The Ride

THE SPIRIT OF BIKING

By Alex Oliver

THE RIDE - A PERFORMING ART

The ride is the moment when and where pure biking exists. The feelings the ride gives are often akin to those experiences that people enjoy without smiling; yet loud laughter, accompanied by a disbelieving shake of the head, occurs regularly. The grin, inspired by a ceaseless fascination and enjoyment of a bike’s abilities, is the commonest, dominating factor.

A first time rider is a kind of virgin, although a regular rider feels no less trepidation every time they approach their machine with the intention of riding. Obviously not so much on the hack to work, but upon embarking on that specific experience that the manufacturer intended, and what you acquired the bike for in the first place.

Mounting the bike, its weight is hefted between the legs, the way an accomplished person handles a familiar object. The fuel and oil vapours infuse the olfactory senses, seeming to mingle the bike’s blood with your own. The keys chinkle like distant tiny bells as they turn, and tiny lights read off vital signs. The kick-start is an exertive enough effort to alert you to what is about to happen - the electric start a seemingly minimal, incongruous motion. There is a creak of leather (or a rustle of modern fabric) as the rider prepares, then the bike roars like some rudely awakened beast. It is time, perhaps after a droning moment of warming up, to select first gear, hopefully without too much of a crunch.

Then you feel the bite of the clutch under your fingers. Subconsciously, your mind similarly engages in anticipation of the ride. Any sounds the brake parts or drive mechanisms might make are now barely audible under the engine’s rising voice, as you enter a dance with gravity. That wonderful sensation, that you are not going to fall over, of being ripped from the present into a virtual future tense, fills your mind, elbowing out any kind of garbage that has previously occupied your thoughts. Nothing else matters. Traffic fumes, country odours - even the essence of the weather, confirm what the eyes and ears now encounter.

Once under way, the engine warms as you warm to the ride. The heated vapours occasionally rise, to remind you of the mechanistic life you have activated. Something threatens to cross your path and you feather the front brake lever in anticipation. The moment passes and you reach some place where the bike can be allowed to behave like a bike - not some piece of traffic. As a bug whizzes and pops onto the visor, an uncontrollable snort or guffaw bursts under the helmet. You shuffle in the seat. It has begun.

Muscles are shaken out of their stiffened rest as the forks chatter round some uneven bend. A sky check alerts the mind to the weather conditions. Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that it’s a dry, bright day. Not one of those where your socks can become horrid damp monsters of the deep boot, nor the kind that hurls frost or snow at you until you become like some wizened tree, bent by the wind and decorated with frosting. You begin to move more quickly.

The tarmac comes up, then drops away, as your manoeuvres greet the road’s varied directions, guiding the projectile through corners. It is that sensation that can put some people off, but the rider wills it to be ever more animated, because this culminates in a smoothness. Then your mind does to you what it does to a child, engrossed and undisturbed in happiness. You begin to sing. YOU have not selected the music. It is the jukebox of the cosmos that tunes your unconscious to some forgotten radio station...and a silly song ensues.

Any number of incidents and events become part of your life now. You are launched into a reality not necessarily your own. Where you can rule, you take the road as you find it, not how someone or something else predicts or infers. While the road has its limits in length and breadth, your freedom becomes absolute.

The ride begins simply with technique; the functions enacted by the rider necessary for riding the machine. As the rider becomes aware of its nuances, they adjust their behaviour instinctively. This is the interpretation of the machine’s intimate language by the rider. It talks of the road through the suspension and steering, and of its requirements through the exhaust note and other engine noises. The rider replies by adjusting their use of the controls to suit whatever the bike is asking. Understanding bike talk allows the rider to interpret its essential needs and improves the ride.

What is known as the knack is integrated into that behaviour, which begins the development of style. A rider’s style is what differentiates them from others, whether they use similar or different machines. Perfecting style brings the best out of the machine. It creates a performance. The performing art of motorcycling.

This is described, in the physical movement of the machine through space, as a dance. Watching groups of riders, swaying patterns can be made out, through corners and over rises. The hands and feet become significant, like in Indian or Hawaiian dances. They affect the pace of the dance, as the throttle hand describes an arc, and the fingers open and close over the clutch and brake levers. These movements are interspersed by patterns made by the feet in gear-changing and braking. Imperceptible pressure on the footrests and handlebars make the bike dive from side to side, while hanging off the seat is a more notable announcement of what will happen next - that is, a fast bend. Even more delicious is the counter steer - when the bars turn one way, but gravity and momentum throw it in the opposite direction. The spinning wheels (often with that hypnotic reverse effect), the compressing suspension, the mad weaves and slides - are all relative to what each other are doing.

Sometimes the bike gets out of hand. A speed-wobble, tank-slapper, call it what you will, shakes the bike’s head. The handlebars oscillate violently from left to right, and the vibrations can unseat the rider, throw them down the road, even take their life. The instinctive impulse is to slow the bike until it becomes more manageable. More experienced riders will nail the throttle wide open, as a bike under power is the most balanced of all. They know that a limp throttle hand, especially in a corner, will create a bike that flops like a rag doll. The input of power is the most positive and exciting route to Kioka - a Japanese word meaning: “At one with the beast.”

An accidental slide takes you where you don’t want to go. Again, the instinct is to fight it, but again, the rider of a thousand rides has learned to steer into it, allowing whichever wheel that stepped out of line to find adhesion again. Time gets distorted. It only takes a millisecond for the bike to get unsettled, but knowledge and courage know that another millisecond of patience, rather than inappropriate action, is all it takes to correct things. Deliberate use of aberrant behaviour enters the educated palette. Dipping the clutch, wrenching on the power and a tug at the handlebars can lift the front wheel. It paws the air like a prancing horse - except that a horse can’t do this while it is hurtling forwards. At a standstill, high revs, a slight lean and a dropped clutch let the rear wheel spin up, and with the front brake held on, the bike turns in an abrupt circle. The rider hops on one foot as a power-circle, or doughnut is made. An upright bike under the same conditions will spin the rear wheel in a burnout. The right amount of excessive throttle in a bend also lets the rear spin, almost imperceptibly, creating a power-slide as the wheels get out of alignment. Aspects of the ride may seem very aggressive, but there is a finesse, which even competition riders acquire, that can smooth out the wildness into a calculated, seemingly easy ride.

In this unconscious flurry, it would be pedantic to mark how someone rode to work. Yet we often pride ourselves on a smoother or quicker execution of the most mundane journey; or laugh if we rode like a complete pillock. Some rides are forgettable; others stay with us, whether performed by a hero, a friend or ourselves. Some incident will spring to mind just as someone might recall a tune. They might grip imaginary handlebars and make bike-noises, living the moment again. In the dance of the motorcycle, we are seeking such moments, and they come so readily. The incongruous also comes to the fore. Somewhere on a ride, a tiny drop of fluid might appear at the end of your nose. With a slight opening of the visor, it can be dabbed away with a gloved fingertip. Why does that memory take precedence over the time you thought you were going to freeze to death?

Motorcycling has been compared to aviation. Unlike the car and more like a plane, a bike can defy gravity. It banks into corners, rather than being thrown sideways by g-forces. It can swoop, dive and soar, even become airborne, though the flight cannot be sustained. Stunt riders deliberately get the wheels crossed-up in flight and an accomplished rider knows to land rear wheel first. As earth-bound sensations go, the manoeuvrability and speed of biking separates it from mountaineering and the like, because the majority of people are able to do it - at any time.

There is a theory by someone called Gestalt. He says that when we’re listening to music, although the notes are played separately, we don’t necessarily hear them separately. We tend to simply register the tune. Other drivers, signs and road surface conditions, are like notes, the road is the tune.

Drivers use their physical and mental attributes to assess and organise stimuli - notes - into levels of importance. They look beyond the machine they are piloting and beyond the hundred yards they are in. This has become known among Bikers as the thousand yard stare. The mind is working in four dimensions: three in the physical world, one in the mental. The Biker’s mind knows that every situation is a different tune to be learned. Some notes are memorable like the direction the road goes or its surface; others are constantly renewed improvisations that demand attention. Like jamming musicians, Bikers enjoy riding because of the variables and the freedom to regulate the ride at their own pace.

There is a further musical aspect to riding. Bikes speak, even sing in many languages; a two-stroke stammers, and cries like a bird of prey, a four-stroke makes thunder. Single cylinder engines of two or four stroke design, larger or smaller capacity, all sing differently, the same variations applying to twin, triple and four-cylinder configurations. Alterations from standard usually give the exhaust note greater presence, and freer-breathing carburettors roar or snarl rather than hiss. High-revving multi-geared bikes allow the rider to play tunes, as the engine-note rises and falls through gear-changes, under acceleration and deceleration. Whatever bike it is, it will growl from lower revs, and howl at a certain engine speed, where power out-put is at its optimum best. After other parts of the ride, like introduction or verses, this ‘power band’ creates a sound that inspires like the chorus of a national anthem would a patriot. It is the battle-cry of a warrior who is certain of victory.

Solo riders can immerse themselves in the sound and feel of their ride. The induction and combustion noises and engine vibration fill the ear most of the time, with the occasional wall or other reflective surface throwing the exhaust note back at them. Wind-rush plays differently over various helmet designs or the bare head. A tilt or turn of the neck alters these tones, and faired bikes give opportunities for wind variation, as engine noises are amplified below the screen, and are swept away as you sit up.

Bring more bikes into the dance and it becomes orchestral, yet syncopated in the way an Indian raga unfolds. Besides making different sounds, bikes occupy different space. As one is on a rising throttle coming out of a bend, one following might be decelerating into it, its engine note falling. Simultaneous passage round longer bends and on straights will allow some constants, the notes at a steady pitch. These auditory effects add to the visual concertina effect, where braking bikes bunch up into a bend, and accelerating bikes seem to leave the others behind. The use of the gearbox brings a staggered pattern of rising and falling engine sounds. The more bikes there are, the more voices follow in a round; the type of tune where the performers begin later and later. The variations in their speed produce the musical movements of sound - like largo and accelerando.

There is an added exhilaration when another’s sound enters your field of hearing. From the start of the ride, when engines burst into life one after another, there is a pronounced feeling that something is happening. It is important, exciting and encouraging, as even the machines acknowledge each other - by making similar sounds as they get under way. A gentle ride produces an idle if not relaxed feeling of power, being under control. The more vigorous the ride, the more the engines actually seem to say that they’re enjoying themselves. Aggressive ripping, growling and snorting, rises into rebellious yells and screams of pleasure. It is bestial, a predatory song about power. Handling that power is the greatest turn-on for the lover of biking art.

Push the limits of tyre adhesion, and they will join with yelps and squeals. Take the engine too far, and you can sense a tortured wail. But keep it ‘on the cam’ as some describe it, and you will never, ever want to hear an end to its singing.

Visually for the rider, there is the blur of scenery, the prey of other vehicles ahead. While the nearest riders in a company fill the rider’s frame of sight, the onlooker can watch a snaking procession. The individual hears the petrol tank act as a soundboard for their own motor. Other riders’ sounds come and go with the proximity of their company. For the eavesdropper, whether they be spectators at some competition or at the roadside, the group can be heard as a whole. A knowing ear can trace the mode of riding, the actual manoeuvre and pace, without visual contact. The approach from distance, the rise in volume, then the Doppler effect, all climb onto the change in sound with the passing of each machine. Zamm, zzamm, zamm; they rip past and re-emphasise statements of presence and power, speed and determination.

The only discernible rhythm occurs whilst engines are ticking over - the thud of a single, the chunter of multi-cylinders. This is when the explosion of each cylinder’s firing becomes distinct, isolated. It is this rhythm that becomes crunched up in time to become the constant note of the engine at work. At the ride’s end, the buzz falls into various chuffs and irregular, asthmatic wheezing as the music stops - the silence only punctuated with the ticking sounds of cooling metal. Knowing the exhilaration of riding sounds, it becomes understandable why anyone would buy the sound-track of a TT race, or watch televised competition with the sound going through their stereo system (even if they wouldn’t admit to it).

Biking has also been compared to writing, in that the road is the blank sheet on which the rider composes a narrative line. Tyre tracks left in impressionable surfaces describe snaking paths, yet no two texts, even by the same rider on the same machine on the same route are identical. There are rules, like corners and hills, which dictate the grammar of a ride, punctuating it, but there is no right or wrong way to write the piece. Unlike the masses of artworks and musical instruments consigned to the attic of obscurity, even the most amateur machine can be regularly aired. The road is like the visitor’s book of life, where anyone can sign in. Track days, designed to let ordinary riders taste uninhibited speed, allow riders to express themselves on the same pad as the writing greats, to doodle on the same canvas as the masters.

In the dark, the lights create lantern-dances that hypnotise. Photographers regularly capture the blurred trail of red tail-lights along the road. For the rider, their world decreases into a globe of light. The warning lights swish in your peripheral vision. Other lights guide like beacons. In the city, street and neon lights flow over chrome and polished panels, like stars in a placid lake. Day or night, reflections in plate glass windows can distract. They reflect the rider the way a movie camera somehow elevates us to star status; flattering, unreal, absorbing the attention.

On the ride, only the bike’s thirst might rein you in, by which time, you are probably more ready for a break than you realised. Whether it’s journey’s end, or a stage on a longer voyage, you rumble up with a feeling of satisfaction that is only tinged by the decreased momentum. Can this be it, ride over? A look back at your silent companion reassures you that it won’t be the last.

All art-forms can enrapture; deliberate ones, occasioned by people, or the accidental, found in nature. They arouse various emotions. The final master stroke of biking art is the palette of emotions driven by (natural) excitement and the gamut of physical sensations encountered in (deliberate) participation. Once a ride is finished, the rider has gone through such an uplifting and invigorating experience, that even the grin can fade. A tear might fill the eye, but it is not one of sorrow. It has been put there by the thorny wind. With the activity over, the enjoyment doesn’t fade, it continues in a different temperament. Any company that has shared the ride behaves similarly. So much is felt, but so little is said. It is not a time to analyse, but a time for a different ride, thoughtful, reflective, turning inward on an emotional buzz. Strenuous or not, riding a motorcycle, defying gravity, powering through the elements, changes the persona. The first ever ride does this and subsequent ones do it repeatedly. When someone becomes famous, climbs a mountain or goes through any similar conquest, they become imbued with something that others can’t always describe - yet they know that person has changed. The ride is one of those things.