Hot_Air wrote: ↑Sun Nov 01, 2020 9:31 pm
Spin, I think we’re into semantics. What you’re describing as a single-stage overtake seems like a kind of multi-stage overtake. Perhaps it’s a hybrid
But overtaking is tricky to discuss in words, and better conveyed on the road.
Either way, I find three-stage overtaking an extremely useful tool in my toolbox. (But not the only overtaking tool.)
The Spin Doctor wrote: ↑Sun Nov 01, 2020 8:04 pm
If you overtake from close behind where your speed is matching the vehicle you're overtaking, you a) have to pop out to make your final visual check and b) you have to build speed to make the pass and that also takes time.
I never said anything about “close behind”, did I? Usually, I prefer to make a visual check from the offside. The world can look different from the offside, and I like to have this view before accelerating. Also, building speed happens in a blink on many bikes (including mine). On a slower bike, it’s a different world. And I’ll take account of time requirements in my forward planning. As with many things in life, timing is everything
I understand a 'three stage overtake' to be from 1 second back - that's how it was explained to me by a RoSPA examiner / police rider. See a possible opportunity, move up to the 'following position', move out to double check then go. So that 1 second position is pretty close to my mind, given that you should be aiming for a 3 second gap at 50 mph. And the closer you get the more it cuts your view. And it also cuts the view of YOU from the perspective of someone coming the other way - hence the 'pop-out' effect.
Moving out early gives you the view you are looking for, and opens up the line of sight from the opposite direction.
The only reason that we have these debates is because of the obsession with 'progress' and getting overtakes in. Maybe it's because I spent 16 years riding around overtaking everything I could to shave a few seconds off the delivery time, and so squeeze another job into a day's work that I have a more restrained view of overtaking now. Even as a courier, my primary aim was never to get from A to B in a rush, but to ensure that I got to the delivery point - only that way would I be in a position to pick up the next job.
If you use longer straights for overtakes, you don't need to despatch them with any sort of acceleration, but simply carry the speed you already had into the pass. It doesn't work everywhere... but it works a damn site more often than riders who are in a rush seem to realise.
I heard a rumour that - wait for it - there may be a new edition of Motorcycle Roadcraft published this year.
). It has some good stuff about ye olde SMIDSY but only devotes a page or so to it! Yet we get an entire chapter about motorway riding; maybe that’s more important if you’re a bike cop routinely doing 150 mph on the motorway. It seems tricky – perhaps impossible – for any book to cover what’s what from IAM to police pursuit riding.
