PRO RIDER

Photos : Geoff Osborne

Lockdown means many things to many people and for a bunch of you it meant smacking the ‘ buy now ’ button on a new motorcycle . Now for the licence ...

’ m not going to sit here in judgement , OK ? I know of , and have raced with people who , for a myriad of reasons called excuses , never did the Class 6 ( motorcycle ) deal on their licence . I ’ m also not going to say there is an easy way – there isn ’ t . For those as ancient as myself , the easy way was fronting up when you were 15 and successfully navigating around the block under the watchful eye of an M . O . T Traffic Cop . Basically , if you didn ’ t manage to screw that up , as in crash , it was ‘ good luck ’ and you were set free . The progression to a full licence automatically kicked in six months after your ‘ test ’ and that was that , done .

GET WITH THE TIMES For the younger riders out there , now you know why the Boomers and Gen Xers were , and to be blunt , still are , the festering sores of ACC and insurance companies alike . That simplistic approach to getting on the road involved a wee pamphlet about the road rules , aptly called the Road Code . It was brilliantly designed so we could study for our theory ( one of the four sheets we knew by rote ) and the five ( yep ) theory questions that preceded your three-minute ride around the block , literally , concealed inside your English textbook while the teacher was waffling on about some old Pom called Shakespeare or something equally irrelevant to a bike-mad teen . It means that most of my generation have never seen the vast majority of the Road Code as it stands today . I hope that explains grey hair and roundabouts , random lane changes ( we didn ’ t have multilane roads back in the day ) and scanning behaviours to you younger lot and maybe spark a question or two from the old salts ...

KIWI RIDER 67