Ride Agile! by Steve Dowse - HTML preview

CORNERING

Cornering is what generates both fear and delight for most riders. Finding the rhythm or flow through a series of turns either on the road or on the track brings a feeling of deep inner satisfaction. You ride the road, it doesn’t ride you. But get it wrong and your blood runs cold as the crash looks inevitable.

Cornering combines control techniques: gear shifting braking, steering and accelerating with your set of decisions about position and speed. Turns are different, even the same piece of asphalt needs different decisions to suit the conditions and the traffic. But some things don’t change, so here are a few tips.

Riders cause themselves more problems by entering turns too fast than by anything else. It is dangerous on the street and loses time on the track. Motorcycles are just about the fastest accelerating vehicle you can get your hands on, so what’s the big deal about slowing down?

On the track it’s the speed you exit the corner that determines your speed down all of the next straight and makes the big difference in lap times. Don’t take my word for it; test it out for yourself. Brake a touch earlier and you get the luxury of setting your entry speed and position exactly how you want them, something you can never achieve when you are scared of running out of road. For track work, figure out what line will give you the best launch out of the turn and work on setting that up. When you’ve

got the answer, see then if you can leave the braking a little later and still get your line.

On the street, going in slower allows you to use the line that gives you maximum view through the turn. The earlier you can see that’s it’s safe to get back on the power, the better. The whole problem with riding on the street is not knowing what you’re going to find next. If there were track marshals every 100ft this caution into blind turns wouldn’t be needed! But on the street what you can’t see you can’t plan for and what you can’t plan for can kill you.

Sooner or later (usually sooner!) you will find yourself going into a turn way too fast. You misjudged it, there’s a kid running out or patch of oil, a crash on the track, the reason doesn’t matter. It will happen. So prepare for it by deliberately going into a challenging but open turn too fast, maybe 20mph too fast. For this to work you need to feel real fear about not making it round. Your only objective is to stay in one piece. Stopping at the side is OK. Turn, straighten, brake, turn... all tactics are valid.

Yeah, this is not safe! It does improve your reaction to an unexpected crisis situation really well. You learn to use your motorcycle control skills under pressure. You will trust your quick judgments more, be cooler in your reactions and more instinctive in your control actions.

Face the fear
Can I really recommend this for street only riders? YES! Do a track day. Ride someone else’s bike if the thought of dropping your own is too awful. Face the fear and ride through it. I honestly believe it will do more to better and safer rider.

Too much throttle while you are leaned over can and will break the traction of the rear tire. The rear slides towards the outside of the turn, pointing the bike too far into the inside. Classic ‘oversteer’. You need to come off the throttle so that the rear tire can grip again, steering into the skid to straighten up. As with all skids, the quicker you react the better. Suddenly regaining grip with the wheels pointing in a different direction to the way you are travelling will throw you off. Fortunately power skids are the easiest type to tame. That’s why I recommend that you gain experience dealing with them before you explore other kinds of skidding and sliding.

Traction control is ABS in reverse. Instead of limiting the amount of braking force applied to the wheel, it limits accelerating force. The benefits and limitations are similar: it will stop you skidding but it will not be quite as good as a top rider at balancing power against available grip in the dry. A skilled racer may put on enough drive out of a turn to literally steer the bike on the throttle. He feels the oversteer increasing or reducing through the seat of his pants and eases or rolls on throttle appropriately. The rear tire isn’t skidding but it is running at with what the tire engineers call a slip angle of maybe 10°. Traction control doesn’t react until a real skid has started, then chops the power. Oscillating between a smaller slip angle and a skid is not as good as being able hold the tire at the edge of its traction limit with constant tiny corrections. If you can manage that in the dry you’re racer material. Do it in the wet and you’re on your way to a world title! For the rest of us there are 3 realistic options: go gently on the gas, learn to recognize the early symptoms of a skid and correct it or... if you can’t control that right hand... invest in traction control.

Going down the gears on the way in is just a matter of making smooth downshifts at the right point, but which gear is right to take the turn? For machines with plenty of power on tap the answer is simple; the highest gear that keeps you in the power band but out of full throttle until you exit the turn. On a racer you can generally change the gearing to get it just right for the turns that matter most. On a road bike you have a broader power band and less reason to push the limits.

The big mistake is to change down too far, scream through the turn then have to up-shift while still leaned right over. Just rolling off and back on the power will wobble the bike and disturb your line, no matter how smooth and slick you are. On turns you don’t know, stay one gear higher than you could drop down to and concentrate on doing a smooth controlled turn without worrying about running out of revs. On a ‘new to you’ track, you’ll probably need that gear anyway once you’ve learned its tricks and found your lines.

Tire technology advances all the time. In general you can have more grip with less life and the more grip you want the more picky the tire gets about the conditions it works in. A racing tire just won’t grip properly if it’s too cold and will overheat, blister and shed chunks if it’s too hot. No matter what they say in the ads, you will never get race grip out of street tires but they are much more accommodating of variations.
Similarly with breakaway. You might find a tire that hangs on a bit longer but when it lets go it does it with a bang. Tires that warn you of the approaching limit before ‘letting go’ in a smoother way are the easiest to live with. If you want to play around at the limit of adhesion, get tires that allow you to learn about slip sliding around rather than drop the bike. On the street, premium tires with good grip wet and dry and a ‘soft’ breakaway characteristic will give you heaps more confidence and fun than racing slicks.

Have you watched riders maneuvering at slow speed? Some of them look like penguins waddling along with an egg resting on their feet! A skill that is useful and helps you look cool is riding tight turns feet up at walking pace or less.

The trick is set the rear brake to drag and hold it there. By . By 8 feet from walking pace in neutral. OK, now use the throttle to give you about 6mph in first gear with the brake dragging and hold that throttle position. Slow down by pulling in the clutch. Using only the clutch you have superfine control at slow speed. Because the engine is pulling and has enough revs to be smoothed out, there is no jerkiness. Have you ever noticed that just the action of starting to depress the brake pedal, before the brake bites at all, disturbs the bike at very low speed, just because you stiffened you leg muscles? Well no such problems here.

With a little practice, you can make turns with the bars at full lock and your feet up. How cool is that? The best brake and throttle settings vary from bike to bike. A bike with high gearing and a narrow power band may require that you throttle back a little as you declutch to stop the engine screaming. The smoother you are the less clutch and throttle change you need. The most important thing is to keep that brake drag constant and control the power to the rear wheel with a sensitive left hand.