Motorcyclist filmed death of friend as they broke speed limit

[Iain]

Video at link - not nice to watch, but cuts out as soon as the accident happens. No gore, just the inevitability of an imminent death.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5507922/Motorcyclist-filmed-death-of-friend-as-they-broke-speed-limit.html

Fred Bowden, 42, strapped a camera to his bike and followed fellow motorcyclist Andrew Prowse, 46, as the pair broke the speed limit 30 times in the space of just 20 minutes.

Bowden filmed for 25 miles until Mr Prowse clipped a hatchback car on his Kawasaki ZX10R and was thrown under an oncoming camper van.The accident, in which Andrew died instantly, was caught on camera by Bowden.

Bowden was then knocked off his own Kawasaki 1000cc ZX10-R by the flying wreckage from Andrew's machine.

It later emerged Bowden was clocked at a top speed of 156mph, but his speedometer had reached speeds of 170mph, Truro Crown Court heard

The court was told that Bowden was caught speeding 30 times – riding 70mph in a 40mph limit, 100mph in a 60mph limit and 124mph in a 70mph limit.


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Right now there is an argument going on over on my other forum as to who is at fault. I tend to thinking that the car driver was reckless, and should not have been overtaking there. However he probably didn't even see the biker even if he had checked his mirrors before attempting his overtake as the biker was doing over 90mph.

Overall you have to feel great sympathy for the driver of the oncoming van. He wasn't at fault in the slightest.

[MikeB]

Right now there is an argument going on over on my other forum as to who is at fault. I tend to thinking that the car driver was reckless, and should not have been overtaking there. However he probably didn't even see the biker even if he had checked his mirrors before attempting his overtake as the biker was doing over 90mph.

Looked to me like the car and the motorcycle were both trying to pass the same car at the same time in one lane area. The motorcyclist is ultimately at fault, but I could see charges for the driver of the car.

[mfree]

if the motorcyclist was going that fast, he could have come from concealment and been there so fast that there wasn't anything to see for the driver of the car, and no time to react when he did appear.  I can't watch the video here to tell...

[Firethorn]

We had a couple riders do that between the base and town.  No injuries, fortuantly, but they discovered just how much trouble the commander could give them even without any more evidence than a Command Chief's word.

Probably helped that it's a 4 lane highway as well. 

[K Frame]

Darwin is a harsh master sometimes.

I feel sorry for the van driver who was probably heading home after a hard day's work and ended up running over a sack of crap.

[AmbulanceDriver]

There's a reason we nickname those things "donor-cycles"....

In most cases on a motorcycle, it's not a matter of if you're gonna get hurt, it's when and how bad. And that's if you're riding safely.  These two were clearly not.

Sometimes it's your fault, a lot of times it's the other drivers fault. 

This one I'm putting solidly in the motorcyclists fault.  I strongly suspect the driver of the hatchback did the mirror check, saw the road clear behind him, and started to pass the slower car.  He may have even seen the motorcycle, but not expected them to be traveling at 100+MPH, but rather to be traveling at the speed limit, and therefore been safe to pass the slower car.  Unfortunately, the motorcyclist was doing something extremely dangerous, and that danger caught up to him.

[HankB]

Idiot won a Darwin award.

I remember hearing about a guy in his 40's or 50's who decided to get himself a motorcycle. (Classic mid-life crisis.) He took classes in riding, wore a helmet, etc., and bought himself some big powerful machine. First time he took it on the highway, he wondered why everyone else was driving so slowly . . . he looked down and saw he was riding at over 150 MPH! 

He sold the cycle later that week, figuring that if he kept it, he was going to kill himself in short order.

As for the link . . . I wonder why people like Bowden go around filming themselves breaking the law, with means that LEOs can access? If I were going to do something like that, I'd use something like an encrypted hard drive, so at least I wouldn't be providing evidence against myself.

[Boomhauer]

This one's solidly on the motorcyclists.

I feel sorry for the drivers of the cars. Not a bit of sympathy for the two wheeled idiots.

[Cromlech]

I'm in agreement. I've spent some time on (admittedly puny) two wheels, and have a fair few biker friends, but this is clearly their own damn fault.

[Tuco]

I remember hearing about a guy in his 40's or 50's who decided to get himself a motorcycle. (Classic mid-life crisis.)

Floyd died the first time he rode a motorcycle.

I met Floyd once when I was a kid of 12 or 13, he lived across the street from my uncle Dave.  Dave, my dad, Floyd, and I were moving some furniture from Floyd's hair salon as I recall.  We were all riding in a car with a trailer on it.  He and my uncle were discussing the transfer of one of Dave's motorcycles.  Shortly thereafter Floyd ended up buying Dave's mid 70's model year Yamaha 750 Special.

Shortly thereafter Dave came home from work and looked across the street.  The bushes were uprooted along the corner of a brick house, the downspout torn away, a window broken.  The remains of the Yamaha were in Floyd's driveway, a disintegrated helmet on the lawn.

Floyd hopped on the bike, put it in gear and accelerated in first gear for about 250-300 feet into the exterior corner of a brick residence.   The acceleration evidently threw him back, and holding on tight, he rolled on the throttle.  Dave estimated 50 mph in first gear, considering hopping the curb and crossing the lawn.


EDIT- I called my dad and asked - The guy's name was George.

[Firethorn]

Floyd died the first time he rode a motorcycle.

The first time I rode a motorcycle was during the safety class.  For just this reason.

My VStar 650 maxes out around 85.

Something like 2/3rds of USAF motorcycle deaths/injuries are on sport bikes...  They're pushing a new class especially for them.

Sad story, otherwise.  Dude was doing the right thing, wearing a helmet.  Too bad otherwise.

[Nightfall]

Squids + liter bike = dead sooner than later. The only people who should be getting on any RR, let alone a friggin' 1000cc RR, are the very experienced and the very mature. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case.

[Parker Dean]

 The acceleration evidently threw him back, and holding on tight, he rolled on the throttle. 

I know about that one personally. I'm a complete novice and I was exercising a friends 84 Honda Sabre 700 by driving it around in the neighborhood one afternoon and was pulling it back into the garage. I misjudged my forward speed and saw that I wouldn't make it into the garage from the up hill driveway and lip of the garage floor so I decided to do a quick clutch release and blip of the throttle to bump it over the lip, much like you'd do in a car. Wrong! The acceleration coupled with the uphill grade combined to throw me back. This in turn caused a roll-on throttle condition making the acceleration several times what I had intended. I saw within a split second that there was no way I'd get the bike back under control by the time I pushed through the back wall, so I dumped the bike.

No serious injuries. A sore elbow and twisted my ankle somehow. After limping around for a while I went to pick up the bike and you know what? That thing weighed a ton lifting it by yourself! I had to lift it behind me like some Olympic weight lifter or something. That almost hurt worse than the fall. The bike wasn't damaged either. Long experience had shown us that going down on the right would break the front brake lever, and towards the Left would break the mirror. We used to joke that he bike spent more time on it's side than on it's wheels. We were all newbs so dropping it was a normal course of events. The nice thing was that doing so never amounted to anything serious. Pretty much just pick it up and go on.

[Nick1911]

I never dropped my bike.

I was positively paranoid about safety though, and never went beyond 70mph.  70 is mighty fast without a steel cage and 4 wheels!

[Parker Dean]

I never dropped my bike.

No doubt has a lot to do with how seriously you take the matter. It was a junk bike for just such an emergency so we weren't all that serious.

The first time was the bike owner himself with a new tire on the back. Pulled out of the bike shop and proceeded to slide the rear out from under him. I did the second one coming to a stop and put my foot down at the stop right into a pothole. Another friend did a "Superman" and fall, followed by a low speed fall over like Arty Johnson or something and the last one I did in the garage. Not long after that the bike developed gum in the jets from sitting and never ran right again and was given away.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

i love to ride and used to ride like that.  if i had killed myself doing so it would have been my fault. other drivers have no reasonable expectation of encountering a testosterone fueled fool doing 2 or three times the legal limit.  the onus is on the fool to protect himself. god was looking out for me.  well god and trhe judge that made a pedestrian outa me for 18 years.

i won't watch the video  been there done that   at the time i confused blind fool luck for skill

[just Warren]

The main thing about speeding is that it makes you dependent on others' reaction times. Is this smart?

I've seen posts in other places where people brag about how fast they  go. When it is pointed out how dangerous this is, their usual reply is that they are very skilled and are better drivers than most of the population.

This used to be my view as well, when I was much younger. So my criticism might sound hypocritical.

The key is NOT the speeder's skill it is the skill of all the rest of the drivers who are near enough to affect the speeder.

In addition to how bad road conditions may be just about fifty percent of drivers are below average in one or more of the following: reaction time, vision, attentiveness, driving skill, good judgment, or the quality of their vehicle.

So what a speeder is betting his life on (and this guy lost) is all these other folks not making a mistake. These are bad odds. So to drive like that is sheer folly.

I place 100% of the blame on the speeder.

A few years ago two brothers were messing around on their rice bikes, one popped a wheelie at about 100 MPH lost control and died upon impact with an almond tree. The other brother was brokenhearted but I had no sympathy as it was their own stupidity that caused it. Don't act like a dumbass don't die like a dumbass.

[Gewehr98]

Everybody's the world's best driver/rider - just ask them.

That is, until they have an accident that results in a local fire department rinsing their mortal remains off of the asphalt with a fire hose.

Their poop doesn't stink, either.   

[seeker_two]

Darwin would have loved YouTube....

[bedlamite]

There is a time and place for riding that fast. That was neither.

[crt360]

There is a time and place for riding that fast. That was neither.

Agreed.  Waste of a nice bike, too.

I don't know the traffic laws over there, so I'm not sure what the car might have been doing wrong (everything drivers do over there looks wrong to me), but the guy on the bike appeared to be a complete idiot and I'd assign him 100%, if not 120%, of the blame.  Just before the crash, the camera bike was doing right about 100 mph and the rider about to crash was pulling away rapidly, probably going 130+.  No more than 2 seconds elapse from the time he popped out from behind the car trailing the impact car and the initial collision.  There is no way the driver could have seen him coming and reacted in that time period.

What Warren said is what it's mostly all about, and frequently ignored by young, inexperienced riders.  Going fast down a straight highway doesn't show much skill, especially if you can't avoid things in front of you.  A monkey can twist a throttle and hang on until he hits something.  The first time someone passed me on a bike at 150mph, I thought long and hard about how, despite being a careful, attentive driver, I had no awareness of the rider until he was going by me.  If I had changed lanes at the wrong time, he'd have been a splat.  I like bikes and did the motocross thing when I was younger.  While I had my share of incidents, I learned quickly from the older guys I spent a lot of time riding with that riding on the street is a real easy way to get yourself in a hospital bed, even if you're an extremely skilled rider.  Being a knucklehead guarantees it, or worse.  One night, a few years ago, I came upon a scene where some kid had just hit a curb on a nice Buell.  The bike was still running and I stopped to help.  Apparently, he had launched a considerable distance through the air and went chest-first into the telephone pole he was lying close to.  He was DRT and there was nothing anyone could do to bring him back.  Bikes are great, but not for everyone.

[Iain]

The first time someone passed me on a bike at 150mph, I thought long and hard about how, despite being a careful, attentive driver, I had no awareness of the rider until he was going by me.

I've had that happen, which is why the 170mph section of that video I find just as concerning.

The argument elsewhere revolved around whether the car driver should have been overtaking. Of course he shouldn't, but some seemed to think that a bike has a right to overtake in an area where a car shouldn't be, so the bike was ok. My problem with the way some ride bikes is that yes, there are things that bikes can do that cars can't, like weave in and out of packed traffic. Can doesn't mean should though.

I was buying car tax online the other day, there was some stat there about how many bikes there are as a % of taxed vehicles - 3% in the UK. Most of those will only come out on a nice weekend. It's no excuse for car drivers to forget about bikers, them being 3% of the vehicles on the road, and a small percentage of them acting like the guys in the video - yeah sometimes car drivers are just not going to see them because they don't expect them to be where they get to be as quickly as they get there.

[Strings]

Wow... a SQUID, even in full gear, is still a SQUID...

There are a couple people I would trust to drive that fast (on/in any vehicle), but those people recognize what Bedlamite already said...

[CNYCacher]

The first time someone passed me on a bike at 150mph. . .

The first time someone passed me on a snowmobile at 150mph, I thought "What's a snowmobile doing on the freeway?"

Some things about Upstate NY you can't help but love. 

[Firethorn]

We were all newbs so dropping it was a normal course of events. The nice thing was that doing so never amounted to anything serious. Pretty much just pick it up and go on.

Haven't dropped a bike yet, not even in class.  One lady did it once in class.

Of course, having an accident on a bike is a lot like a ND/AD with a firearm - if you do it enough...

This used to be my view as well, when I was much younger. So my criticism might sound hypocritical.

Given that you say 'used to be', I'd say you've matured.