Study: Sport bikes dangerous

• By JARED JANES
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 8, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Stephanie Futrell called her mother a few hours before midnight June 23 to tell her she would be home within an hour. Then she told her friends she was taking a short ride on the back of the sport bike.

“She was going to go up the road and come right back,” her mother, Cheryl Futrell, said. “She never made it back.”

Futrell, 19, died at a hospital June 25 from injuries she suffered two days earlier when the driver of the motorcycle she was a passenger on ran off the road near Port Vincent, ejecting Futrell and the 24-year-old driver, who were both wearing helmets.

Louisiana State Police booked the driver, Daniel Varnado, at the end of June on counts of careless operation and manslaughter, but both of Futrell’s parents said they do not blame him for the wreck.

What they question is whether the type of motorcycle Futrell was on and Varnado’s relative lack of experience on it might have played a role in the crash, said her father, Aubrey Futrell.

The sport bikes were linked in a national study to a disproportionate number of fatalities relative to the number of the sport bikes on the road. But motorcycle advocates say that a lack of proper training is a leading cause of fatalities on sport bikes.

Futrell said Varnado had the Suzuki GSX-R750 — a high performance racing bike that can reach speeds of up to 170 mph — for a short time before he took Stephanie Futrell for a ride along a stretch of La. 16.

A week earlier when Stephanie Futrell visited her father at his home in Jackson, Miss., for Father’s Day, Aubrey Futrell, a certified motorcycle safety instructor, took Stephanie Futrell for a ride on his touring motorcycle, he said. When his daughter expressed interest in buying a sport bike, he told her that was the only kind of motorcycle she could not have.

“Kids don’t understand how dangerous and unforgiving these (sport) bikes are,” he said. “It’s not a safe bike in my opinion to be on.”

Sport bikes are motorcycles built for racing but allowed on public streets. A popular choice for younger motorcycle riders because of their cheap price relative to their high performance, sport bikes usually produce more horsepower per pound than other motorcycles.

Since state and local agencies do not keep statistics on the number of registrations or fatalities by type of motorcycle, it’s impossible to tell what the fatality rate is in Louisiana for sport bikes, Louisiana State Police spokesman Trooper Johnnie Brown said.

Anecdotal evidence provided by troopers on the highways suggests there are more sport bikes on roadways than before, Brown said, but the same could be said for most motorcycles.

A rising number of motorcycle license registrations have become the norm nationwide with a 51 percent increase in registrations from 2000 to 2005, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. That coincides with an increase in the number of motorcycle fatalities.