You may or may not have heard of Reise, and that’s because it’s a fairly new tyre manufacturer that only recently entered the market with its off-road-focused rubber. Our first outing with the TrailR 50-50 tyres revealed them to be the best made-in-India tyres for off-road riding at the moment. So to help its existing and prospective customers get the most out of these tyres, Reise is going to be periodically conducting an off-road school called the TrailR Academy, which, this time around, featured tuition from nothing less than Dakar competitors. Here’s how the inaugural round of the two-day school went.
We were greeted on the morning of Day 1 by Ashish Raorane, one of India’s only Dakar finishers, and Arunas Gelazninkas, two-time winner of the Original by Motul category (you probably know it by its earlier name, Malle Moto). After a brief session of adjusting the levers on the Xpulse 200 4V we’d be using, we hit the track. This was easier said than done, with this being Gurugram in the middle of June, with mercury levels crossing the 40-deg C mark.
Nevertheless, the initial few drills were quite beginner-friendly fundamental concepts, which helped us get in the groove of things. First up was braking techniques, which on dirt can often be quite the opposite of what you use on tarmac. One of the most important building blocks of off-road riding is body position, and the academy covers this as well.
The Throttle Shrottle Moto Ranch we were riding at provided a good variety of courses that allowed us to try out a number of different techniques and sample different situations. Cones were also used to create a slalom course, which we tackled in a number of different ways (a combination of sitting, standing and using only one arm or one leg). All this helped refine our body position, mostly because using incorrect body position creates a whole world of problems.
The drills got more intense as the day wore on and, by the end of day 1, we were railing around a 180-degree turn that was in the form of a near-vertical wall. The idea here was to get used to the bike being an extreme orientation, which then also gives you the confidence to use the support of smaller berms on something like a motocross track.
Day 2 brought even more intensity as we attacked boulder fields and slush pits. The most taxing of the lot, though, was a large, deep horseshoe-shaped ditch with very steep inclines leading into and out of it, and fine sand at the bottom. This helped combine a lot of the learnings that we picked up over the course of the school – carefully maintaining speed going down the slope into the pit, then getting on the gas as soon as possible to maintain momentum through the soft sand, and playing with the throttle to carry drive coming up the steep climb out of the pit.
Considering the complexity and variety of obstacles and drills at the school, this isn’t something we’d recommend to someone completely new to off-roading. There is a lot of condensed learning involved, and if you haven’t done any riding in the dirt before, you’re likely to be faced with a lot of very alien scenarios and sensations. This will have most newbies resorting to instinctive reactions that often aren’t the correct techniques for the job.
One area of the TrailR Academy that can improve is batch size – we had a ratio of about 13 riders per coach, and this resulted in fairly limited time to put into practice each drill we learned. There were open track sessions at the end of each day, but these weren’t necessarily conducted under the observation of the coaches.
The school rounded out with a couple of interesting and entertaining amateur races at the end of day 2, and all in all, it was a good mix of fun and learning. Summing up, the TrailR Academy could prove to be a useful tool to riders with an intermediate skill level off-road, who are looking to further improve their technique, and can do so under the watchful eyes of some very capable instructors.
