A close call worth mentioning..

[Gilles]

Riding today in Transylvania, with my wife on pillion. Relatively little traffic on the E60 (2 lane road about 40 km's South of the city of Brasov). The lack of traffic made the sweepers feasible at 100 km/hr + speeds.


In Romania, there's a lot of roadside stalls, parking, etc. One must always expect the unexpected.

Coming around a right hander, at about 120 (km/hr), and about 75m ahead, I notice the nose of a car poking out of a line of parked cars, and sure enough, a dumb b**** talking on her phone looking the other way, crawling onto my path with her BMW. The choice, what will happen next:

1) Will she continue forward, and I dodge around her rear?

or

2) Will she notice me and stop, so I can dodge around her front?

I can hear my wife screaming, and I am fixated, closing in on target.

The Brembo's do their job, and the dumb bitch (with the BMW) keeps moving forward, and I dodge around her rear with relative ease.

Lesson for today, don't get fucking fixated.

[lwp411]

As long as you guys got thru it ok....that's #1 priority!

[Gilles]

Originally Posted by lwp411

As long as you guys got thru it ok....that's #1 priority!

True...and the no.2 priority is to always be learning. I guess that's the point of this post. Few tell their tales of close calls.

Maybe I should learn to leave this country...sigh. Has superb roads, but awful road users.

[thelumox]

glad you avoided that one Gilles.

yesterday, a nice lady in a BMW, talking on her cell, provided me an opportunity to practice my braking skills too!!

"always a student" is the way i look at my riding experiences

[John]

Glad you took appropriate action. When I was in the Highway Patrol motorcycle academy we practiced an exercise that simulated just what you experienced, in our case we would quickly reduce speed by braking then do an aggressive weave around the "target". We did this maneuver over and over again to ingrain it within our memory. It also taught us the capability of the bike, what it can do under those kinds of circumstances. The exception to this evasive action movement is when there is not enough space nor time between you and the car, in that case the goal is to reduce speed as fast as possible since there is a relationship between speed and extent of injury from a crash. If impact is unavoidable we were told to get up on the floorboards and at the last possible moment before impact or right at impact jump up, hopefully this will catapult you over the car where you can roll out of it. This trick was called "going over the top". Obviously if the vehicle in front of you is a truck, you don't want to do the jump maneuver, just brake your ass off. In the old days when cars were built tall and boxy, the recommendation was the same as if a truck was there. Under no circumstances do you want to "lay it down" because you will slide at speed into the target because metal and plastic offers no braking power when a bike is on its side. You hear of people bragging about laying it down as if its some kind of skilled move, well, in 99.9% of the situations the lay down was caused by panic braking. I think the saying "keep the rubber side down" is appropriate here.

[ZDM]

And here I thought "Transylvania" was a fictitous place where vampires and werewolves roamed.....how about that!
Well it appears those well ingrained skills took over , you avoided mayhem and kept your cool...wife screaming and all. Good work!

[moonmanhere]

Should have pulled a u-turn afterwards, pulled up alongside, and busted her mirror.