Passes & Canyons Blog

Turns can be fun–or they can scare you silly.

I’ll knock on wood and say that I’ve never gone down on my motorcycle except in the mildest circumstances possible. That includes a 2 mph tip-over in mud and wiping out on gravel at about 5 mph when a dog walked out in front of me from between two cars. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t come close a few times. And there were plenty of other times when in truth I probably wasn’t all that close to disaster but managed to scare myself pretty badly just the same.

I’m happy to be able to say that most of these incidents were a good many years ago, when I was nowhere near as experienced or as good a rider as I am now. That fact testifies to the folly of someone thinking they can get on a motorcycle and ride it just fine without any sort of formal training. Like me. Managing to not go down and being a good rider are not at all the same thing. I’m a good rider today because I have by now had a great deal of experience AND I have taken the Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s Beginning Rider Course (twice) and their Experienced Rider Course. Plus a couple other classes.

Almost without exception, the situations where I’ve been scared have been when I’ve been in a turn and either found myself going too fast or seen loose gravel on the road. You know as well as I do that there is nothing that will get your adrenaline pumping more than being leaned over in a turn and feeling that rear tire let go when it hits gravel or a patch of water. At that point there’s nothing you can do but ride through it and count on your tire to hook up again once you’ve cleared the hazard. Fortunately, that’s usually what happens.

Get a Grip

Going too fast is different. Most importantly, you can learn better riding skills that will help you avoid the situation in the first place or how to cope with it if you failed to avoid it.

The crucial factor in a sharp curve is traction. Leaning and braking both consume traction. If you’re going straight down the road at 90 degrees vertical you have maximum braking traction. Leaning into a curve it can be very dangerous to use the brakes because the farther you’re leaning the less traction you have left to brake with. Thus, the best way to enter a curve is to do your braking coming into the curve, before you initiate your lean.

Rider coaches will tell you not to touch your brake while in a curve, except very, very gently as a last resort. I have actually violated this rule from the very beginning because I didn’t understand the physics of it. Suffice it to say that I’ve gotten away with it because I’ve always been very gentle on the brake, but I’ve known instinctively that it was a risk and there were a lot of times when I was very scared. Now that I’ve learned more I do this a lot less, but I’m actually fairly confident in my ability to do it because I’ve been doing it successfully for so long.

The other factor in finding yourself too fast in a curve is taking a huge leap of faith and trusting in the bike, and that’s a mighty scary thing to do, too. The fact is, motorcycles and motorcycle tires are very good these days, and they have abilities that exceed those of most riders. That is, you can safely lean most bikes over farther than the rider has the courage to lean.

When it’s a do or die situation, though, you’re going to be a whole lot better off scaring yourself silly by leaning even further, than if you don’t try it and just accept that you’re going to crash. It’s hard to find that courage but seriously, what’s the worst that can happen if the only other alternative is crashing for sure? I make a point sometimes of leaning way off the bike, keeping it as upright as possible, even on easy turns. I figure I want it to be muscle memory coming into play if I ever desperately need to make that move.

In the end, I think what has saved me all these times was fear. I have been more afraid of crashing than I have been of pushing beyond my comfort zone. But fear is no fun, so I’ve worked to become a better rider and these days I just don’t find myself in these situations much anymore. It makes for a much more pleasant ride.

Biker Quote for Today

200mph, no hands. Damn that’d be cool… right up to the part where you die.

Balance and shifting of weight are important at slow speeds.

I’ve had my V-Strom for a couple years now and while I’ve been off the pavement a number of times with it I really want to do so a lot more. Now, in previous years I have gone on some good rides in the dirt with Ron Coleman but we didn’t get out this year.

What we did do, though, was spend a little time in a nearby empty lot working on slow speed maneuvers. Ron has a lot more off-road experience than me and he figured he’d help me with my skills.

It turned out, however, that I actually am more advanced than he expected. He wanted to teach me about trail-braking and he started off by demonstrating. Now you try it, he said. So I did, going in tight circles and figure 8s and while I wasn’t as good as he was he immediately saw that I was no novice.

So, not to make assumptions, but you do know what trail-braking is, don’t you? If not you really ought to learn. It’s just a matter of revving the engine while pressing lightly on the rear brake as you make slow-speed maneuvers. Revving the engine bumps up the gyroscope effect of the engine, creating stability, while using the brake keeps you going slow. Done right you can move at walking pace and just walk around in circles or–more usefully–make a U-turn in a tight area.

But Ron was making his turns tighter than I was and that’s where he was able to teach me something. It was counter-balancing. Making those tight turns he didn’t just rev and trail-brake, he leaned way off the seat to the side away from the turn. The more you can lean the bike the tighter you can turn, but you don’t want to lean the bike so far it falls down. If you lean way off in the other direction your center of gravity remains stable and you don’t go down.

I’m accustomed to leaning in the turns at speed, but this is different. When racers go around curves you’ve seen them leaning way off into the curve, scraping knees and elbows. Same principle in the opposite direction. At speed like that the idea is to shift your weight off so the bike can stay more upright and not low-side on you. At walking speed you lean the bike, not your body, into the curve and shift your body the other direction to counter the weight of the bike.

So I tried it and sure enough, I could make those turns even tighter. I wasn’t really good at it and was a bit unsure, so I definitely need to practice. And I will. And I’ll become a better rider. Thanks Ron.

Biker Quote for Today

Straights are for fast bikes, turns are for fast riders.