flying Spaniard rode sheepishly passed us.
Why the hysteria? I can only think it was the intense sense of relief that everyone survived with only a local rider’s pride in tatters because it certainly could have been much worse.
So yeah, don’t race the locals. Good advice Tom.