Bikesafe Weekend

[Lissa]

Well, we've just done a Bikesafe weekend with Warwickshire police, so I thought I'd post about it to let you know how it went and what we thought of it.

The two day event cost us £110, and covered two full days from 9am to 4pm with lunch thrown in. For solo riders it would have cost £100, the extra tenner was to cover the food costs for me as we did it two-up. The course was run from the Rover Heritage Centre at Gaydon.

We arrived at 9 on the Saturday morning, to find tea, coffe and biccies waiting for us in the room we had been allocated. There were 17 of us altogether, 16 bikes. Pete and I were the only ones riding two-up. All of the riders had to fill out a brief questionnaire about length of riding experience, any breaks taken from riding, and which bike they currently had. This was to allow the Bikesafe guys to attempt to match riders in pairs for each observer.

The morning was spent in the classroom, watching a slide show, and talking generally about safer riding techniques. Lunch was at 12, and then at 12.30 the riders were paired up and allocated either a Police rider, or a ROSPA or IAM member as an observer. There was a lad with a naked curvy there(not an org member, so we told him about the site) so we were paired with him. We were also allocated a Police rider as our observer. Not much more to say about that first afternoons riding, except that we didn't get above 60mph at all.

We arrived on Sunday morning at 9, not exactly filled with enthusiasm at the thought of a whole day spent at sub-60mph riding, to be told that we had been re-assessed, were obviously too quick for the guy we had been riding with, and were being paired up with another rider and Police observer. Woohoo!!! We teamed up with a guy with a Thundercat and our observer told us that he generally took the 'progressive' riders. He expected us to observe 30, 40 and 50 speed limits, but on roads that were national speed limit, ride as we would normally ride

We had a fantastic day out with him. He had never seen an SV in action before and said it was a 'fantastic little bike'. He was really impressed by the engine braking, and the fact that we rarely had to use the brakes, and how quickly we could power out of corners.We went all over Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, and didn't want the day to end.

We finished off back at Gaydon, and Pete was pleased but slightly embarrassed to be assessed as 'highly skilled' and '**** hot', a true compliment I think coming from a Police rider.

All in all it was a thouroughly enjoyable weekend. Well worth the money in our opinion, and if you've ever thought about doing one but weren't sure, we'd say go for it!

Sounds really good... not least being allowed to break the speed limit with the police watching... Perhaps I should get off my rather large a*se and do some more training?!