Conquer your fears with California SuperbikeSchool

06 Jun 10
Leigh Godson from Bike Chatter reveals how CSS Level 1 helped him to overcome post-accident issues with left-hand bends

If you have ever had an accident on your motorcycle you will no doubt carry a little baggage from the experience whether that is toward certain vehicles, road surfaces, weather conditions - basically anything that you feel might have been a contributing factor to your incident. When this happens you try to adjust your riding or even back it off a little to add a buffer zone in case of a problem, my day at California Superbike School was all about seeing if this could be altered or removed.

In my case it was simple left hand bends and corners which on occasion caused me to feel 'not quite right' coming up to them which really is just plain stupid as I have ridden the same corners on other days and felt great, riding your motorcycle on the road is certainly a cerebral experience and you tend to trust your instincts much more than driving a car or even off roading and therin lies the main problem that your brain is simply overloading with reactions to keep you alive - often the completely wrong reactions too as I found out one beautiful sunny day at Silvertone's Stowe circuit.

As someone who has ridden for a few years and gained the experience of all weather riding I would have hoped that I could overcome my need to back off when things did not feel right, some days the bike would feel great under me and others I would feel totally exposed and under pressure and no amount of me telling myself that I am being stupid was sorting it out, I had the fortune to be invited along to Silverstone by California Superbike School to see if they could change the way I thought about these reactions on their level 1 training day. Normally here you would expect to hear that I did not expect a massive change from one day and I suppose to some degree this is true but CSS has an excellent history of training racers who then become champions and with thousands upon thousands of riders passing through the school's doors each year so you know they are doing something that works - how this will apply to my silly fear I do not know.

Read the full article at http://www.bikechatter.co.uk/articles/riding-techniques/item/1330-conquer-your-fears-with-california-superbike-school.html

Download full PDF document

Press Reports Index