Upside Down

Safety Training

Getting up to Speed

Being able to cope with being dunked in

water was essential for what I had to do next.

W

HILE I admit that I’m no great shakes

as a swimmer, I can still swim and I’m

not particularly frightened of water.

I understand completely why non-swimmers

might be worried about paddling at the beach

in water more than ankle deep, but I can cope

with splashing about in water now and again,

otherwise I wouldn’t be quite so attracted to

the thought of riding a motorbike across a lake.

There was another element to hydroplaning

the motorbike that I needed to investigate and

it involved the way that the planing surface

would rise out of the water. Once it was out

of the water, its shape would force air down

towards the surface, creating a cushion of high-

pressure air that it could ride on. That, at least,

was the theory, and to see that theory put to

the test I needed to experiment with a planing

surface a bit bigger than the one we were going

to use on the Suzuki. I was about to get a taste

of Formula One powerboat racing. Before I

could do that, however, I had to have a dunking.

In the whole of mainland Britain, you can’t get

much further from the sea than Burntwood in

Staffordshire. Halfway between Birmingham

and Stafford, just off the M6 toll road, it’s slap-

bang in the middle of England, so it might seem

like a strange place to be teaching me anything

about powerboats, but it was in the swimming

pool at Chase Terrace Technology College

that I was to undergo immersion testing.

168  hydroplaning motorbike

Immersion testing is basically capsize training

for powerboat racers, and, seeing the test rig set

up at the side of the pool for the first time, I did

start to wonder a bit about whether I was quite

as confident in the water as I liked to think. It

looked like a scary piece of kit – some sort of

torture chamber, maybe – and there was a good

reason for that … it was scary and it was torture!

Before I was strapped into the test rig, however,

I had to have a crash course in using breathing

equipment. Yours truly, the dodgy swimmer,

was about to be trained as a scuba diver – and

it wasn’t at all bad. The training was really

pretty basic and intended just to get me used to

breathing through a mouthpiece and swimming

Below: I’ve never been a great swimmer, but I was
getting to quite enjoy the scuba diving lark in the pool
at Chase Terrace Technology College.

Top right: The ‘torture

chamber’ rig, a mock-

up of a Formula One

powerboat cockpit, was explained to me in
great detail.

Bottom right: The

framework allowed the

entire cockpit to be

turned upside down to

simulate a crash.