Jelster = ‘I have heared stories of 4 or 5 riders to 1 bike, that’s a lot of standing around…’
This question just got asked on VD. Here’s the answer:
Is there anything to stop one rider flipping a wheelie into an oncoming rider, such as a barrier that seperates the two lanes?
No
Instead only one rider is allowed to wheelie at a time (with only two pupils on bikes at any one time). This is for safety reasons (after all, if someone’s learning to do something this dangerous it would be incredibly stupid to not take precautions to try and minimise those dangers - and having two people learning to wheelie heading towards each other sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. Not just because of a flip, but far more likely because of landing a wheelie hard after making a mistake, and going into a tank slapper. If that happened, for example, the last thing you’d want is for another novice wheelieing towards you. And sod’s law dictates that if the only thing to hit is that other rider, that’s exactly what will happen, even if they’re quarter of a mile away ); because a rider can make a mistake that’s so serious that, assuming they get away with it that time, they won’t get away with again if they make that same mistake again. And if no one’s there to both see them make that mistake and stop them, to not only explain what they did wrong but why they did it and how to not do it again, then you suddenly have both a very serious safety problem, but also a rider who’s not learning to wheelie, but is learning how to kill themself. If only one person is wheelieing at a time, then the instructor (or two instructors at Paul’s school) can spot every single mistake and rectify that mistake before it becomes a problem or before the pupil looses half the day doing something wrong
Also, Paul’s found that people learn a hell of a lot from watching other people practise as they can then see precisely the same mistakes, or indeed victories, that they’ve made being made by the other pupils, and then why they were given the advice they were by the instructors - plus, it’s so stressful that you absolutely must make sure you never get tense on the bike, and that means not spending too much time on the machine. And finally, because it’s very easy to spend far too much time on the bike and learn nothing but what not to do. If you’ve never done something before, how does your brain know what it should and shouldn’t do? If you do the correct technique for the first three attempts and then something completely wrong for the next ten minutes, which information do you think your brain will remember?
Paul generally has two instructors working at all times so that every single run every single pupil does is watched and analysed by at least one instructor
Paul’s days probably are less time on the bike (compared to Jimmy Fireblade’s school), but it sounds like they’re a lot more intensive instructionally
Paul is Pual Gower from http://www.thehweelieschool.co.uk, the school at Bovingdon referred to earlier in this thread
Very very cool vid!
