At the risk of sounding clichéd and a bit mushy in my old age, I’ll always consider one of the greatest privileges of living the charmed life of an occasional motorcycle journalist as when someone approaches me for advice. It’s true that recalling stories of the places visited, bikes ridden and persons met to groups of people is great fun and I shall never get tired of it. However, someone reaching out and asking for help has a different meaning, as there is a genuine sense of purpose to whatever I say next. It could be remembered by that person for years or even forever, so what I say and do next matters because it only affects them and not me, which is to say that my words and actions come with a fairly big dollop of responsibility.
By a convoluted set of circumstances, one such request reached me via Michelin earlier this summer – could I help one of its sponsored riders navigate her way through not only her first ever trackday but also her first ever time on a road bike, and her first ever time riding on tarmac?
“Yeah, sure,” I said, thinking, ‘where do I even start?’ As well as the aforementioned feeling of privilege for being asked, I could not resist the double challenge of coaching a newbie through the minefield of their first trackday and of getting them to adapt from a life of off-road riding to tarmac at
