Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/08/incredibly-lucky-motorcyclist.html
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Lucky indeed!
I am wondering what was causing the shake (i.e. physical damage to his bike or environmental issue)?
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Tire pressure off? Steering head come loose?? Who knows. I wonder if slowing down made it worse so he kept trying to go or what? Knobbies on diamond-cut cement shouldn’t shimmy like that unless pressure is way off.
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Given that he blurred out the speedometer in his video, and cut it to exclude whatever initially caused the shake, there is a good chance that he was driving excessively fast, and possibly failed to properly land a wheelie or something.
Rather than “brave motorcyclist,” the description I would use would be “reckless driver.”
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Yeah, my $ is on rough landing at too high a speed. Looked like they almost powered out of it, which would have been cool, but sliding between the wheels is worth more points.
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It’s called a “tank slapper”, and is caused by the front wheel losing traction at speed. Say, from pulling a wheelie and not sticking the landing so well. The guy is a squid, and he almost died because he screwed up while doing something stupid for his youtube channel. I’d like to hope this incident scared some sense into him, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
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This is what he says happened:
NO I DIDN’T WHEELIE. I was merging onto the freeway, checking traffic while I ventured over to the carpool lane. When I got next to the carpool lane, I check if it was clear again, then merged in while quickly accelerating in first gear. When I got up to enough speed to pass traffic (Traffic was doing 75-80 MPH) I changed into second gear (where the clip starts). First mistake I made was having my weight WAY too far back on the bike while accelerating, that mixed with the extremely bumpy freeway and the acceleration of the bike caused the front wheel to go extremely light. Thus causing the violent speed wobbles.
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first thing I thought about was the steering head itself. True enough saying “who knows”.
I was thinking that there are only two possible scenarios though…1) He felt that shimmy the entire time and it only kept getting worse when he should have stopped previously. or 2) it came on rather suddenly and was only just then trying to deal with it.
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Yeah, his story is nonsense. Which is why I’m not hopeful that he learned anything from his near-death experience.
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That cat just spent eight lives.
Glad he came out in one piece.
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60+ in first gear and then he upshifted into second? What gearing is this? He should have been thrown from the bike when shifting with the disparity in needed RPM for shit like that if it is even possible.
My Speed Triple wouldn’t do that. I sold it because it was too fast and I was gonna die.
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Worse that that, according to his own account:
So he was going somewhere north of 85mph. In first gear.
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Ok people, public service announcement: never ever put any weight behind the center of the rear wheel.
Maybe that’s what happened and maybe it was something else but if you do put weight behind the center of the rear wheel, you can expect results exactly like this.
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all I can say is I am fortunate enough to have never dumped my bike. Maybe I am overly cautious, maybe I am super lucky…whatever the case, I cannot fathom being in that scenario in the first place.
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Road rash! Serious amounts of road rash. Those thin pants he was wearing were zero protection.
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Here’s an example of someone doing nothing wrong other than having weight past the rear axle
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Gearing, or merely a callous disregard for that red line on the tachometer.
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Anyone ever see, or god forbid experience a bike that pogos? Before modern rear suspensions (so like 20 years ago if it’s a Harley 
jk) the rear springs could setup a bounce in a turn. The rear wheel starts to pogo up and down and the tenency is for the bike to send the body of the bike sideways until it settles a bit, catches traction, and sends the bike down the track in a tumble. My father has a scar from his navel to his neck because of a honda doing the pogo on a track back in the 60’s.
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Holy shit… one lucky SOB!
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thanks for reminding me of this video. Now I spent 30 min going down the rabbit hole on Youtube.
videos like this make my groin ache.
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