Road Riding
ROAD RIDING
DAN HUNT
TURN, TURN, TURN
Emergencies in which you need to quickly turn a bike are rare. They tend to catch you by surprise. You may already be in a turn, just entering one, coming out of one, or going straight. Whatever the case, you either have to turn a little, a lot, or merely change the degree to which you’re already turning. The first thing that causes trouble here is that a turning action is often applied to an emergency in which stopping or slowing is actually the desirable maneuver.
Turning actions, from straight up, or while deepening or shallowing an existing turn, are most appropriate for the following types of situations:
1. Minor deviations from established direction at high speed when no stop is necessary and there is plenty of road left for the change.
2. Major deviations from established direction at low, easily handled speed.
Examples of causes for minor deviations at high speed are such hazards as fallen rocks, oil slicks, gravel, or even a painted line on the road. The important point in avoiding these types of hazards efficiently and smoothly, without twitching your machine into an undulating nightmare or getting off your established line of travel too far, is to stop looking at the hazard once you first recognize it. Desert riders know the problem well. Call it the “rock fixation syndrome.” Keep your eyes fixed on the rock and you’ll hit it every time. . . even if you see it 50 feet ahead.
What is happening is that the motorcycle, so responsive to your every command, tends to travel in the direction that you happen to be looking. You can prove this for yourself by riding along a straight road and averting your eyes and head 45 degrees to the left. You’ll find that it is very difficult to keep the bike from turning left to follow your eyes, unless, of course, you’re cheating by stealing glances back at your planned direction of travel.
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So when you see a hazard, direct your eyes away to the planned new route of escape. Forget the damned rock. You’ve already seen it, you know it exists, you know where it is and, unless you’re some kind of geology freak, you don’t want a closer look at it.
Look beyond the obstacle to your escape line, and, as if by magic, your eyes will tell your body, which in turn will tell the bike to go around said rock. The body is loathe to steer a motorcycle in a direction that is not being checked out by the eyes. The unseen direction is an unknown possibility. Everybody knows that humans instinctively avoid unknowns because unknowns create fear.
I successfully tested this theory a few years back on a mountain road in California. The obstacle was not a rock, but rather a car, which planted itself in a dead stop in front of my sweeping left-hand drive into a 55-mph bend. The driver started to turn into a dirt side road without looking. He saw me swooping toward him just after he crossed the middle line and, with slothlike reaction, he brought his dinosaur to a stop, blocking my lane entirely.
Turn inside to the other free lane? Hardly. Straighten and brake hard, thereby running onto the soft shoulder and locking the front end up? Hardly. There was a steep, high dirt wall 10 feet off the pavement. I looked beyond the car to the wall, and then to the 10-foot patch of dirt in between car and wall.
Lifting the bike out of my established bank ever so slightly, I opted for going around the car on the dirt. At worst, it would be a glancing blow against the bank. Before leaving the pavement, I put in just a touch of brakes. I kept my eyes on that dirt carpet and where I would hopefully go if my road tires didn’t wash out. Onto the shoulder, I fed in some throttle to hold the bike in a bank. Keeping the gas on would help transfer weight to the rear. If the bike should let go, the idea was for the rear wheel to let go first. Once past the car, I didn’t look at the wall. It was looming closer, as they say in literary books, but its loomingness was rather irrelevant. Instead, I looked at a shallow ridge of hard-packed dirt running along its base. Because my eyes were on it, that’s where my wheels went, and as they went I laid the bike over as hard as I could. It worked. My wheels skittered up to the bank, took Continued from page 92
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hold, and then the bank guided bike and rider back toward the road, safe and scared as hell.
Major deviations at lower speeds are an easier proposition. As with the above, heavy braking in a steep turn is self-defeating, as the straightening force of braking action will hinder the turn even if you don’t wash the front end out. The feeling you get is one of the front not wanting to turn. If turn you must, then turn. But make sure you really want to turn, rather than slow first and then turn.
As your proficiency increases, you’ll discover that the gap between full-force braking and a no-braking turn grows narrower. They will overlap into one another. Playing road racer, you’ll find yourself going deep into a turn, using the brakes and gearbox to slow down. You’ll discover yourself well into a bank with the brakes still providing a good measure of slowing force. Only when your line is established in the tightest part of the turn, and you have heeled the bike over as far as it’s going to heel, will you be off the brakes entirely and back onto the throttle lightly. Riding like this, you will find yourself wellcommitted in any turn. A wise man, committed so deep, knows where he is going and where he’s arriving before he commits.
Inevitably there will come a time when your tires let go. Either you got in too deep, or you abused the front or rear brake. Or the tire hit a wet patch. Or it hit some fine sand that trickled off a bank. Or you hit a patch of ice. Your only object in these loss-of-traction emergencies is to get the bike upright. There should be nothing else that concerns you. Most of the time you should leave your controls alone or get off them if you’ve been too hamhanded.
If you’ve ever had a front-end washout on pavement, you know that it happens fast. From the instant of that first snapping, yawing motion, you are playing in a game with meager odds. Keeping this in mind, you know that your resources for recovery are also limited. Taking typical situations one by one, here’s what you may expect, as well as how and how not to deal with them.
FRONT-WHEEL WIPEOUT
This action invariably occurs in a bank from abusive application of the front brake. If you catch it just as it begins, release the front brake instantly. Maintain strict attention to smooth directional control after traction is regained. Snapping motion at the beginning of the slide and the end of it may cause severe suspension and frame oscillation.
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In straight-ahead skids caused by overbraking in emergency stops, ease off on the front brake while holding your body and your handlebars straight. Make balance corrections after the front wheel regains traction.
A rarer type of front-wheel skid occurs either in wet weather—particularly as the wheel passes over a line painted on the road—or on a grease spot. Hopefully, your angle of bank is shallow when you hit a hazard like this. If so, you’ll feel a floating sensation at the handlebars; it becomes instantly easy to turn the wheel into the turn, with, of course, no effect. Resist turning the wheel into the turn, concentrating instead on reducing the bank and adding power smoothly to take the weight off the front wheel. Treat yourself and your machine as though both were suspended on a tightrope. The situation is the same as riding in marginal traction: sudden and wild control inputs will result in loss of traction.
BACK-WHEEL WIPEOUTS
In braking, back-wheel skids are usually caused by a) too much rear brake, either banking or traveling straight; b) locking up the back wheel while downshifting, due to improper synchronization of engine speed with drive-train speed; c)engine seizure. Obviously, you correct a brake skid by decreasing your pressure on the back brake. Locking up the back wheel during a downshift sequence can be corrected by whipping in the clutch; once traction is regained, an extra margin of safety is gained by selecting a higher gear before you again release the clutch; the problem may be that you accidentally selected too low a gear.
In all situations where traction is threatened, remember one thing: the traction produced by a tire that is not skidding is somewhat better than the traction produced by a tire that is already skidding. That means that any corrective action you apply to a skidding tire has to be even more gentle than the action that you applied to prevent the skid in the first place. If you get all unstrung in the early stages of a skid—flailing your handlebars, cranking the throttle, grabbing indiscriminately at every lever and control handle on the machine, or (incredible, but some people do it) dropping both feet to the ground in an attempt to keep yourself upright—you’ve had it. Instead, keep your body compact, arms and shoulders and legs collected near the machine. Direct changes of bank with subtle counter-shifts of your upper body. Try to keep your feet on the pegs. If the skid is too far along to correct normally, dropping one foot like a dirt tracker could help.
You might want to practice a few skids on a dirt road, where losses in traction are more gentle. A safe brake skid can be initiated with the bike in straight-up position; just stomp on the back brake for a second, and let up when you feel the back wheel coming around. The dirt practice will be invaluable. Just remember that pavement, because it offers such good traction, also has a much more sudden transition point from full traction to no traction at all. Those neat tricks you learned on the dirt are not so applicable on the hard stuff, even though the control and coordination from dirt riding is.
