What is the path to improved motorcycle safety?
More specifically, what is the path to fewer motorcycle crashes?
I recently received two very different answers to that question from two highly respected and qualified experts. My interest in the question comes from years spent teaching riders: today at Yamaha Champions Riding School, before that at Freddie Spencer’s school, before that running Friday racing clinics before every Willow Springs race. And before all of that? From a simple desire that I suspect most of us share: I want to never crash a motorcycle again.
Fred Says…2%
A few years ago, I read an article by a well-known motorcycle journalist—let’s call him Fred. Fred had written two respected riding-technique books and spent years writing for Motorcycle Consumer News. One of his photo captions contained a glaring technical error, and several of the concepts in the article weren’t quite right. Rather than criticize him publicly, I invited him to attend YCRS as my guest. My thinking was simple: if you’re going to teach motorcycle technique, the more perspectives and experience you have, the better you’ll serve your readers.
Fred politely declined.
He explained that his interests had shifted. Rather than focusing on riding techniques themselves, he had become interested in the science behind motorcycle fatalities and how rider training affected crash statistics.
He pointed to research suggesting that once motorcycle ridership exceeds roughly two percent of the population, fatality rates increase to what society considers an unacceptable level. He acknowledged that it wasn’t a popular position within the industry, particularly for people who make their living around motorcycles, but he believed this “taboo” subject deserved discussion.
His conclusion was straightforward: If the goal is fewer motorcycle fatalities, then the answer is fewer motorcyclists.
From a statistical standpoint, it’s difficult to argue with him. None of us will ever be injured riding a motorcycle if we never ride one. Stay on the couch. Sit safely on the porch. Fewer riders will inevitably mean fewer motorcycle crashes.
But could you actually live that way?
Helen Keller: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing”.
Motorcycle riding has never been mandatory. Every one of us has made a conscious decision to accept its risks in exchange for its rewards. Some riders trust their luck. Others trust fate. I’ve always preferred another approach: instruction, practice, and a deeper understanding of the motorcycle itself.
I wrote back to Fred, telling him that this “taboo” subject of discouraging motorcycle riding goes against everything we do at Yamaha Champions Riding School. Our question has never been, “How do we reduce the number of riders?” Instead, we’ve asked, “How do we help riders enjoy motorcycles for an entire lifetime, at whatever pace they choose?” That single question drives our curriculum.
Not a Population Equation
After nearly three decades of coaching riders and watching thousands of students improve, we’ve found that the biggest problem isn’t that too many people ride motorcycles. It’s that too many riders receive training that leaves them poorly prepared for the situations where they need real skills the most.
A weekend in a parking lot following a flawed curriculum may earn someone a license, but it rarely prepares them for a tightening mountain road, an emergency braking situation, or an unexpected obstacle halfway through a corner. When that training fails—and too often it does—it discourages riders, causes crashes, and sometimes pushes people away from motorcycling altogether.
In that sense, Fred is absolutely right about one thing: More riders learning incomplete or questionable techniques will almost certainly produce more crashes.
That naturally leads to another question: What does good motorcycle training actually look like?
At YCRS, we believe it begins by riding the motorcycle the way its designers intended it to be ridden. That means adopting the same thought processes, vocabulary, and control techniques used by the best riders in the world. It means understanding weight transfer, tire loading, grip, direction, body position, and the relationship between speed and cornering radius. Those aren’t racing concepts; they’re motorcycle concepts.
Exactly Wrong
Unfortunately, too much traditional instruction teaches riders to do exactly the opposite of what expert riders do when proper rider input is critical.
Average riders release the brakes when the experts stay with them. They accelerate when slowing is the solution. They rely on theories developed to minimize accidents for non-riders in a parking lot at 18 mph rather than understanding the dynamics that actually govern motorcycle behavior. Much of this advice is well intentioned, but it creates confusion by describing motorcycles in ways that don’t match how expert riders—or the engineers who designed the motorcycles—ride them.
One example stood out immediately in Fred’s article. He described Reuben Zaus as steering the motorcycle with the throttle while giving a thumbs-up in a photograph. Zaus was doing exactly the opposite. He was backing the motorcycle into the corner under braking, not driving it out with throttle. Those two techniques couldn’t be more different and confusing them teaches readers precisely the wrong lesson. It speaks to the riding-technique misunderstandings in the motorcycle industry, even by published-author-experts.
That’s one of the reasons I invited Fred to our school. Anyone writing about motorcycle technique owes it to readers to experience as many evidence-based approaches as possible before explaining them to others. And if we’re going to have an honest conversation about decreasing motorcycle fatalities, we should begin by taking a hard look at the quality of the training riders receive—not simply the number of people who ride. Mandell Creighton wrote, “The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.”
Teach it, Don’t Preach it
After spending most of my life around motorcycles, I’m continually amazed by the amount of well-meaning but ultimately ineffective advice riders receive. “Ride the speed limit.” “Be careful.” “Ride your own ride.” “Keep the rubber side down.”
None of those ideas are wrong, they’re just a waste of breath if increasing rider safety is the goal.
Most riders—from club racers to military personnel to everyday enthusiasts—didn’t get into motorcycles because they wanted someone telling them to be careful. Many of them thrive on challenge. Telling them to “be careful” without giving them better tools doesn’t change what happens when they rush into a decreasing-radius corner on a rainy afternoon. At that moment, all the safety slogans in the world become meaningless.
What the rider needs then isn’t another reminder to be careful, they need exact technique.
“Prudence keeps life safe but does not often make it happy.” — Samuel Johnson
That brings me to the second expert.
I can’t tell you his name, but he flew fighter jets for the military and later trained military pilots in advanced fighter tactics. He’s attended YCRS several times, has podium finishes on an SV650 at the club level, raced a Ducati 748 in AHRMA, competed in the Reno Air Races. In his early seventies he started an aerobatics school! He’s seen, done, and survived more genuinely dangerous things than just about anyone.
Less Preaching, More “Best Practices”
One day I asked him how the military improved aviation safety?
He wrote: “In aviation, we finally got a handle on our accident rate when we stopped approaching mishaps from the standpoint of telling pilots to ‘be safe’—whatever the hell that means—and started approaching them from the standpoint of operational excellence.
If you’re flying your airplane in an operationally sound and tactically proficient manner, you’re already operating safely within the risk parameters of that mission. The first step in riding a motorcycle safely comes from knowing how to control the motorcycle. Without that foundation, trying to reduce accidents is largely left to serendipity. I call this approach ‘brilliance in the basics.'”
“Operational Excellence”
“Operational excellence” captures what we’ve been trying to accomplish at Yamaha Champions Riding School without ever quite putting it that way.
The military couldn’t significantly reduce accident rates by asking pilots to be more careful. It reduced accidents by demanding extraordinary proficiency in the fundamentals of flying. Pilots became exceptional at operating the aircraft. They mastered the basics until they became instinctive. Safety wasn’t the objective—it became the byproduct of operational excellence.
I immediately forwarded his e-mail to every instructor at YCRS with a simple message:
Let’s make exceptional riders, and we’ll make safer riders in the process.
Anyone who has attended YCRS or followed our writing has perhaps noticed that we spend remarkably little time preaching caution for its own sake. Instead, we obsess over technique. We talk about maintaining traction, progressively loading the suspension, understanding weight transfer, recognizing that speed determines radius at a given lean angle, all covered by the overall goal of getting direction. Those are the conversations that actually help riders when situations demand perfect rider reactions.
That doesn’t mean we ignore common sense.
We’ll absolutely tell students to slow down in town—but we’ll explain exactly how many feet a motorcycle covers every second at different speeds. We’ll remind riders that more speed requires more braking because the corner isn’t changing for us—we have to change for the corner. We’ll encourage students not to ride with reckless partners, then explain how poor group dynamics contribute to crashes. We’ll remind everyone to be smooth on cold tires because nearly every instructor has learned that lesson the hard way.
The advice is always connected to technique, and the technique is what makes the advice useful.
Consistently Fast Riders Say…
One summer, Josh Hayes, Cameron Beaubier, JD Beach, and Garrett Gerloff spoke to students during a YCRS school. Four of the fastest motorcycle racers in America stood in front of our students, and not one of them spent time saying, “Be careful.”
Instead, they talked about improving vision, refining technique, building consistency, staying physically fit, learning from mistakes, and becoming better riders.
Elite performers in every discipline understand that excellence comes from mastering the fundamentals, not from constantly reminding yourself to avoid failure.
General George Patton once wrote, “Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.”
You’ll never find a YCRS instructor standing in front of a class wringing his hands and repeating, “Don’t speed,” “Speed kills,” or “Take it easy.” Those slogans may be well intentioned, but they don’t solve the problem riders face when traction suddenly disappears or a corner tightens unexpectedly or a car turns left or a deer jumps the guardrail or the table falls out of the truck or …
What helps is becoming exceptionally good at operating the motorcycle.
That means:
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Increasing your focus before you leave the driveway
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Recognizing cold tires before asking for maximum grip
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Having mental reminders that bring your attention back whenever it starts to wander
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Smoothly moving weight through the motorcycle instead of shocking the suspension
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Loading the tires before asking them to generate significant force
- Continuously adjusting speed to match corner radius
Teach it, Don’t Preach it
Simple Goal
Our simple objective: teach riders of every age, experience level, and riding discipline to operate the motorcycle just like the expert test riders who developed it. This is not a speed thing, this is a techniques thing.
Most of us have decided that Fred’s solution will not work. We are not interested in sitting safely on the porch, we choose to participate. We can’t imagine life without motorcycles, yet we want to reduce risk while enjoying what drew us to motorcycling in the first place.
To be fair, Fred wasn’t wrong. If more people ride poorly, there will absolutely be more crashes. The solution, however, isn’t fewer riders. It’s better riders.
The military eventually discovered that safety improved only after its pilots became exceptionally skilled operators. Motorcycle riding is no different. Safety follows operational excellence, and operational excellence begins with mastery of the fundamentals.
At YCRS we describe how surprisingly small the differences are between good riding and exceptional riding. A slightly smoother initial brake application…because the steel bridge is wet. A little more respect for tire loading…because the tire is new. Ten percent more trail braking…because your Bagger is already dragging. Better visual discipline…because a lot is happening in the big city. Earlier recognition of excessive entry speed…because you’ve never been in this canyon before. Faster identification of a developing problem…because more time gives us more options. Quicker understanding of how to adjust the line before the motorcycle reaches the point of no return…because the leading cause of rider fatalities is running wide in corners.
None of those improvements are dramatic by themselves, but together? They’re transformative. They’re the small details that begin to make perfect sense once you learn to view the motorcycle from the perspective of an expert rider—through smoothness, calmness, awareness, precision, and an understanding of how grip is created and maintained.
Hey, Is This a Riding Techniques Book??
No, it’s an argument against the idea that the only path to motorcycle safety is to stop riding motorcycles. That conclusion is understandable if the only training riders receive is incomplete or, in some cases, fundamentally backwards. Most rider education isn’t entirely wrong—but here’s the provable truth: even small misunderstandings become enormous when speeds increase or traction decreases.
Fortunately, that’s beginning to change.
The movement toward Champions Habits continues to grow. Track-day organizations, racing schools, WMST new-rider school in Washington, Too Cool Motorcycle School new-rider school in Calgary, Alberta, ChampStreet in Colorado, and instructors around the country are embracing evidence-based techniques that mirror the methods used by professional riders and the engineers who developed today’s motorcycles. The new-rider-instruction ship is slow to turn (except WMST and Too Cool Motorycle School), but we are the only MSF Tier Three school in the world because we want to help.
#1 Championship road racers don’t win titles by thinking about “not crashing”. They win by executing the fundamentals more consistently than everyone else. Veteran street riders accumulate hundreds of thousands of miles because they continually practice emergency braking, refining their vision, and improving their technique long after earning their license. Several YCRS instructors have completed entire racing seasons without crashing while competing for championships. One member of our staff has ridden nearly two decades on both street and track without a single crash.
None of those riders achieved that record because they spent every ride thinking, don’t crash; they focused on riding the motorcycle like a champion: consistently well.
If sitting on the porch isn’t the answer for you—and it certainly isn’t a recipe for industry growth and success—then commit yourself to becoming a better rider every time you throw a leg over a motorcycle. Encourage the riders around you to do the same. If you can’t make a school in person, get ChampU. Game changing.
Because after all these years of teaching, racing, and studying motorcycle control, I’ve become convinced of one simple truth: Safety follows skill. Our new-rider-school experiment with Washington Motorcycle Safety Training (gowmst.com), and Too Cool Motorcycle School (toocoolmotorcycleschool.com) is proving this with every class they do. Teach the right stuff, create safe and confident riders.
Industry members: please get with WMST and Too Cool Motorcycler School for discussion of how we return to a growth industry through proper rider training.
Become brilliant in the basics of motorcycle control, and safety becomes far more than hope; it becomes the natural result of excellence.
– Nick Ienatsch
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” — Warren Buffett