August 06, it was a Saturday, not exactly the greatest weather, the wind was quite strong which was actually the deciding factor in my choice to go riding or not because I wanted to take the opportunity to teach myself to ride in strong crosswinds while still cornering at my usual speeds. Anyone familiar with riding a motorcycle would know that this is not easy; a sharp gust of wind and you can easily find yourself suddenly travelling in another lane possibly even an oncoming lane or getting dangerously close to the pavement, add to this sharp highspeed corners and one can easily see where the danger and difficulty comes in.

So there I was, heading up Kloof Nek on my way out to Camps Bay, when a red car began pulling out from a parking bay on the left side of the road pretty close in front of me. At first the car appeared to stop half way out of the bay as if the driver had seen me, sadly I had no such luck, the car was just pulling out very slowly. So I was presented with a very slow moving obstacle in my lane; at this point that the adrenaline kicked in and realisation dawned on me, I was going to rearend this car if I didn’t act immediately. My options were fairly simple: do nothing and hit the car (target fixation & panic), brake hard and slow down enough, or go around either left or right. I weighed up the options, the first was highly unappealing, the second worried me quite a lot as I had recently noticed something odd about my front suspension/braking (another reason I was out riding, to diagnose the issue) , so I selected the third option of going around the car. Left or right, which will it be? Passing a car on the left is fraught with danger, there is less space to pass, and cars turning out of sidestreets often pull into the road a bit. There was no oncoming traffic, so the obvious choice was to pass on the right. So I did, or at least I tried, pulling alongside the car I suddenly realised the car was turning right cutting off my line of escape. It’s a rather sickening feeling when you know that you have no more options, no more time to react, and that you’re going to collide.

Everything is a bit hazy here, after hitting the cars wheel arch all I remember is crunching, cracking, grinding, sliding and then lying on the road staring up at the sky with people holding me down asking if I was conscious. Thinking back over the incident the car must have knocked the bike out from underneath me, because I continued to go straight, and the bike went to my right sliding along the ground until it got wedged underneath the front of a parked 4×4 on the right side of the road. I ended up roughly 15m from the original point of impact in the oncoming lane, behind this same 4×4.

There we have it, a full account of the accident — as I remember it at least. Distances and durations and speeds I’m not sure of, coming back later to measure, the stretch of road in which it all happened is about 60m, and travelling at 60kph (~16m/s) doesn’t leave much time. In hindsight if I had immediately started braking I probably would have made it, unfortunately I don’t have the natural instinctive reflexes that more experienced riders have developed; I’m still fairly new to riding (roughly 6 months and 8500km).