Rapid Skills day

There’s not much point in having a sports bike if you don’t know how to use it properly. Having only ever owned all-rounders before I thought it was about time to learn some fast riding skills now that I have the Honda CBR600F (supplied by DK Motorcycles), so I booked myself on to a Rapid Skills track based course.

The half-day Rapid Skills I course in Wales saw the 20 riders split in to four groups of people around the same skill level. The group then spent the day with their own instructor who tailored the course specifically to what everyone in the group needed to learn, looking at our current level of skill and adding bits of advice to help improve our riding.

After every 20-minute session we all came in with big smiles on our faces raving about how much progress we had made in such a short period of time. And by the end of the morning everyone went home a far better rider and many of us were already talking about booking up again for another session.

Along with a few other people I had already booked my next session and was back out on the track in the afternoon for the Knee Down school.

I had never got my knee down before and despite countless people telling me that you don’t need to do it on the road, I’d had enough of being the only one with no scratches on his sliders.

A lot of the course was similar to the Skills course but with more emphasis on posture and positioning on the bike. Most of us were already riding fast enough but we just weren’t reaching out far enough with our knees.

With the help of the instructors pretty much everyone had got it sussed by the end of the day and the feeling of elation when your slider touches down for the first time was well worth the exhaustion of spending all day going round and round in circles.

I’ll be booking myself on the Rapid Skills II course as soon as I can.