The upside to having rampant insurance fraud with motor vehicles is the increased use of dashboard cameras, at least that’s our selfish take on the situation currently in Russia. If that’s truly the case, then the crowning achievement of that philosophy is surely the following video.
Going far too fast for the flow of traffic, our protagonist finds himself quickly cut-off by a car that is changing lanes. What happens next is entirely predictable, yet incredibly not. We don’t want to give it away, just watch it after the jump…no pun intended. Thanks for the tip Taco Ben!
The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is a risky proposition, especially for the competitors in the motorcycle classes. A course where instead of run-off, sheer drops and rock-filled inclines abound, the joke is that if you go down at any one of the 156 turns that comprise the race course, it’s likely that you won’t die from the impact…you’ll die from starvation during the drop.
That is certainly hyperbole (except for the turn aptly named “Bottomless Pit”), as the danger is very real. We can give no better example than the footage from yesterday’s motorcycle session, at the top of the mountain.
During the practice days, competitors go full-tilt up the mountain road, are collected, and then as a group descend to the starting point for another run. That day for supermoto rider Tom Specht, in the Pikes Peak Middleweight class, the mountain showed why you can never let your guard down.
Taking a tumblefew miles from the summit, Specht was “lucky” in the sense that he only suffered shoulder injuries from his rapid descent. This could have been way worse.
For Jeff Grace, who “caught” Specht’s Honda CRF450 as it landed in the road in front him — well, at least he only has some scuffs and scrapes, not to mention a great video to show everyone. No crash is ever a good crash, but at Pikes Peak, this might be as “good” as it gets, since everyone involved will ride another day.
The 92nd running of the “Race to the Clouds” goes off Sunday morning. We’ll be bringing you more pictures and report throughout the rest of the week. Stay tuned right here to A&R.
More rain has gotten in the way of the Isle of Man TT’s practice sessions, as Wednesday evening’s events came to a halt after only one lap around the Mountain Course. With rain hitting a few spots of the course, and an incident at the top of Barregarrow, Clerk of the Course Gary Thompson had no choice to but to call the night’s events to an end as the rain increased.
The incident at Barregarrow involved newcomer Laurent Hoffmann, who was airlifted to Nobles Hospital, and is reported to have leg injuries as a result of the crash. By the time that crash had been cleared, Mother Nature turned up the waterworks, and that was the end of things.
According to a preliminary report by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), motorcycle fatalities dropped 7% for 2013. The drop is the second time in five years that fatalities on a motorcycle have decreased (the last drop was in 2009), with 4,610 motorcyclists dying last year, compared to the 4,957 in 2012.
The report by the GHSA is based off the first nine months of 2013, and shows that fatalities dropped in 35 states (along with the District of Columbia), increased in 13 states, and remained the same in 2 states.
I have been jealous of our British readers for sometime now, as the government in the UK has seen it fit not only to have one of the best helmet safety rating systems known to man, but they have made their test results incredibly accessible to the two-wheeled going public. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s worth taking a look at Britain’s SHARP website before buying your next lid.
SHARP takes impact analysis from five regions of the helmet, and then based on analysis from which points on the helmet are statistically more likely to be hit during a crash, assigns a weighted score to the helmet’s safety score.
Basing laboratory analysis with real world probabilities, SHARP is perhaps the most pragmatic rating system available for motorcyclists, but more importantly it is the most transparent and accessible.
Well know it looks like we can be jealous of Australia as well, as our riding brothers and sisters down under have their own public database of helmet crash statistics, appropriately called CRASH, which like its British counterpart, does away with some of the guess work in helmet safety, and makes that data available to consumers.
While trolling through the doldrums of social media, I stumbled across this advertisement from the New Zealand Transport Agency about speeding, and posted it to the A&R Facebook page. The message is typical, but the execution is masterful, and so I thought it prudent to post it here as well.
You would be hard-pressed to find a motorist who doesn’t travel a comfortable margin above the speed limit at times, and while we consider that offense a casual breaking of the law, this video reminds us that the consequences are potentially less casual. So the next time you’re doing a couple clicks over the posted MPH, give this ad a thought.
Proper road racing is a dangerous game, as the spectacle unfolds upon all of the uncertainty that comes with public roads, rather than the controlled environment of a proper closed-course racing circuit.
The competitors you find at events like the Irish road races, the Isle of Man TT, or the Macau Grand Prix are a unique breed to be doing what they do, where they do it; and if you talk to many of them, the prospect of an untimely ending is something that has already been factored into the cost of what that choose to do.
No one goes looking for an early death, of course, but the realities of the situation are ever-present. Just last year, Luis Carreira lost his life while qualifying at the Macau GP, a reminder of how dangerous the armco-laced Guia race track can be for motorcyclists.
Thankfully the 2013 Macau Grand Prix was without major incident, but we did have a close-call on the first lap between Horst Saiger and Marc Fissette. The event’s photographers captured the contact and subsequent crashes with their cameras, giving us a frame-by-frame perspective into what was thankfully just a bad day at the office for these two riders.
The Aragon round of MotoGP left an awful lot to talk about in all three classes: Alex Rins’ masterful victory in Moto3, forcing Maverick Viñales into an error; Nico Terol’s emotional win in Moto2, dominating all weekend after illness; Scott Redding and Pol Espargaro’s epic battle for the Moto2 championship, which Espargaro came out on top of, though only just.
Jorge Lorenzo’s astonishing speed at what should have been a Honda track; Marc Marquez’s astounding victory, moving him closer to the 2013 MotoGP title in his rookie year; Valentino Rossi’s wily race, holding off first Stefan Bradl and then Alvaro Bautista to get on the podium; and much, much more. But I won’t be talking about any of that tonight.
I won’t be talking about it, because what started out as a minor mistake turned into a massive incident, with a spectacular crash as a result, leading to an ongoing investigation by race direction and a lot of talk about dangerous riding. Do the facts justify the debate? In my opinion, no, but the issue needs addressing, and so address it we will.
Over 75,000 paying customers came to watch the races at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on Sunday, and each and every one of them got their money’s worth. Three classes, three winners, battles to the very end, and serious consequences for all three championships, with two thirds of the races done.
The day got off to a great start for the home crowd with a calculated and determined performance from Scott Redding to win the Moto2 race. Redding had come to Silverstone with two goals: to win the race, and to further demoralize his main rival for the title Pol Espargaro. He succeeded totally in both objectives, much to the relief of the British fans.
When Redding turned up at his home track with a special patriotic livery, the Union Jack splashed all over the fairing of his bike, fans feared the worst. Bad memories of previous years when British riders had sported patriotic color schemes were imprinted fresh on their minds, and they feared that Redding had jinxed himself.
Redding disagreed, and demonstrated his point by running in the top 3 in every session but one. He made sure that he always finished ahead of Espargaro, and once he qualified on the front row, posting a stunningly consistent string of fast laps in the process, he had the job half-done.
Marc Marquez has been sanctioned with two penalty points for ignoring a yellow flag in the morning warm up. The Repsol Honda rider was penalized after crashing at Vale, just moments after Cal Crutchlow had gone down at the same spot. Marquez was penalized as the marshalls at the spot were waving yellow flags, along with the oil flags.
Speaking after the race, Marquez said he had not seen any yellow flags at the corner. “I didn’t speak with [Race Direction] but they said there was the yellow flag and the oil flag, and I know that with the yellow flag you need to slow down, especially when you see the oil flag, you slow down a lot, but I didn’t see them. I cannot say many things [about this]. The rules are there, and so if they gave me points, it’s because the flags were there, but I didn’t see them.”