Dave Abrahams

A Honda Fireblade rider gets to grips with a tight turn-in.

Each year the Wheels Motorcycle Safety Campaign gets underway in Cape Town just as the spring south-easter blows the cobwebs out of our riding gear and gets us back on the road after the winter rains. And each year it provides a few surprises.

Such as the big new BMW sports-tourer that started leaking brake fluid during the braking exercises at Killarney racetrack on Sunday - less than 36 hours after a major service. If ever there was an object lesson in expecting the unexpected, that was it.

But it all started the previous weekend at the Gene Louw provincial traffic college in Brackenfell with a spine-chilling look at what can go wrong - and all too often does - when bikers with no more protection than the gear they are wearing have to share the roads with large metal boxes on wheels.

The South African Paramedic Services' first-aid presentation focused more on what not to do if your riding buddy goes down: move the victim as little as possible, keep airways open and apply pressure on open wounds to stop bleeding.

While few bikers have the time to do a proper inspection first thing in the morning, the technical presentation showed that it takes no more than a moment to walk around your bike and see that nothing is dripping and that there is air at the bottom of the tyres (when all the air is at the top, Cyril, you have a problem).

Oh, and that macho habit of grabbing a handful of brakes as you swing a leg over the saddle not only stops the bike from rolling forward and crashing down in your driveway before you've even started the engine, it also confirms that the brakes are actually working.

The emergency lane-change got several riders very flustered, including this one on a Suzuki Bandit.

Dave Abrahams

Then the participants moved outside to the training area where a number of riding exercises had been set up, mostly based on real-world scenarios, such as an emergency lane change (some idiot in a car pulls out in front of you) or turning into a bend that tightens as you go in, or even steering between cars in traffic, which is not illegal but does demand a special set of precision-riding skills.

New this year, over in a corner, was a group of teenage rookies on scooters and 125s, being taken through the K53 requirements by an experienced instructor. Most law-enforcement officers will acknowledge that the K53 is only the first step in learning to ride safety, but there are a lot of safety tips worth learning buried in the officialspeak.

The following Sunday the main group - nearly 60 of them - gathered at Killarney to take their riding to the next level, with high-speed braking and cornering exercises. When chief instructor Tony Sparg had them stop from 80km/h using only the rear brake and then check out the resulting stopping distance there were some raised eyebrows.

Even using both brakes some participants got flustered and sailed way past the orange cones before hauling their bikes down, prompting a remark from a watching rider that “if he'd done that on the street he'd have T-boned something”.

After lunch the circuit was opened for the participants to put all they'd learned into smooth, accurate laps, with Sparg and his instructors always on hand to give advice and demonstrate the neatest (and safest) lines. And even the most experienced rider went away feeling that he or she had learned something new, something that might save them from a nasty moment on the road one day.

And that's why Wheels motorcycle club do it. As long as bikers keep getting skittled (nearly 50 were killed on Western Cape roads in the first nine months of 2011) they'll keep teaching safety skills, as they have done for the past 11 years.

The rider of this Kawasaki ZX-6R has the rear wheel just kissing the ground under hard braking.

Dave Abrahams