Highside

One of the unspoken appeals of motorcycle racing is the danger that comes with the sport.  A little puddle on the track, a little too much speed through a chicane, all sorts of tiny errors can cause a rider to lose control of his bike.  And when the only thing between your body and hitting asphalt at 200 kilometers per hour is a bit of leather and a helmet, the crashes are undoubtedly spectacular.  It’s one of the most exhilarating and terrifying aspects of the sport: watching a bike catapult it’s rider off through the air.

I decided to name this site Highside for two reasons: because it symbolized one of the goals of the site (to take specific terminology and make it accessible for those new to the sport), and because it symbolized the sport itself.  The drama, the danger, the adrenaline.  A high-speed motorcycle crash represents all of this.  The riders who take to the grid are the best in the world, but they are also some of the greatest.  Many of the most brilliant and talented riders have been taken from their prime by small mistakes that became catastrophic.  Some lose their lives in pursuit of the sport.  And yet, I’ve heard an entire grandstand of fans, tens of thousands of fans, scream and cheer the moment Dani Pedrosa crashed out of the Indianapolis Grand Prix in 2009.

More often than not, the riders walk away unscathed.  Take, for example, Casey Stoner’s famous warmup lap crash at Valencia in 2009.

This crash was brought on most of all by a rather innocuous issue: cold tyros.  Stoner’s tyros lacked enough heat to maintain enough grip on the track, and as he went through the corner, the back tyre started to slide.  A fraction of a moment later, the back tyre regained it’s grip, but the bike had already slid enough for the sudden change to jerk the bike up, catapulting Stoner into the air, and out of the race.

Stoner was, by many accounts, incredibly unlucky.  In the midst of his dramatic return, a sudden fluke ended his season one critical hour before everyone else.  That fluke would end up costing him third place in the World Championship.  Yet, less was made of how that incident could have been much worse.  He suffered the crash while on the warmup lap, traveling behind the pack, riding at a relatively low speed.  Change those three characteristics, and you could have something like this:

That video comes from World Supersport, during the earlier years of the past decade.  The second bike suffered an engine malefaction, spitting oil all over the track, and taking out three additional riders.  It’s not a stretch to say that one of those riders was mere inches away from death.  Luckily, all of the riders involved in the accident survived.

Watching a close battle between two high-caliber riders gets your adrenaline pumping like nothing else.  As they dive in and out of each other’s racing lines at breakneck speeds, we witness a level of skill and guts that we can only dream of possessing.  But for those of us so far away from the action, we sometimes forget the darker side of these battles.  No one is arguing that we should feel guilty for watching the crashes, but it’s important to remember the danger involved.  We need to be cognizant of the risk for life and limb when rider’s crash, and not be so quick to revel in their misfortune.  The danger makes the sport more interesting, but in the end, the danger isn’t what makes the sport.