The New Zealand’s government plan to reduce road toll, lie in a small plate.

To curb the issue of the high crash rate for young drivers in New Zealand, the powers that be have come up with a brilliantly idiotic idea on how to reduce the number of accidents…give them a small plate with an ‘R’ emblazoned upon it that is to be plastered on their windows.

There isn’t a mention of driver training, courses or anything else that could “actually” help the current poor state of driving, just a small patch. In all honesty, how is a small plate that make other road users aware of the skill level of the driver, going to make any difference in accidents at all when the majority of the crashes that the youth of New Zealand cause are their own fault in the first place.

“As well as causing 34 per cent of fatal crashes over the four years, high-risk drivers were also at fault in more than 60 per cent of late-night crashes.

Of teenage high-risk drivers involved in fatal crashes, 48 per cent had licence-related factors such as being disqualified or unlicensed, and 24 per cent were racing or evading police at the time of the crash.”

So what can we take from the information above? First off, most of them never had a license with them in the first place, and the rest were racing or trying to escape the cops. I fail to see how exactly an ‘R’ plate will help this at all? Or is this just another cash-grab campaign from the government because their funds are getting low and so they decided to target restricted drivers?

The government is merely trying to show that they are using our money to try and stop the high death-toll and crash rate of the young road users, but really, what they are doing is little over sadly pathetic. Instead of using the tax-payers money for something useful like subsidised driver training or even compulsory training, or even information packs. They decide to give us something that no one that is actually causing the majority of these accidents will display.

So if I have this right, other road users will see this plate and then give them a wide berth on the road, perhaps even pull over to let them past so that they are not in danger of being taken out and that it will automatically fix the problem.

We are skirting around the bush and it is becoming increasingly annoying. Give me 2 months in the seat of whoever is making these Mickey Mouse decisions and I could assure you that we would have halved the death toll in New Zealand. I would cut to the heart of the problem and not take any bullshit for an answer.

“You are at the greatest risk on the road in the first six to nine months after getting your restricted licence and driving solo.”

Ok, so that is no surprise at all really. I mean, look at it this way. Where a lot of the current full license holders already should not be let onto the roads in New Zealand and they are teaching our young generation to drive, they are merely passing over bad habits. So that when these drivers go out alone onto the road by themselves, they continue to make the same mistakes that their parents do and we have a never ending cycle.

Just recently the restricted driving test became a lot more difficult, by that, I mean that these people actually have to know how to drive first. From the start of this change, there has been something like 40-50% of Learner drivers that have failed the test compared to around -20% before if memory serves me right. What does that show us? That nobody could drive in the first place and they have only just cottoned on. One small step for man I guess.

At the end of the day, if we want to see any real change in the road toll and the accident statistics, we need to drastically change our current regime. Harder laws, compulsory training and regular testing, a large media campaign to bring awareness and a  zero tolerance for mis-behaviour.

All writing in quotes taken from the NZ Herald article - http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10808933

Back into my sweaty little paws.

So, it has now been just over 3 months since I had lost my license and as of yesterday, I now have a license again after serving my time only slightly begrudgingly.

I am so excited to actually get out and ride, but there is one slight problem… I have no road bike at my disposal. Well, that’s a lie, I do, but it is in a million pieces and doesn’t go anyway. I guess I could always just find a large hill and roll myself down and see how far I get?

I am trying to sell my race bike so that I can buy a road bike but nothing has happened so far and so I wait…I wait for days on end with the most pitiful face I can muster and refresh the bike ad every 20 seconds to see if somebody has purchased it yet.

I was thinking along the lines of a Dual purpose bike so that I can practice my drifting out in paddocks without the ever-present possibility of having the tyre grip and throwing myself into either another car or something else just as solid. Unfortunately I have to get a 250cc to carry me through the rest of my restricted stage (Another 8months?) but with the new Power to weight ratio (LAMS) arriving in maybe 5 months, I am considering getting a 400cc DRZ or something of that style so that I will be sorted for when the new law does come around.

You just know that this will be me in the months to come. Or maybe something like that…

Only problem with that is that I have to lay kinda low for a little while so as not to get yet another large ticket from my lovely friends, the cops. If you see a story on the news from some lunatic motard rider who ran from the cops so that they didn’t get a ticket, it would most likely be me. (DISCLAIMER: Most likely won’t be me.)

Now it’s time for me to let you into a little bit of this personal hell of mine, I call it ‘Public Transport’ and it is the spawn from which all evil was created, kind of like the pit of flames deep in the heart of Mordor. First point is that as per usual, they are always either late or early which can throw out your plans when you need to catch the first bus of the day which is supposed to get you there bang on time for work as it is. But then he decides that everyday he will sleep in for that extra 10 minutes and that perhaps everybody else should have an extra 10 minutes of sleep (or waiting in the freezing cold, in the rain at the bus stop.)

At least it is consistently late…

Second point is that they are too damn expensive to catch anywhere else apart from in the city, I mean, if you want to go to your friends place which isn’t that far away and is easily accessible by bike, you have to catch around 40+ buses with a grand total of around $200 just for a one way fare. Now I have heard about daylight robbery but this is just ridiculous.

How cool would it be to ride on a bus like this? Pedestrians will stand no chance!

Third point: There are smelly, obese, badly dressed people that are determined to sit right beside you and emit their putrid stench all throughout the general area and don’t seem to take the severe outburst of coughing fits, long vomiting episodes and general panic that spreads like wild fire through the whole bus as a hint to have a shower or at least to tame the wild forest that grows all around their body. I mean when grown adults start to breakdown and cry when you walk onto the bus and loudly exclaim that they have gone blind and lost all sense of smell and that they don’t want to live any more on this earth then there must be something wrong. 

And yet I am forced to catch this damn bus every day, as motorcycles zoom past around the outside, on to tackle their favourite corners and what not. I am intensely jealous. Not to worry, soon I will be upon a mighty steed once again and I will be sure to tell you all about it.

Matt

Where the rubber meets the road

As dawn breaks tomorrow, the start of the 2012 practice sessions for the Isle of Man TT begin. The most dangerous and amazing race on the face of this Earth. With over 200+ deaths to date on this circuit, there is no room for error, and when you do make a mistake, things go bad very quickly.

I am one of many, wishing that they could be standing just metres from the road as high-power bikes race past at blazing speeds. The sounds penetrates the peaceful silence of the island, with birds chirping and the sound of the countryside all around you, the bikes power through the twists and turns of the circuit and compete for the win, or least of all, to finish in one piece.

Rider gets some hang time before slamming back down to the ground and entering into a high-speed corner.

It is definitely worth checking out ‘Closer to the Edge’ if you haven’t already! An amazing movie going into the lives of the TT riders, namely Guy Martin and taking you deep into the world of this amazing race.

Isle of Man TT – The time is near

Guy Martin talking his way through the course.

I may be wanted for murder…

So to kick the day off, work was going swimmingly, preparing food for the day and chopping various items with my large, sharp knife. I had a pot of butter on, simmering away when as some silly girl walks behind me and bumps into me, I knock the pot of hot butter onto my hand and in retaliation, swing wildly around with my knife and ‘accidentally’ slit this poor girls throat as she falls to the ground with a thud and warm, crimson blood soaking into my nice clean Chef’s clothes. 

I quickly realise the gravity of the situation and make my way out of there as soon as possible, I jump onto my motorbike and pin back the throttle. Then I remember to turn the bike on, and now I am off on my way to my safe house which is prepared for one such occasion as this. On the way there I stop at a set of traffic lights as a scooter rider pulls up beside me with only a bicycle helmet on and 3 small children on the back of his 50cc Zongshen scoot. 

He tries to smile at me with a large toothless grin and spits out some foreign language in an attempt to make polite conversation. Since I am not in the mood to talk I ignore him, but he persists on trying to talk to me and all I can make out from the muffled, dying dog sound coming from his mouth was “” Hello, I like your bike!” Or something along those lines, I get angry that he is still trying to talk to me so give his little scooter a swift kick with my armoured boots and watch as he slowly but surely, topples over to the ground. 

Unfortunately at this point a large bus decides to pull up beside us and… you get the idea. 

So that is my current predicament, I am typing this from the safety of an internet cafe on Queen St in Auckland city and I am sure that they will not find me here. Though there are quite a few people looking at me, but I usually get this because of my good looks. 

Oh hang on, I think they are calling the cops?! 

Will update later got to ru…

MotoGP 2014 Suzuki Prototype

MotoGP 2014 Suzuki Prototype

This is what is believed to be the Suzuki prototype for their 2014 MotoGP bike, looks pretty nice and I look forward to seeing how it performs!

New Suzuki MotoGP bike?

Taken from http://www.cycleworld.com/2012/05/22/spied-2014-suzuki-motogp-prototype/ and written by Kevin Cameron.

Insiders tell us this is a prototype for Suzuki’s return to MotoGP in 2014. The project was, we are told, “hot for a while” and then cooled off. Now, with these photos from a test earlier this month at Sugo Circuit in Japan, it clearly has momentum again.

What have we here? We see from the exhaust pipes that this is a transverse inline-Four, just like all GSX-Rs. That is a departure from Suzuki’s V-Four GSV-R MotoGP architecture. While the usual pipe arrangement for a flat-crank inline-Four is 4-into-2-into-1, this bike has two long-taper megaphones, each connecting to a pair of cylinders. That suggests this engine does not have a flat crank but instead is fitted with a 90-degree “crossplane” crank shown by Yamaha’s engineer Masao Furusawa to improve grip.

A Japanese informant said, “New Suzuki MotoGP racer is certainly inline-Four. It is not, however, normal inline. When guess from exhaust sound, kind same as YZR-M1.” All the other trappings of MotoGP are present: top-level Brembo calipers and carbon discs, Öhlins suspension, plus carbon-fiber bodywork.

What else do we see? We see a radically forward rider position, and that the engine’s cylinder block is inclined forward, perhaps as much as 30 degrees. This moves the intake throttle bodies to where they need to be in the airbox. As the rider accelerates (note that in one of the cornering photos, he has the throttle pinned, suggesting advanced electronics in use), his face is directly over the steering crown. The fuel tank sits behind a large carbon-intake airbox and consists of a thin forward vertical portion as tall as the airbox, with a long and quite thick “foot,” which effectively forms the rider’s seat. You can see fuel pipes to the injectors entering the front of the airbox. Note also that as the rider accelerates, his butt is three inches clear of the two-inch-thick seatback pad, further underscoring the far-forward rider position.

What has happened here is that as the engineers have sought to lower the placement of the fuel toward the machine/rider center of mass, putting most of it under the seat, fuel mass has moved rearward. If the front tire is not to become unweighted during off-corner acceleration, something else must compensate by being moved forward. And not only that, each year, as tire grip is increased, more power may be applied without wheelspin, increasing the tendency to lift the front.

Under the rider’s hands are bulbous ducts leading from the chin intake in the fairing nose, through the chassis sides and into the engine airbox. Although a rear-wheel starter can be seen in the garage shot, there is Suzuki’s usual round “starter door” in the right side of the fairing, through which a starter dog can spin the crank if the slipper-clutch setting is too soft to permit rear-wheel starting.

It’s hard to see what is going on with the airflow to the two radiators. At first, the “covers” between them and the front tire look solid, like carbon fabric. But they could also be stone shields. In one photo, the upper cover has come loose and moved forward along one edge, as if there were pressure behind it. If solid, it would be a first in ducting ram air from above the tire to the front faces of the radiators. Airflow behind the front tire is always disturbed, providing poor pressure to push it through the radiators. This is part of the reason radiators are as big as they are. Four large hot-air exit slots are provided in the fairing sides.

And when I look at where the cylinder head must be, it might suggest the upper radiator is U-shaped to make clearance for it. Suzuki did this during the early 1980s to move its disc-valve RG engines farther forward.

Recently on the Italian website GPone.com, journalist David Emmett asked Suzuki racing technical director Shinichi Sahara if the company will change to an inline-Four. Sahara replied that they will “stay faithful to our engine layout.” And in a Peter McLaren story from this past February, veteran Suzuki test rider Nobuatsu Aoki said he “rode it last week” at Ryuyo.

Conflicting information? Not at all. It is normal for manufacturers to build and test multiple prototypes before determining which is most promising. Veteran tuner Eraldo Ferracci has told of testing endless prototypes when he was at Benelli—and most were not produced.

There is also another possibility here: Suzuki is known for making multiple uses of projects, so an inline-Four MotoGP prototype could also gather information useful in design of next-generation GSX-Rs. Could such a machine also be the foundation for a production-based CRT bike? Might Suzuki build the MotoGP equivalent of a production racer in the spirit of Yamaha’s TZs of the 1970s?

It’s a guessing game, and we enjoy it. We shall have the pleasure of anticipation.

Slippery slopes, bouncing front tyres and the end of a relationship.

5.30am

Before daybreak on this freezing morning Greg and I set off to Hampton Downs Raceway for the last ART day for the season. Bikes in tow with talk about fat people’s livers and we were on our merry way. Stopping off for a pie, coffee and a fuel up at the servo before we get to the track we meet up with a few more early bird bikers, one of which has decided it is to cold to ride and will soon be loading his bike onto the back of a trailer so that he can relax in the warmth of a work van, laden with biking needs.

Once we set up and go through scrutineering, sign in and gear check we await the call for the track walk. Lines of excited bikers wait at the track entry and we are soon stopping at each corner and checking them out. Since my bike doesn’t have a stand attached to it, I have to lie it up against the tyre wall’s and barriers that line the track and unfortunately pick up a large amount of mud on my tyres which I have to try hard to scrub off before we enter back into the pits and am very tempted to just let out a huge standing burnout, but refrain from my urges as I can’t be bothered being told off so early on in the day.

Session 1 and we are all systems go, it is a pretty slow pace to begin with as the majority of us have never done the track before and are trying to get acquainted to it as soon as possible. I pass around 6 riders who are dawdling along and start to pick up my pace a little but as soon as we had started, the finishing flag hangs lazily from the start grid and we make our way back into the pits.

Now before we go out for the second session, rain starts to piss all over the lovely track and what we are left with is a nice slippery surface on which we now have to navigate. Normally I am fine in wet weather but my tyres were starting to get a little old and harden up so gave me the feeling of riding on ice for the entire session which wasn’t pleasant. Expecting the tyres to give at any second, left me riding like a nana around the track. As I enter into one tight corner and am leant over slightly my rear tyre steps out for a second or so, but it quickly resumes it’s place in line with the front and I am off down the straight. I could feel the bike edging out from underneath me on every turn and it consumed my mind leaving me with little concentration on what I was actually doing which was kind of dangerous as we will soon find out.

As I am coming out of turn 5 which drops 8 metres in a decreasing radius style corner I then power onto the short straight, reaching around 170km/h when the bike that was close in front of me decides to slam on his brakes for whatever reason, leaving me to quickly shut off the throttle and grabbing a little too much front brake. That in itself is a big no-no as it upsets the bike considerably and will no doubt cause the front to lock up…which it did. The front tyre violently moves from the left to the right and then suddenly grips on the tarmac causing it to catapult into the  air and land back down with a heavy thud and leaving me with the bewilderment and confusion that I am still up on two wheels and now coming up to the long sweeper which I need to prepare myself for.

As that session finishes, I put my bike up onto the stands and I then go and have a much needed cigarette as I miss half of the debrief. My nerves aren’t too happy at this current point in time and I await session 3, hoping that it will not bear the same, if not worse results.

Session 3 goes rather well, and I start to get the hang of the slippery slopes and smoothness on the bike and start to work on each corner, getting progressively faster as I go.

By Session 4, the track was finally dry and I could have a little bit more fun and give it some gas around the corners without fear of it dropping out from underneath me, started to link up some corners but I am still a fair way away from mastering this track. It is a busy circuit with camber and height changes and many decreasing radius corners and a double apex corner. You don’t have much time to think before the next corner jumps out at you and to combine that with 20 other bikes whizzing around on all sides of you, if keeps the body and mind very busy.

The track layout.

Now that I can get my license back after a painful 3 months, I may as well buy a road bike so that I don’t have to bus everywhere (Major pain in the ass.) So, lacking the funds to have both a race bike and a road bike, I must sell my beloved SV650.

But I think that if I can save up enough coin in the next 5 months before the start of the season, I might be able to get a new race bike and enter into the Pro-Twin series and work my way up to the top. Just looking to iron out my riding habits now and really start to learn about the bike but that shall have to wait.