Riding on the Dutch police training circuit

Jerry

2016
CBR650F ABS
May 18, 2017
The Netherlands
Last Friday I went riding on a circuit used by the Dutch police to train cops driving cars and riding motorcycles. They practice all sorts of traffic related things there, ranging from basic vehicle control and safely closing off roads to high speed pursuit situations.

They also rent the track to other organizations who want to use it for training purposes, including the company I used before to get a track riding training on the GP circuit of Zandvoort earlier this year. This training circuit is quite different though. It's not exactly a race circuit (racing is also not allowed). There are no run off areas or even curbs, so you're immediately in the grass if you get off the track. The road is built according to Dutch public road spec. It's just as wide as a two lane road and includes road markings (which actually is a brain fuck, because seeing the white stripes in the middle of the road makes your subconsciousness go "stick to the right side of the road!"). Because it's the police training track (a government owned facility), free riding isn't allowed and the format of the event really needs to be educational. So you go out in groups, overtaking is not allowed and there's front and back riders of the organization and an additional third instructor per group, as mandated by the circuit rules.

Here's a Google Maps shot of the layout we rode
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It's short but there's plenty of challenging turns. You can imagine we didn't go extremely fast (think the top speed reached on the straight was a tad below 140kph) but anyone can go fast in a straight line ;)
I can really recommend anyone who rides a motorcycle to do a track training event like this. You learn so much. Of course, you don't want to hang off your bike on a public road like you do here, but you learn so much about how much further the limits of your bike are than you think. It might save you in a panicky situation some day. I feel an event like this is a great step before going on a free riding trackday event as that may feel a tad intimidating.

Here's some pics taken by a professional photographer.
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As you can see it turned a bit dark near the end. We had a beautiful sunset during the last session
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I also have some video footage which I'll post once I've edited into something manageable :)
 
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