YellowDuck

Sorry for the diversion from the great advice you are receiving but...I don't believe you. Seriously, I don't. Of course you are countersteering somewhat. It's practically impossible to steer a motorcycle at all without countersteering. You just aren't doing it very aggressively at present.

Hmm...this place is a little slow these days. Here's a question, as we are getting well and truly into riding season in the northern US and Canada: What plans does everyone have for racing this year? After suffering an injury that resulted in a minor amputation (end of my middle finger) last season, it took all of my diplomatic skills over six months to convince my spouse that it might not be completely insane to give it a go for another year. With her hard-won consent, I will compete in Battle of the Twins Lightweight class again with my Ducat Sport Classic in the Southern Ontario Association of Racing (SOAR), and also return to endurance racing with the Prairie Dogs on Humpty Dumpty the 2003 GSXR600.. Did a bit of work on the Ducati over the winter. Got the shock rebuilt, and the fork cartridges modified so I now have compression damping adjustment on the front end, put on different bars, a quick turn throttle, wrapped the exhaust, repaired all the crash damage...little things like that. Pretty much ready to go at this point. Have a test and tune day scheduled for May 14, at the track where I used to do most of my track days. I'm interested to see if, after a season of racing, I am any faster at Cayuga. I'll probably start up my racing blog again this year as well. So, what about the rest of you?

Yes, awesome MotoGP race. MM is still the best but got the tire choice wrong. He was SO on the ragged edge for those last few laps, while VR looked like he was cruising by comparison. I naturally cheer for the old guy but I don't like his chances of winning the title. The kid is just too good. Good F1 race. Nice to see Ferrari a credible threat again. Nico is out of it - I don't see any signs of him besting Hamilton. Big story for me this season though is Williams - I wish they could just find that tiny bit extra to harass the two front teams a little more. Also anxious to see what Honda pulls together for McLaren as the season goes on - no way are they going to be happy with where they are sitting now.

The strangest incident for me was that Moto2 incident between Simeon and Zarco. From one camera angle it looked 100% like Zarco's fault; from the other angle it looked like Simeon was totally to blame. I know it was under investigation but I don't know if there was any ruling that affected Zarco's finishing position or licence points. Yes, it was impressive how Marquez could sprint that far and that fast in his leathers and helmet, then jump on the B-bike and ride like that. He was really running!

Terrible injury - sorry too hear. Luck plays such a role in how we emerge from an accident. I have crashed a few times on the street where I really, really could have hurt myself but walked away unscathed. Never injured in almost 30 years of riding, until last summer when a lowside in practice at the track cost me part of my middle finger. Just bad luck - could have easily have been another "nothing" crash. Still nothing like a busted femur - that is serious stuff. Best wishes for a complete recovery. To be honest, the difficulty in judging traction conditions is the #1 reason that I gave up riding at night quite a long time ago. Not saying it necessarily would have turned out differently in daylight, but it might have. Darkness is just one more thing that works against us, especially on sketchy roads. People say motorcycling is dangerous, and it kinda is, but looking at the statistics if you 1) don't ride without training and a license, 2) don't ride after drinking, and 3) don't ride at night, you cut the risk pretty substantially. Just food for thought. Highsides are sometimes sort of spooky and often difficult to figure out. I agree with the others that trying to solve what happened could really help set your mind at ease. I'm just less confident that you will be able to. For sure, return to the scene of the crime (preferably on four wheels) and see what you can deduce.

The other version is "slow is smooth and smooth is fast". I just take it to mean that if you are kind of frantic trying to brake super late and hard, get on the gas early and fight the rear for traction, etc., then you are not going to be able to effectively do the things that really affect your times, like stay on the fastest line and optimize your corner speeds. I've had that experience where I tried to find time with really late braking but then wasn't getting my entry speeds spot on. Doesn't work.

Understatement in my opinion. Finding a decent line is job one. After that, figuring out what gear I need to be in for every corner is absolutely essential. I memorize it and go and write it out in my notebook, then go over it in my head sitting in the pits multiple times until I have it down. *Then* I start working on braking points and corner entry speeds, moving those up as appropriate. Honestly I don't find much point in pushing on that aspect until I know 100% what gear I want to be in, everywhere. Personally there is no way I can work on optimizing my braking points and turn-in points if, in between, I am still half guessing about how many downshifts I need. ...here is the braking point - squeeze on gradually - now hard - downshift the *pre-determined* number of changes - clutch out let the slipper figure it out - still braking, already at my entry speed - turn-in point is still a bit down track, I'm coasting - next time move the braking marker up some more.... So next time I brake a few feet later...and it feels like 100 yards later...it feels impossibly fast....still what feels like some extra speed at my turn in but but I commit to the turn and trail brake into the corner....and then by the apex I realize I am still too slow!....inch it forward again on the next lap. Wash, rinse, repeat. That's a lot going on and I need concentrate 100% on hitting my braking and turn in points, and evaluating after every corner if I could have carried more speed in...the shifting needs to be totally worked out before that process really starts. Occasionally over several sessions on a new layout I will get my corner speeds up so much that I need to alter my gear selection in one corner or another, but then that is just one small change at one point on the track, easily learned. I know it seems like I am veering off topic here, but I'm really not. Proper cornering with trail-braking to maintain the steep front-end rake as you transition from braking forces to cornering forces compressing the suspension, and avoiding the instability that comes from releasing and then reapplying the brakes - that good stuff requires that you have the braking point forward enough so that you don't get your braking done way too early. If you are not naturally trail braking at least a little bit out of actual necessity - that is, if you are still coasting at all before corner entry - then this all really isn't going to come together. All of the above may be totally wrong. I am not a CSS coach (though I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night). Just relaying my own thinking on it, based on my personal experience.

So, motorcycle track riding / racing are activities that some would associate with "adrenaline junkies" - those folks that get a kick out of basically terrifying themselves for entertainment. I think the term "speed freak" is just another way to say the same thing. Is that actually part of the attraction for any of you folks? Personally, I think I am the opposite. Yes, there is an element of fear (for lack of a better word) every time I brake a bit later and throw the bike into a particular corner faster than I ever have before. But I don't really enjoy that feeling of anxiety. Similarly, on a really long straight where the speeds approach 140 mph, I find it unnerving, at least for the first few laps, but I don't get a kick out of that either. That feeling is more like a necessary evil in the overall project of trying to set the best lap time possible. For me the enjoyment is in the challenge. Not the anxiety itself but the ability to overcome it, or even suppress it, in order to do what I know in my mind is both possible and necessary to go faster. A perfect day at the track is the one where I dropped some time, but never experienced even the most fleeting moment of panic. How about the rest of you? Is the fear part of the fun, or could you do without it?

Ha, this is a fun question. My thoughts....karts and bikes a pretty different, since karts lean away from a corner like pretty much all cars. When you corner a car hard to the left you load up the right side suspension. I just had a look online at kart design and I see that all of the suspension is in the tires and frame flex, so that is all completely undamped. So, when you exit a hard left turn and immediately turn right, now the kart flops over onto the left side, but it does that pretty hard because all of the load in the right side "suspension" is unloading all at once like a spring being released, so it helps to push the kart over into its lean away from the right corner. Thus the "snappy" feel. I am thinking that performance-wise it is not really a good thing.

Nicely made video! But that's still really silly....

I feel fairly certain that this is something with which I needn't concern myself.

Stroker, sorry to hear about your crash - that is always an unsettling experience. The risk of accidents like that are one of the main reasons I gave up street riding a few years ago. Glad to hear that you are pretty much okay though. I doubt using the rear brake would have helped much. Unless you are very highly trained and skilled, using the rear in a panic situation is not terribly helpful. Better to concentrate on modulating the front as best you can. The rear end is so light under those conditions that the rear tire doesn't have much to offer in the way of braking traction anyway. More likely you lock it up and risk a highside crash. From your description it does indeed sound like you froze up a bit and saw braking as your only option, when maybe steering around the trouble would have been more effective. Very easy mistake to make! It's a very natural reaction to rely on the brakes when an emergency situation arises, but I think it is possible to train ourselves to instinctively invoke other types of evasive action as well. It does take specific, deliberate training though.

I'll add a few comments. I'm not crazy about the location you chose for practice. It looks like a concrete surface and may be kind of dusty. More importantly, as your speed increases if you make a mistake you are going to run into that curb pretty quickly. I like rchase's idea of a big open parking lot much better, assuming you can find one with a clean surface. I think your body position is pretty good for the speed you are going. You definitely want to get your head (eyes) up a bit, but I think that will be easier in a more open area where you are not in such danger of running out of room. The good thing is that you have the center of your upper body well to the inside of the steering stem (i.e., you are not crossed up on the bike), which is one of the harder things for new riders to accomplish. When you are riding somewhere where you are not just going in circles, try to always "commit" your upper body to the inside of each turn in this way. I am a little concerned about your tires, and wonder what other forum members think. In my experience it is unusual to run the front tire to the edges while the rear has so much unused rubber left. More often it is the opposite. There is a *lot* of lean angle potential left in your bike, but I am not sure I can say the same for your front tire. This worries me a little and I wonder if the tire is the correct width for the rim. It could just be that this tire does not have a very sporting profile. Either way I don't like it. Edit: Oh, and I think it is pretty common to favor turning in one direction over the other. Me, I prefer lefts as well. In my case that got better as I was using the bars less and less to hold myself on the bike, and using my legs more for that purpose. Once your hands are really just working the controls and not supporting your weight, it matters less if your throttle hand in on the high side or the low side. That's not the whole reason for preferring one direction over the other, but it can be part of it.

That sounds very unnerving. Easy to lose confidence when things like that happen with no clear cause. My first thought was engine braking, but you seem to have ruled that out. Can you be 100% sure you are not grounding any hard parts in these situations? Is there any possibility of accidental rear brake application? (unlikely I know) Is there a painted line on the road? Could your tire have contacted it? Are you running the recommended tire size for the rear rim? Did you examine the tire for contaminants near the edge of the tread on that side? Just exploring ideas.

I think what you are getting at is that if we are in the corner faster than normal, we may not be applying enough throttle to effect the proper 60/40 weight distribution front / rear, thus overloading the front tire and causing the push. So the solution is...gas it?

Great question - I look forward to reading the educated answers. I had similar a experience in my first race season, in exactly the circumstances you describe (in a race, actually second of two back-to-back races, a bit tired, pushing a little). My highly skilled reaction was to freak out, roll off somewhat, lose several places on the corner exit and then use the next two laps trying to collect myself.

Nice riding but...you can see the brake lever move on every downshift. Maybe this isn't enough movement to have an effect with his braking setup, I dunno. But it reinforces my feeling that it is pretty hard to modulate braking perfectly when you are blipping shifts.

I have thought about this a lot in the context of motor racing (mostly cars). I agree with Eirik. There is some fraction of the population that will never be any good at it at all no matter how much effort they put it. Sucks to be them. Then there is the vast majority of us, who can achieve some decent level of competence with enough time and work and persistence. But then in walks natural talent boy (or girl) who shows up for their first track day and by noon are going as fast as many of us who have been at it for years. With a couple years practice and lots of hard work and proper support, those are the ones who can win national championships and such. The rest of us just simply can't do that, no matter how much determination and money we might have available to throw at it. Sorry. I put natural talent at about 75% of the equation. Hard work and opportunity (like having a rich daddy who gets you onto a good ride early on) make up the other 25%.

He's not the first world champion to demonstrate with his words that he doesn't understand much about the physics of how how a bike actually steers. It's just proof that actually understanding how bikes work is not a prerequisite to becoming one of the best riders on the planet. Strange but true.

I suspect that you don't need instrumentation, you just need faith. According to CSS (as I understand the issue anyway) if you are off the brakes and turn it hard enough to break a tire loose, it will be the rear, not the front. It was a major step forward for me in my riding when I finally found the courage to steer it really hard - I bet you'll find the same if you just screw up your nerve and push the inside bar much harder that you do now. It's really not a matter of working your way up to a certain strength of steering input, but then no farther. You can steer it as hard as you like, unless you are trail braking.

Those videos were both taken the season before I finally found this forum and TOTWII and starting learning how to ride properly. I can't believe how much my riding has changed over three seasons. In that time I went from holding people up in intermediate group at track days to being a credible threat to podium in my local race series. I had one day of actual on-track instruction in there, but the folks on this forum get 90% of the credit for my improvement.

I am not the camera bike in this vid. I am the lead bike on camera from 8:20 to 9:30 (yellow tail). Basically holding up intermediate group. At one point (8:40) someone who probably belonged in expert passes the two bikes behind me under braking, then passes me on the *outside* exiting a tight corner. Nearly pooped my pants. I wouldn't say that my riding totally stinks in this video, but it was definitely in my "not trusting the tires yet" stage, having never yet come close to grounding a knee puck. There are some even older, more embarrassing videos of me out there somewhere, but I am not that motivated to find them... Edit: Okay, here is an even worse one. Watch from 3:20 to 4:45. Stiff on the bars much? And check out the awesome quick turn.

Ha ha....what's with the foot off the peg thing? Is he trying to dangle a leg like the MotoGP guys, or was he going for a supermoto kind of style? BTW, you guys all suck. I was awesome from day 1. Okay, maybe not. I'l see if I can find the old youtube video....

I am awestruck.

Yes perfect sense. Thanks to you and PittsDriver too for taking the time to explain in to me. Bike is away for winter now but this will be on my list of skills to try to acquire during practice next season. Chances are I will end up grenading my gearbox but hey, the bike has had a long and productive life....