My 19 year old son and I have been riding a year. He has an 05 SV650S. He was on a dry 55 mph curvy road this past sunday. He came upon a 20 mph curve. He said there was gravel on the curve, he felt the rear tire slip, he then locked the rear wheel and went off the road and hit a built up dirt bank. He is okay but the bike has a broken front fairing and scratched it up some. The bike and he are extremely lucky.

Now I rode the road the day after and he showed me the spot where it happened about three days after the accident. There was NO gravel on the road. He said he took the curve at about 35-40 mph. If he was taking an outside curve too fast and locked up the rear wheel to slow down and then released it, would that have propelled him off the road?

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He may have been going so fast that he was unable to stay on the road and caught gravel at the edge of the road. And also using the brakes in a turn is always a critical procedure.

Years back I came into a turn with loose gravel, the way I handle it was by going straight into the ditch and getting on my brakes once I was going on a straight line. My rider and I were both okay.

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I concur...If a curve is posted 20mph, it's pretty likely a tight one, and 35 or 40 mph might be a little fast regardless of experience. If he got too high in the curve and caught a rock with the rear, that can be just enuff to bring the bike back up a little and change the direction the bike is heading. When you're riding on your sidewall it's easy to slide, when something breaks the traction, like gravel or sand.

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If you'll recall from the MSF course, the best course of action when you feel your rear tire losing traction in a curve is to do nothing. The natural panic response is to back off the throttle and go for a handful of brake, but that always just makes matters worse.

If he locked up the rear brake and then released it, he probably would have high-sided the bike, and this sounds like it was a low-side.

I've hit gravel, wet leaves, and even wet manhole covers going...well..let's say a "spirited" pace in corners, and I've learned that the best thing after the initial "OH SH!TE" in your head is to just keep it steady. If anything I'll ease up on the inside bar a *tiny* bit if I have room to straighten up, but the throttle, brakes remain untouched. The hard part is training your brain to not touch anything, as your instincts want to hit that brake.

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As a general rule, if you lock up the rear wheel on a tight turn (for whatever reason), you're going down. A slide on gravel might or might not be recoverable, but if you lock the rear wheel, you're done for the day. Hard braking is about the last thing you want to do if the rear wheel starts sliding.

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Bikin' John
'93 Honda CB750 Nighthawk

I had a similar experience on my way to Hyder Alaska last spring on the Suzuki. Going around a tight hairpin curve at 70kph (posted speed of 60kph), I hit a series of frost heaves that were spaced just enough to cause the rear suspension to get really light (shocks decompressing just as the bike went down into the next dip). I felt the back end start to slide out on me, so I made sure that there was no oncoming traffic and just let the bike drift a little wide and go over the centreline. Kept the throttle and my lean angle steady and stayed off the brakes.

Took it a little easier on the curves after that, especially the downhill ones.

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This is my second year riding. So far so good, and God be willing it stays that way. I was told that if you manage to lock the rear wheel and get into a skid, the best course of action is to just keep it locked or let off the rear a little bit depending on speed. The Safety course basically said that when your decision has been made the stick with it or you'll end up in a High Side. Is there any truth to this? Is it actually better to keep it locked and ride out a possible slide then get tossed? I like to think that I'm a deffensive rider. I'm still scared of riding to a certain degree, I like to think I'm scared enough not be stupid. My starter bike is a 1984 Nighthawk CB750 S. And I find it to be more than enough bike me.

i locked my rear wheel the other day during the morning commute. doing 60-70kmph. managed to ride it out and just kept my inputs the same. not sure if it was because i was trained well or if i just panicked so much that i didn't do anything, but it worked.

in your son's case, it could have been gravel, the slick line or more likely just the high rate of entry speed.

i know if i went down i would probably blame gravel or solar flares before i blamed my riding ability, but deep inside i would know it was my riding. but gravel is a funny thing, rain can wash a bunch of it onto the road one day, and if there is heavy traffic, it could be gone the next.

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First, sorry to hear about the crash, hope he heals quickly and returns to full functioning ASAP.

Gravel can fall onto the road from a truck carrying, guess what...gravel! So even though a road appears perfect the day/hour before and no weather actions like a down pour washing gravel into the road have happened, you can find that perfectly clear road from yesterday/an hour ago all messed up by a man-made occurence. The action of further traffic tends to "sweep" the lane clear of such objects over a span of time afterward, depending on the volume/type of traffic. If this was a very busy road, you might not have found the gravel there just 30 minutes later.

The mistake causing your son's crash was not recognizing the hazard soon enough, and some training programs suggest a simple guideline for avoiding crashes that applies here: if you cannot see far enough ahead to be able to make a COMPLETE STOP in that distance, you are going too fast. It's a pretty harsh guideline, but without years of experience to apply to handling adverse moments, it's a good rule for relatively NEW riders who want to accumulate enough experience to transcend this guideline. I'm not sure I have enough experience after 35 years of motorcycling myself to do that, BTW...

If something becomes visible to you that threatens your traction, REDUCE SPEED and with that, LEAN ANGLE. This is what MSF puts forward regarding traction related hazards.

Regarding locking the rear wheel, this forces a rider into a straight line path, or risking the high side if they let up on the rear brake in MOST SITUATIONS (but not ALL). In this situation, skidding seems to be a clear factor in the crash, and not skidding MAY have prevented it.

So all this begs the questions, has your son taken the MSF class, and if he did, did he forget/overlook what he learned? And if he didn't, does he feel there might be some value in taking it?

I've come up on a bunch of gravel in a turn before, the only thing you can really do is try to straighten out before you hit it, then hope there's enough room to turn afterwards.

The key is to riding in a manner that'll at least let you identify a hazard before you roll over it.

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Of course I'm generalizing from a single example here, but everyone does that. At least I do.