Guide to cornering a motorcycle

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Guide to cornering a motorcycle
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Guide to cornering a motorcycle

Cornering Part 2: Creating smooth transitions
Drive properly through the curves

Cornering does not consist in piecing individual arcs together or in a straight line. It becomes really good and it is most fun when the transitions from one to the other are fluid. That has to be learned and practiced.

Ralf Schneider

October 13, 2011

Braking, rolling, accelerating – the MOTORRAD graphic shows the individual phases of cornering in different colors and in the correct order. That is clear and understandable, methodologically justified, but not entirely correct. Because the change from one phase to the other is never as abrupt, as sharp as the clearly separated colored stripes suggest. Nor should you.

When approaching a curve, you don’t pull the brake lever with a jerk, but first turn down the accelerator, lightly press the foot brake lever and reach for the hand brake lever when you feel your weight shifting forward. This sequence alone has a lot of potential for optimization. You can turn the throttle and grip the lever in one movement. Then they slide into each other quickly without looking choppy.

If the driver now has to shift down one or more gears while approaching a curve, things really get going: pull the clutch, operate the gear lever, at the same time keep the brakes on, after shifting down, carefully engage, release the brakes, turn in – everything wants to be done in a meaningful sequence or at the same time. And that’s just the work of hands and feet. In the meantime, the head has to process a large amount of information and make decisions. And the less he is concerned with the technical issues of motorcycling, the better he can design the driving program for the next few seconds.

So it doesn’t help: Once again, as always when riding a motorcycle, the processes and their variations have to be practiced. Anyone who has to study the phases of a driving maneuver one after the other still needs training. And even the motorcyclists, for whom the processes have long since become flesh and blood – the psychologist and behavioral researcher Bernt Spiegel would have written “which they have given to the deep person” – are not badly advised to go through these processes from time to time and to optimize them if necessary . Because just to the question of how many fingers you use to pull the handbrake lever while still using the handlebars, five different motorcyclists will find six different answers. Pascal Eckert, the pilot in the opening photo, takes an interesting approach, pulling the lever with his middle and ring finger, just placing his little finger on it and holding the throttle between the index finger and thumb. In the next moment, when he has completely released the brake, which is only slightly applied, he can pull up the gas again in order to support the drive in an inclined position during the roll phase. Valentino Rossi, on the other hand, shifts from the brake lever to the throttle with all four front fingers, but still manages smooth load changes. Incidentally, it should be noted that the lead pilot can shift down and engage the clutch sensitively even at a considerable angle. That belongs to the high school.

Keyword Rossi and company: You don’t have to strive to drive as fast as they do. They are role models more as masters of the fast yet seamless transition, the integration of complex action patterns into an even more complex overall process – driving. Most of them put a lot of effort into adapting all the details so that everything falls into place. Normal drivers shouldn’t be too bad to at least correctly adjust the position of the handlebars and levers and the play in the throttle cables

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