Ride Agile! by Steve Dowse - HTML preview

GIMME A STEER

Steering motorcycles well is a subject with a bit of mystique about it. A number of studies have found that steering wrong in an emergency is a major cause of accidents. Obviously it is an area many people are not 100% confident about and I sure had a bunch of problems myself. I don’t mind admitting my deficiencies now but I guess that at the time I was convinced I could handle my machine as well as the next guy.

When I first started riding I had trouble steering at speeds much over 30mph and my line tended not to be tight enough. I spoke to my cousin and he told me I needed to push down on the grip on the side I wanted to turn to get the bike set into the turn. Also, I should pull it back up to straighten up again. The advice worked and I rode that way for a couple of years, knowing nothing about counter steering and picking up some bad habits in the process.

When I got a bigger machine, I used more body steer, moving my weight to help lean the bike with my knees. At the time, I reckoned I was pretty slick! I honestly don’t know exactly when I discovered that steering was much more effective than the brute strength approach, but what a difference it made! I stopped putting weight through a locked elbow joint, loosened up and got precise control. Only later did I realize that I was steering the ‘wrong’ way. I don’t know whether this proves how bad I was or how some things are best learned from feel rather than theory.

Since those days there has been plenty of stuff published about counter steering and how you need to steer left to make a right turn. But there is a bit more to it than that. When you drive a car, you steer by turning the wheel the way you want to go then you have to hold the wheel turned until you have finished the turn. Bikes don’t work that way at all! I have heard physicists argue at length about how motorcycles turn and I have no intention of getting sucked into theories about trail and gyroscopic precession here. But the thing that ties theory and practice together is the fact that a motorcycle barely needs to be held into a turn. You ‘push’ to make the steer, the bike leans, you stop ‘pushing’ and the bike holds the lean and makes the turn. Once the turn is established, it is an almost stable situation that only needs a tiny steering input to maintain it. If you have a nice big empty parking lot, you can prove this by doing a complete circle totally hands off at say 30mph. Something that follows a circular path without being positively guided doesn’t seem quite right... but it is. Try going loose during a long sweeping curve. Unless the bike gets disturbed by something on the road, it hardly needs any input from you through the grips until you want to straighten up. It is much easier to think in terms of the steering forces you apply rather than the angle that the bars turn through. Cars work on angles, bikes work on forces. If you look at a bike cornering at any decent speed there is hardly any angle on the front wheel at all.

So the long and short of is this: steering sets the lean, the lean angle sets the turn. My cousin told me to ‘push the grip down’ to set up the turn and ‘pull it back up’ to end it. He didn’t say you had to keep pushing down to hold it, we both knew from experience you didn’t have to. He did say I needed to pull it back up. Looking back I can see there were deep truths hidden in his statements that completely passed me by at the time. To this day I still regard it as ‘pushing’ to set the turn and ‘pulling’ to straighten up although I think the turning forces I use are more the other way round!

I know I am going on too long here but you need to understand what is happening and then practice the ‘feel’. That way you will be better able to learn from structured experimenting rather than just trial and error. First, prove to yourself that you can use counter steering by pure rotation of the bars to set and remove turn (and thus lean angle), without any up or down force at all. Next, modify your normal style to use more of the pure rotation and less of the brute force and body steer input. Try to keep your elbow joints loose; it really helps.

Once you have settled in to this ‘steer to lean to turn’ style, it’s time to get more advanced. Steering when already in a turn is what gets round a sudden hazard on the road and gives you multiple lines to choose from on the track. A Joe Average rider only ever does fixed radius curves. He can’t really cope with decreasing radius turns and he has one line for each turn on the track.

To hone your skills as quickly as possible, corner wrong(!)... then correct. Start practicing with too tight a line and open your line part way through the turn. Do it early in the turn then go later, correcting only when you are obviously running out of road on the inside.
A lot of
accidents would be avoided if all riders were taught to do this When you are comfortable steering to ease your line part way through a turn, swap over and tighten part way through.

It is partly psychological because steering to the outside of the turn when you are already going wide and running out of road feels unnerving. You know it works but at first it won’t feel like it’s going to work. It’s a major sticking point for some people. So go easy and work your way into it, shifting the edge of your comfort zone a little at a time.

Before you realize it, you will have blown Joe Average riding into the weeds. On the street you will be able to cope with unexpected tightening curves or debris in a turn. You will find new lines and double apex curves that you never knew existed. You will enjoy new feelings of confidence and of being in control in turns. It’s great!