The USS Quad Damage

Intro

Well not everything but alot of stuff was stacked against me for my pre-provisional licence course and test. Not the least of which was the fact that I’d only had time to ride my bike about 1/3-2/5’s of the days I’ve had my L’s for the 2nd time. Which wasn’t alot as I’ve only had my L’s for 2 weeks as the RTA couldn’t work out how give me the month I would have liked. Yes normally it’s 3 months minimum however I’ve held my L’s before so I don’t have to wait 3 months.

The sleep

First up, I had very little sleep. For some reason I lay in my bed until atleast 12pm before I nodded off to sleep only to wake up for some reason at 4:40am. Yeah my sleeping patterns suck.

I got out of bed at 6am, had a shower, breakfast, got everything ready, put on my gear and moved my bike out of the garage. I then proceeded to stall my bike prior to attempting to move it.

I somehow got bogged/wedged for a minute or two in the grass between our driveway and our neighbors driveway. Ok it was more like a really bad angle which wedged the bike between the elevated side of our driveway and the large rocks are used as a border to seperate my neighbors garden and lawn near our drive way.

So far so good, I headed off to the UWS Macarthur Daycare centre.

Now the course starts at 8am. I was there at around 7:10am. Way too early so I just stood around for ages wishing I’d have slept in for 30 more minutes.

The course starts

Now anticipating rain I’d taken all my wet weather gear which ofcourse had to be worn. This obviously was a mistake because not only did it not rain on the way there but as we entered the daycare centre at around 10 minutes to 8 the sun came out. Which ofcourse spelled the beginning of a hot and humid day.

Alright next we did some road theory in one of the class rooms and headed out to the training area / weekday parking lot for UWS. Yes I was starting to feel the heat even then. The instructor checked out our bikes and mine was fine. Or were you expecting something to be wrong with it? :P

By some twist of fate I happened to be other only person doing the course on their own bike rather than one of the hire bikes.

Training Starts

The first exercise was a slow straight ride for about 30 meters with your throttle constant and your clutch held at friction point. Speed was controlled by the application of your rear brake. I wasn’t crash hot at it but I managed to do it.

Leading on from that as the second section of the exercise which was an acceleration up to 20-25, a shift into 2nd gear and a controlled brake. Easy as.

We went inside, had another talk about, well about something but I can’t for the life of me remember right now. Anyway it would have been about how to avoid accidents on your bike as they are all talks about how to avoid accidents on your bike.

Next we went out and started practicing more specifically for the MOST (Motorcycle Operator Skill Test).

For those whom aren’t aware there are 3 sections to an “oval” or rectangular area with the track followin a counter clock wise direction. Each section deals with some aspect of slow speed manouvering.

The first is weaving in and out of cones and I was terrible at it. Now ideally your supposed to keep your throttle constant, your clutch at friction point and control your speed, which should be really slow, via your rear brake. Just like the straight line in exercise one except with cones to avoid.

I couldn’t figure out why I was sucking so horribly. My revs kept jumping up on right hand turns, falling and almost stalling on left hand turns, I kept putting my foot down, stalling, messing up the turns, almost dropped my bike atleast twice, once with the clutch comming in and reving really high. In general I sucked da big one.

Next was a right hand U-turn into four cones marking the boundaries of a tight left hand turn.

Again I messed it up time and time again. To be fair the “U-turn” was more like a 270+ degree turn which lead into a 135 degree left hand turn. Atleast thats how it played out on my bike. I had alot less trouble with it when instead of trying to stay inside the cones the instructor had placed for the U-Turn I ignored them and lined up my “U-Turn” to end facing the sharp left hand turn. However I still generally stuffed the turns up, stalled, put my foot down, etc,... I felt tense and really cramped on the course and it was showing.

Next we had the duel purpose emergency stop and obstacle avoidance section. My braking was sub par and I’d always prelead into the left or right of the obstacle and possibly turn early.

All in all things were not looking good. Infact I was semi scared I’d fail and had no real idea what was going wrong because I thought I’d been able to do everything satisfactorily when I’d come down here earlier in the week and Harpreet ran me through the course.

I’m not entirely sure but I think everyone else expected me to fail the MOST as well, though I didn’t find out that until after the test.