03/06/2026
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*** TIPS ON TUESDAY *** Fresh Start: Overtake
In Week Eight of the 'Core Skills' series, where I return to the essential riding foundations and rebuild them from the ground up in a fresh way whilst using a brand-new structure too, it's time to look at overtaking, and why it can end in the only crash we accelerate into. Time for a Fresh Start.
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THE MYTH — “If there's a gap, go for it / I do it properly, overtaking is safe.”
These are the twin myths of overtaking. In the first, the cultural story around overtaking is simple enough: if we follow the steps by applying the system (big S or small s, take your pick), then execute the technique cleanly, the manoeuvre is “safe”. Consciously or unconsciously, it's easy to internalise this as “If I’m skilled, the world will behave”.
Overtaking becomes even more dangerous when seen as a marker of competence. “A finely judged overtake is the hallmark of an advanced rider” is an expression I heard from a highly-qualified ex-police instructor. The rider begins to see every potential opportunity as a challenge to be met rather than a risk to be managed.
Many riders also believe that a faster bike “makes overtaking easier”. And that leads to the kind of belief that turns overtaking into a test of personal ability and that the thinking that “if I didn’t overtake on my bike, I might as well be in a car”. That's an expression I've heard far too often. A powerful bike doesn’t change the speed of the vehicle being overtaken, the length of road available, or the amount of information the rider has. All it really does is allow the rider to reach higher speeds during the manoeuvre — and that reduces ability to get out of trouble.
Overtaking is never a technical exercise and the idea that there is a ‘perfect overtake’ is an impossibility. Overtaking is built on assumptions — what we think we can see, what we think we know, and what we expect others to do and our data is almost always incomplete, obtained via fallible perception, and relies on unpredictable human behaviour. Every overtake depends assumptions remaining true long enough for the manoeuvre to work, but no level of technique or skill totally eliminates uncertainty.
Whilst some overtaking crashes are poor decisions from the outside, many look entirely reasonable right up until the moment assumptions collapse and it's obvious it isn't. Riders rarely begin an overtake expecting it to fail, but optimism is not a safety system.
THE MECHANISM — “The dynamics of uncertainty.”
Overtaking is the most complex task we perform on a motorcycle. It is a compound task involving multiple humans, multiple moving parts and several simultaneous predictions that all have to remain valid long enough for the manoeuvre to succeed. Overtaking demands accurate prediction of several fast‑changing, partially hidden elements, using perceptual and cognitive systems that were never designed for this kind of task.
The first part of the trap is perceptual. The rider has to assess the road ahead for a suitable space to complete or abort the manoeuvre. The rider’s brain is trying to track their own acceleration, the speed of the vehicle being overtaken, the speed and position of oncoming traffic and the behaviour of vehicles further ahead, all the whilst monitoring the changing geometry of the road to attempt to fit the overtake to suitable opportunity. These elements don’t arrive one at a time. They interact and change continuously. A road that looks clear from one position may hide a dip or crest that only becomes visible a second or two later.
Humans are also poor at estimating closure rates and distances at speed, particularly when the other vehicle is small, distant or partially obscured. A car that appears as a tiny shape on the horizon can cover hundreds of metres surprisingly quickly. Overtaking happens at speeds where human time‑to‑collision judgement becomes unreliable. Tau, the brain’s built‑in “time left” estimator, works poorly at high closing speeds. Looming — the apparent growth of an object as it approaches — is only useful close up and makes an oncoming object appear to be far distant, then suddenly arrive far sooner than expected. Like the corner at the end of the straight or the car that seemed a mile off.
On top of this sit cognitive limitations. Whilst the rider may have the theoretical understanding of the blind spots created by crests, dips, hedges and buildings, and even other vehicles, and how these can hide a threat until the rider is already committed, the human brain has tends to process only what the eyes can see, and fails to process what might be out of sight. The old saying out of sight, out of mind applies. Working memory and attention are finite, so some elements are always being simplified, approximated or dropped. The brain fills the gaps with what it expects to be true.
Even before we talk about rider choices, the manoeuvre is sitting on top of a noisy, uncertain information stream. It's hardly surprising that riders don't always get it right.
THE MISTAKE — “The Illusion of Certainty and the Commitment Trap.”
The complexity of overtaking creates countless opportunities for a manoeuvre to go wrong, but arguably the most important mistake isn't a technical one at all. It's believing that a well-planned overtake is a safe overtake.
Many riders assume that if they've followed the process correctly — assessed the road, checked visibility, judged the speed differential and identified a passing opportunity — then the decision itself has become safe. But safe implies the absence of meaningful risk, and no overtake is ever free from uncertainty. There are simply too many variables beyond the rider's control.
A well-planned overtake may be a lower-risk overtake. It is never a risk-free one. This is the Illusion of Certainty: mistaking a reduction in uncertainty for the elimination of uncertainty.
The belief is understandable. Riders are taught systems and procedures. Gather information. Build a plan. Position, speed, gear, acceleration. Execute the manoeuvre. The danger comes when a decision made within a dynamic, uncertain environment begins to feel like a technical problem with a guaranteed solution.
The reality is very different. Other drivers make decisions. Vehicles emerge from hidden junctions. Blind areas conceal information. Closing speeds are misjudged. Conditions change while the manoeuvre is taking place. The rider behaves as though the world will remain stable long enough for the overtake to succeed, when in reality the world continues evolving throughout the manoeuvre.
Of course, many times the decisions are sound. And this leads us into a subtle but important bias that shapes how riders process information during an overtake. Here's the problem. Riders may be taught to look for the risks — the junctions, the blind areas, the oncoming traffic — but a successful overtake feels satisfying and the brain thrives on the sensation of a rewarding result. We feel pleasure at a job well done.
Unfortunately, successful overtaking delivers a powerful reinforcement loop. The rider accelerates, commits, completes the pass and feels the immediate reward. Then the more successful overtakes made, the more the brain quietly rewires itself. Information is no longer being gathered to evaluate the manoeuvre. It is being gathered to justify it and begins filtering information accordingly. Instead of asking “is this safe?”, the rider unconsciously shifts to “Can I make this work?”
The brain is no longer running a risk assessment — it is running a confirmation search. This is why some overtakes “feel right” up until the moment they don’t. The rider isn’t ignoring danger; the danger simply isn’t being processed with the same weight. The reward has become the lens through which the scene is interpreted.
Doubt is often confused with hesitation. Riders are taught to see hesitation as a flaw — a sign of weak confidence or poor decision‑making — so they learn to suppress the very signal that would keep them safe. But doubt and hesitation are not the same thing. Doubt is information: a recognition that something in the picture doesn’t yet make sense. Hesitation is what happens when a rider feels doubt but doesn’t know what to do with it. The mistake is not feeling doubt; the mistake is ignoring it, overriding it, or treating it as something to push through. When riders misinterpret doubt as hesitation, they rush to commit in order to silence the discomfort, and that is how they end up accelerating into uncertainty rather than resolving it.
Much of overtaking coaching unintentionally becomes absorbed in the mechanics — following positions, pre‑overtake positions, the “overtaking triangle” and the precise geometry of where the bike should sit. These tools are useful, but they can mislead riders into believing that being in the right position makes the overtake itself right. The rider becomes preoccupied with not starting the manoeuvre from the “wrong place”, rather than questioning whether they are attempting it in the right environment. Technique becomes a substitute for judgement. The focus shifts from Should I go? to Am I lined up correctly to go? — and that is how riders end up executing a well‑positioned overtake in a fundamentally unsuitable place.
But for every rider calmly processing the information, there's another frustrated with being “stuck behind a slower vehicle” because the thought process is “I'm on a motorcycle, I should be able to overtake”. The rider becomes so focused on getting past one obstacle that they stop seeing the wider traffic picture. When a straight finally appears there is little or no planning, all thought processes have collapsed into a single decision: "There's a gap. I'll go now".
So there's the paradox. Poor planning and over-confident planning often share a common factor. In both cases is that the rider has convinced themselves that enough uncertainty has disappeared to commit to the overtake and it's only after moving out to pass that the problems reveal themselves; the centre line that turns solid, the concealed junction ahead, the hidden dip hiding an oncoming vehicle. Now the rider is left trying to solve problems while accelerating towards them.
In many ways, overtaking is unique because it is one of the few situations in riding where a potential mistake is approached under acceleration. Once committed, escape routes disappear faster than most riders realise. Most riding errors at least give the rider the option to try to reduce speed. During an overtake, the rider is adding speed to a situation that may already contain the seeds of failure.
This is where the Commitment Trap exists, as the rider commits to accelerating towards uncertainty.
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THE METHOD — “Deciding whether an overtake Is survivable.”
The overtaking method is usually seen as a sequence of repeatable steps leading to a positive outcome. But that drops the rider into the risk–reward loop where successful overtakes create confidence. The problem is that no matter how competent a rider actually is, it’s the overtaking environment of each INDIVIDUAL overtake that determines the risk and that's what determines whether an overtake is survivable, not the rider’s skill.
The Survival Skills reboot starts by forcing the rider to confront uncertainty. When you switch your search from “look for the pass” to “look for reasons not to”, the search pattern changes and confidence and certainty is replaced by doubt. That doubt is not a sign of weakness or hesitation, and it certainly isn’t evidence of failing to prepare properly. It is simply a signal that you do not yet know enough about the situation ahead to commit to the pass. This is the real purpose of planning: not to create confidence, but to reveal uncertainty.
This single reversal removes optimism bias and forces the rider to search for hazards, not gaps. It interrupts the reward‑driven filtering that so often pushes riders into the Commitment Trap. Instead of scanning the scene for what would allow the manoeuvre, the rider scans for what would prevent it. The shift is subtle but transformative: the rider is no longer trying to make the overtake work, but trying to understand whether the environment can support it at all.
A rider who understands this starts from the opposite angle. Overtaking is an open‑ended system involving multiple moving parts. Planning is no longer about working through the steps that allow an overtake but looking to expose the gaps in the picture and the uncertainties about what other road users might do, and looking for reasons not to overtake.
When you switch from processing potential for gain to processing potential for pain, you start to see the overtaking environment very differently. Lining up to pass a tractor and trailer, you stop searching for a stretch of empty road ahead and start searching for the gateway where it might turn right. Lining up a pass on an HGV on a busy road, you stop searching for a gap in oncoming traffic and analyse just how much further down the road that overtake would actually place you in the traffic stream. The scene changes shape because your priorities have changed: you are no longer looking for what would allow the overtake, but for what would destroy it. Where could hazards be hiding? What might appear in the blind area? What road layout might make a driver turn into our path? What vehicles are ahead and could one of those drivers remove the landing gap?
This single reversal removes optimism bias and forces the rider to search for hazards, not opportunities. It shifts the rider out of reward‑seeking mode and into risk‑evaluation mode. If you don’t know, you don’t go. This is not caution; it is the only rational response to an environment where perceptual latency, hidden hazards and human behaviour can change the picture faster than the rider can update it.
Because the final outcome is never fully knowable at the moment you commit, the method must begin with a simple question: “can I understand enough about this system to guarantee the outcome?" If the answer is anything other than yes, the overtake isn’t on.
Doubt, then, is not an obstacle to progress. It is the mechanism by which the rider avoids committing to an overtake built on assumptions. When planning is done properly, doubt becomes a tool — a quiet, reliable warning that the information available is insufficient. It tells the rider to wait, to gather more data, to let the picture develop.
Only when the uncertainty shrinks and the situation becomes genuinely knowable does the decision to overtake become grounded rather than hopeful so when the decision does move toward action, simplicity becomes the guiding principle. The safest overtakes are the simplest ones: a single vehicle, a long straight, full visibility, no blind areas, no following traffic, no oncoming traffic, no need to move up, no need for hard acceleration or braking.
A long, open straight with full visibility gives the rider time to evaluate the situation, time to accelerate smoothly and time to abort if something changes. Sitting further back from the vehicle ahead gives the rider more time to see, more time to think and more time to react. It widens the field of view, reveals hidden hazards earlier and reduces the pressure to make hurried decisions. A rider who sits back is not “missing opportunities”; they are creating the conditions in which genuine opportunities can be recognised.
A short gap that requires hard acceleration or precise timing offers no such protection. The faster the rider must act, the the manoeuvre depends on everything going right, the more fragile it becomes. If the overtake is so complex it requires careful timing and precision, it is the wrong overtake. Complexity collapses margin. Simplicity preserves it. So ask; “is there likely to be somewhere easier to overtake?” If the answer is probably, the decision is straightforward. You wait. The safest overtakers are not the riders who are most certain. They are the riders who remain uncertain for longer than everyone else.
THE MINDSET — “Overtaking in a world of uncertainty.”
What keeps overtaking riders out of trouble is not technical ability nor the belief that “done right, an overtake is safe”. It's not confidence and decisiveness nor the ability to rapidly “spot a gap”. It's the willingness to accept that uncertainty is always present and that even a well‑planned manoeuvre sits on top of variables the rider cannot control. Mindset is the recognition that overtaking is not a test of skill but an encounter with uncertainty. Planning reduces uncertainty, but it never removes it.
This requires stepping away from the cultural stories that treat a clean, decisive pass as a badge of competence and hesitation as weakness. Doubt is not the enemy, it's not a failure, doubt is information and a firm signal that the rider does not yet know enough to commit. A rider who treats doubt as a warning rather than a weakness becomes far more capable of making sound decisions.
Doubt should be seen as a signal to be curious:
“What don’t I know yet? What could be hidden? What might change?, What have I missed?”
Doubt reminds you to to treat the road ahead as a dynamic system rather than a fixed opportunity. Doubt reminds you choose patience when the picture is incomplete. And doubt reminds you that in some ways the most powerful overtaking decision a rider can make is not to go.
Overtaking is not a technical exercise, but a decision with the potential for a life or death outcome, made inside an uncertain, fast‑changing environment. Overtaking is optional. Arriving is not.
THE MARGIN — “Space for the Unexpected.”
Margin is the shift from “I’ll make progress” to “I’ll reduce exposure”. The only protection you have against uncertainty is the space you build around yourself. Margin is not wasted space. Margin is survival space. It is the buffer that absorbs the unknowns the rider cannot eliminate; the hidden junction, the fast‑closing oncoming vehicle, the driver ahead who turns without warning, the blind area that conceals a hazard until it is too late. Every overtake contains variables the rider cannot control, and margin is what prevents those variables from becoming consequences.
The simplest rule of margin is also the most powerful; “if you don’t KNOW, you don’t GO”.
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