Inch Perfect Trials
We got the chance to head down to Inch Perfect Trials to take part in a trials experience day based in the scenic Ribble Valley. Inch Perfect Trials is a place for any level of rider from complete novice all the way through to a complete professional looking to sharpen their skills and get some practice in.
With incredible views throughout it’s the perfect place to come and relax and ride some motorbikes with good company and fantastic trainers and facilities.
The specific course we enrolled in was their ‘Ladies Day Experience’ which is a 6-rider course that looks to get girls/women riding motorcycles from the ages of 12+, we were part of the the novice group and were led by a female instructor.
It was an incredibly relaxed day with no pressure to perform which was perfect for the group given that many of us had never even sat on a motorcycle before, let alone ride one!
The bikes that were used were Electric Motion bikes powered by batteries with no gears or clutches for us to get our heads around, this meant that we could focus on one thing and one thing only, riding.
Riding a motorcycle for the first time can be incredibly daunting but our instructor Sarah was fantastic in the way she conducted herself and helped us along even when some of us were struggling to navigate the course, she took the time with riders 1-2-1 if they got stuck and went through the steps on how to ride the bike from using the throttle to navigating the rear brake and the regen electric brake that helps to preserve battery power.
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Our day started with a safety briefing before heading out onto the road and down the hill to the fields that we’d spend our day navigating with increasing difficulty as the day wore on.
It was quite simple at first with a course to learn the basics of riding the bike on a setting that limited the power, this allowed us to gauge the speed of the bike, how it manoeuvres and to build our confidence slowly step by step.
We completed two laps of a circle course before moving onto a slalom section which helped us to learn to control the motorcycle more intricately moving around cones and turning left and right whilst using the power to get us through the course. The skills we picked up here founded as the base for the rest of the day when we would attack the fields and even an off road course on gravel through a forest.
It doesn’t sound like much, however to complete novices like ourselves this was pretty challenging and took up the first half of our day as we tried to learn the ropes of the electric motorcycles and how to control them through this course, by the time lunch rolled around we were ready for some food!
Thankfully the kitchen staff were already prepared and we got a meal cooked up for us alongside dessert, before we knew it we were back out on the bikes once again but this time the level of difficulty had stepped up, now we were tasked with riding up some steep hills.
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Of course, we weren’t just thrown into this we were given a little course to follow behind the instructor on ground that wasn’t exactly level but wasn’t flat either, this helped us to gain some experience riding on a gradient and how it feels to ride up and down a hill, adjusting the amount of throttle and brake we were using on the ascent/decent.
Once the instructor felt we were confident enough with our abilities to ride around on the course, we were then given the task of riding up the side of a fairly steep hill, this wasn’t so easy especially for novice riders who weren’t used to riding motorcycles or controlling them, this meant that there was the odd crash or rider struggling to make it to the top.
Adopting the term of ‘when in doubt, gas it out’, we found the hill to be fun keeping the power open as much as we could to get ourselves to the top of the hill, even popping the odd wheelie in the process.
The entire time we felt safe and secure within the controlled environment with an instructor at the base of the hill and another at the top to help us if we were to get stuck, all day long our skills improved with some of us going from absolute beginners that had never ridden a bike before to being able to scale steep hills and ride around comfortably, this is thanks to the excellent tuition we received on the day.
At the end of the day we got the chance to ride the forest course riding around some trees and around the masses of land that they have, this included some muddy ditches, steep terrain and more, all of us managed this with ease.
To conclude, it was a fantastic day out at Inch Perfect Trials and we thoroughly enjoyed it, 10/10 would recommend!