Both Michelle and I volunteered as on-track riding coaches for this year’s BMW Advance Rider Training (ART). The training was held at the beautiful Calabogie Motorsports Park facility in Calabogie, Ontario. This course is geared towards street riders who are looking to learn to be a bit more confident and improve their skills for street riding. Therefore, this was not a racing school which made it interesting for us as coaches. Our goal was not to teach them how to setup a racing pass or block-pass another rider when breaking for the corner.
It was a lot of fun seeing everyone on a variety of street BMW motorcycles exploring the limits of their personal comfort zone. The day combined both classroom instruction sessions and on-track exercises. A new exercise added to this year’s course was a skidpad setup where students learned to downshift while slowing down in a corner. People debated the usefulness of this exercise but it was an interesting exercise regardless. Even in racing, you will often see racers run off a race track after missing a shift or hitting a false-neutral. Needless to say, it was neat to see how students dramatically improved their skills and comfort in just a handful of passes of this unnerving exercise.
The day ended well with no crashes (none that I know of anyways). Everyone got lots of track time and improved their skills. Thanks Pat, Paul and Don for inviting us to help out with the BMW ART school.