I HATE it when people talk about getting their knee down. Mainly because I never have.
Or I never had, until Tuesday, when I did BMW’s Track and Training Experience at Donington Park. It’s only taken me 25 years of motorcycling.
The day consisted of four track sessions on BMW S1000RRs plus exercises on Suzuki DR-Z125s and a BMW F800R fitted with enormous poles making it impossible to low-side.
I’d like to tell you I got my knee down at 100mph on one of the 194hp RRs. In fact it was at about 15mph on one of the DR-Zs. I think that still counts.
It definitely still counts.
The DR-Zs are for teaching students about using their body position, in an environment where any crashes are likely to be relatively harmless. A twisty circuit is marked out on Donington’s wide-open ‘Tarmac Lake’. The instructor, Niall Mackenzie, tells riders how shifting their weight before a corner will help the bike turn.
I’ve always been a bolt-upright sort of rider. The low speeds, open space and small bikes, obviously on road tyres, removed any apprehension about hanging off.
Part of the reason I’d never got my knee down was because I’d never really tried much. I knew it couldn’t be that difficult. If I could just wind on the throttle a little bit more, get it a little bit further over, stick my knee out further still…
Christ, where’s the Tarmac? There! It’s there.
A few more laps and I finally had knee sliders that looked the way they should, scuffed and angular, not flat, pristine monuments to my fearfulness.
Then I nearly lost the front, the tyre juddering sideways but luckily not washing out altogether, and decided to back off a bit.
‘That looked good,’ Mackenzie told me afterward. I’ll take that, I thought. ‘Looked good’ from a former GP racer and BSB champion, stored in the memory banks forever. ‘That looked good,’ he said to the next rider. Damn it.
Twenty minutes on the DR-Zs between track sessions made shifting about come much more naturally once back on the S1000RRs. Students follow Mackenzie around the circuit, learning from the line he takes.
The RR’s a compact, astonishingly powerful, monster of a sports bike. We shared the circuit with riders taking part in a separate track day. Some of them tore past (some a little too close). But if the Japanese sports bikes didn’t make enough ground in corners, they could be quickly left behind on the straights.
The brakes respond to the lightest touch and, with so much torque everywhere, third and fourth gear can take care of most of the circuit.
I didn’t quite get to knee scraping. The seat is surprisingly high. Now I’m making excuses.
It was a confidence-building experience, anyway.
The other exercise bike, the F800R with poles on, is used to show how throttle and rear brake can be used to help turn. This time the tuition was from Kevin Healy, owner of Focused Events, which runs the BMW training day.
He showed us how keeping the throttle closed will tighten the turn. Applying throttle and rear brake simultaneously seemed counter-intuitive but I also learned how this can be used to control the radius of a turn, until I had the wheel at the end of the pole making a tight half-orbit of cones.
It was another empowering, confidence-inspiring exercise but I’m not exactly sure what to do with it, or where it fits in with the rest of what I learned.
I recently did a California Superbike School Level One course. On that I learned one thing, then another building on the last, and so on, in a series of quite regimented classroom and track sessions. As the day went on it seemed too much to absorb but it was clear how each lesson was a step further in the same direction as the last.
In comparison, the BMW Track and Training Experience seemed a bit random.
In a classroom session, Mackenzie talked us around the track, telling us, among other things, the best line at each turn. He’s a likeable instructor but his knowledge of Donington is a lot to take in, and 90% is forgotten before it can be put to use.
Road rides on a range of BMW models including the S1000R and GS Adventure are also offered between track sessions. These are very nice machines but to customers who can ride on the road whenever they like, it might feel a bit like filling time.
The highly structured nature of CSS Level One won’t appeal to everyone though – and I didn’t get my knee down on that. Nor did I learn about body position.
I’m still learning about shifting about on the bike two days after the BMW course. I’m learning how much you ache afterwards. My thighs are killing me and I think I’ve pulled a muscle in my side. Either that or it’s a hernia.
I didn’t feel it at the time. That must mean I was having fun.
Tested: BMW Track and Training Experience, Donington Park
Price: £550 including hire of an S1000RR (£325 on your own bike)
Read our review of the BMW S1000RR, by Niall Mackenzie
