Hotfoot

+1 on that, and here's another warning, when I took CSS Level 1, I was NOT a serious rider, not by a long shot, and look what happened to me! Now I have a budget specifically for track days and racing... and an S1000rr in the garage!

This ranks up there with the "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" quote from cover of the final version of the Whole Earth Catalogue (made famous by Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005). Kai Hey Gorecki, nice take on the RRW article; I thought it was a nice history of Keith's career and the school, but your perspective on it made me see it in a different light, thank you. Since we're talking about quotes, here's one from one of Keith's articles, that I really liked - it struck me as insightful and ABSOLUTELY TRUE: "Ignoring risk is a by-product of passion." It's handy when you have to defend your reasons for doing what you love to do.

Absolutely not. No way is 57 too old, you will have a great time, and you will not feel out of place at all. An average CSS school day has a VERY wide range of ages. Sign up, you'll be glad you did.

This is an very annoying part of riding a lower HP bike at open track days. Many riders on 1000cc bikes take an extreme outside entrance to the corner, slow WAY down, tiptoe through the corner, then pin it on the exit, leaving you no easy way to get by them. The BEST thing to do (in my opinion) is take more CSS schools and get faster so you can move up to a level at the track days where inside passing IS allowed, usually the advanced groups are safer to ride in anyway, much more predictable! That may sound flippant, but it is quite sincere, I ride a 250cc bike and you couldn't pay me to go back and ride in the slow group at an open track day, it is REALLY tough to make passes if you can't go inside. In the meantime, one thing that can help is to hang back a little on the entry (so the slow rider is not blocking you and forcing you to brake hard), carry more speed into the corner and try to get around on the outside. Unfortunately, an inexperienced person on a high HP bike could gun it mid-corner and go wide, and you don't have the option to hold a tight line and pass on the inside, so he could potentially push you off the track, so you want to get the pass done as early as possible in the turn. Naturally if the rider is aggressive, he/she can pin the throttle and pass you back if there is a straight right after the turn, but often after you do it a few times they usually give it up or make a mistake and run wide and you can pull away. The best trick is not to be so close to the slow rider on the turn entry that he robs all your momentum going into the turn. It also makes it easier to look ahead at passing options, instead of getting stuck staring at his taillight. You can usually gain the most ground on point and shoot riders in a series of turns (chicanes, etc.) but can't usually pass IN those sections since an outside pass suddenly becomes an inside pass in the next turn - but you CAN try to set up the rider for a pass at the outside of the last turn in the series. Or, sometimes you can find a long sweeping turn that sucks inexperienced riders into an early, inside turn point, a great chance to pass them on the outside at the entry. Check with your track day officials and see how they define inside passing - can you pass on the EXIT of the turn, on the inside? If so, you might be able to hang back a little, take a later turn point, quick turn the bike to a later apex and get an early drive to come up the inside on the exit of the turn. You also might request a passing flag, if this is a constantly occurring problem and you are really being held back.

+1 But I could be totally wrong, though. Kai Yeah, I think so too. In go-kart racing, if your front wheel hits the guy in front's back wheel, the upward force of his tire and the downward spin of yours LAUNCHES your front wheel up, and can flip your kart. I think it has very little effect on the guy in front - unless you land on him! Presumably that is why rental carts have bumpers to prevent wheel contact. Regarding the question about whether to take a chance of hitting someone in front versus worrying about someone hitting you from behind... well, I'd do about anything I could to keep my front wheel from hitting someone's back tire! On the racetrack you don't have mirrors so you often don't have enough info to know if someone is likely to hit you from behind anyway, and generally it is up to the person behind not to plow into you. So I'd make sure not to hit the person in front of me, and let the person behind me take care of himself. (Caveat - I always do take care not to swerve suddenly across the track, in case someone is coming up behind me, and I try not to ever pass someone and then cut across their front wheel!)

Congrats on getting into EE school. I'm a recovering EE (I got into management instead, so I joined The Dark Side) and there are several other Engineers hanging around in the forums. And having helped a couple of students with uni prep courses for advanced math, I can tell that there's huge difference between how people learn math the best way. Unfortunately, the high school teachers are not always those who are the best at learning math to youngsters. But huge hat's off to your feat, and I hope your success at DE will keep your motivation going (EE match can be a b***ch). Oh, and welcome to the forum and hopefully to CSS. Kai Me, too (recovering EE, now in management). Welcome, Jordan! Hope to see you at Barber, I love that track, too. Sounds like the CSS course will be perfect for you, it is a great way to improve your control of the motorcycle and thus your confidence, and that will certainly help sort out the frustrations you mentioned in your first post. I'm sure you'll have a blast, just make sure you don't get so hooked that you want to spend all your study time at the racetrack!

My pleasure; your questions are good and I am enjoying the discussions. I, too, have noticed that I pick up different things when I re-read any of Keith's books. As my experience and riding level change, different techniques become more meaningful to me, or things I might have glossed over before suddenly have new importance. I'm sure this is part of what makes learning to ride such an interesting journey - and also why Keith's books continue to be the gold standard, year after year - you can refer to them over and over and find new things every time.

As Brad said, this is CSS's first time running at NOLA. The thing that will determine whether the off track bikes (brake bike, lean bike, etc.) can be used, is whether there is a safe and usable area to run them, so being their first time there, they won't know for sure until they get there the day before and set up. (But most tracks have some usable area, so cross your fingers. ) The camera bike should be available, barring any unforeseen technical issues. As far as what to bring, again Brad is on target - CSS has about everything you need, you'll just want something to wear under your leathers - UnderArmour works especially well, helps keep you cool and is thin and slides easily under the leathers. (A regular cotton T shirt is less comfortable, and can get bunched up or damp.) You may prefer to use your own gloves, or helmet, or boots, but that is up to you; sometimes having your own gear is nice, but that just depends on how much STUFF you really want to travel with. The most important thing, by far, is to show up rested, with a good attitude; and if it is hot, make sure to keep drinking plenty of water throughout the day - there's a lot of riding at a 2 day camp. I'm sure you'll have a blast - let us know how it goes!

I have some suggestions that are reasonably inexpensive to try: 1) Could you use more stomp grip to give you some grip with your inner thigh? I'm short and on one of my bikes my knee did not reach the tank cutout. So I put stomp grip where my leg DID contact the bike, which was about halfway between my hip and knee, and that helped. 2) Do you have a good heel guard that you can use to get some grip with your heel? That can make a surprising amount of difference. 3) There is some roll-on stuff available for horse riding called Saddle Stick or something similar, it is made to help slick leather show boots grip better on saddle leather. It can help make your leathers grippier and does not hurt the leather. It's clear, like a type of wax, and very inexpensive. 4) Velcro. (ok, kidding on the last one)

Hey Hottie; Does this mean you're not on the east coast bus tour this year? Rain The just fly me in for special occasions. Actually, my son was the ring bearer in my niece's wedding this weekend (yes, it was very cute), so I needed to be in town for that. I'll be at Barber, though - looking forward to that, I think Barber is a GREAT track.

Here is the exact wording: "In any fast-entry turn, calculate the roll-off as carefully as you would a roll-on." There is a cool quote from Donny Greene relating to this, it seems relevant to mugget's original question - it's at the end of Chapter 6 in Twist of the Wrist II, page 31. It starts like this: "At one track it took Keith 10 years to talk me into using the throttle correctly in fast turn entries..."

Hi shadow1, I sent a note to Cobie to take a look at this question, or maybe he'll refer it to Will. They are on the road headed to schools back east so I'm not sure when they will be able to get up on the forum. I haven't experienced what you are describing. For what it's worth, I agree with what your coach said, about how it would feel if the front end slid - to me it feels like the front tire is suddenly on glass - very smooth, with no feedback. I've never heard an ABS noise but that does seem like a possibility, I'll be interested to hear what Cobie/Will have to say about it. You mentioned you were at Streets of Willow - maybe you ran over a tumbleweed? :) In which turn did this occur? Was the sound a tire-squeal sound, or a grinding, crunching sound?

If you were going from one direction to the either your doing a pretty good job of destabilizing the bike as you turn it , but if I'm going from partially leaned over to even more leaned over I would like to keep the bike as stable as possible Ok. So there is a very broad spectrum here, depending on the turn - how much are you leaned over to begin with, how much do you need to turn it, how quickly do you want to steer, etc., so the amount you dip the throttle (if at all) will vary widely depending on the situation. Just keep in mind we are talking about getting the bike TO the turn point, not a mid-corner steering correction, which is a whole different animal. Generally, when we talk about track positioning, we are talking about steering the bike over to your real turn point, so you are usually not leaned over dramatically, and in most cases you are slowing down, as you approach the turn, so you would already be off the throttle. However, in Muggets example he is still leaned over from the exit of a prior turn. So how much he lets off the throttle is something he will have to judge based on the sequence of turns - if the second turn is faster than the first one, if he can effectively quick steer the bike without closing the throttle entirely, it might be to his advantage to minimize the amount he dips the throttle so he can try to carry as much speed as possible into the second turn. Anyone remember throttle control rule number two?

Going flat on the throttle can work, for sure - but you express a concern about closing the throttle causing instability. So let me ask this - when you are trying to steer the bike, make it change direction, is stabilizing the bike really what you want to do?

Right, adding throttle AND lean angle at the same time is a risky proposition. So, depending on the turn, you might want to dip the throttle some, or close it completely, or maybe even just go flat on the throttle, to make your steering change. When you close or dip the throttle, what happens to the front suspension, and how does that affect your steeering? And how about the opposite - bonus question - if you are hard on the throttle and make a fast steering transition (left/right or vice versa) what potentially undesirable thing can happen?

Well, vision is a very big subject - a whole section of Twist of the Wrist II (4 chapters!) and pretty much all of Level 2 at the school is devoted to it. At least four of the Level 2 drills would be helpful, and at least one from Level 1 - maybe some of our lurkers can jump in and list them. Mugget already mentioned a great one - reference points. Let's start there - how many reference points should you have (minimum) per corner? If you only have ONE reference point, what do you tend to look at? There is another drill that might be helpful with the motion sickness - the "relax" drill. If your arms and upper body are tense, they can transmit an excessive amount of motion to your head and eyes; combine that with target fixation and I could see how that could lead to motion sickness.

I reckon. Remember the recent GSX-R1000 release (can't remember the exact year), where the new bike was actually heavier than the previous model? Suzuki claimed that this was deliberate to increase stability. Also Yamaha - when they originally released the 'big bang' R1 they said that the engine characteristics and throttle control was so good that you didn't even need traction control. But look at the R1 now... I had a boss (in design engineering) that used to say to me: "if you can't fix it, feature it!"

I'm a bit slow to join the party on this thread - sounds like you already worked it out, Mugget - but I do want to point out that what SEEMS like two steering inputs is covered in Twist of the Wrist II, in Chapter 17 in a section called "Track Positioning". It starts on page 75. Essentially, it discusses putting the bike where you want it, for your major steering change, and gives specific examples of where and why you would want to do this and how and why it does not violate the "one steering input" rule. Keep in mind, there can be situations where you lean the bike some, to steer yourself over to your turn-in point - like in a very wide entry turn, or decreasing radius turn with a late turn point. But there are ALSO situations where you have a very fast transition from left to right (over vice versa) and you might have to make your steering input for your LEFT turn while you are still leaned over to the RIGHT. Now, here's a question back to you - if you are ALREADY leaned over, and you want to make a steering input that will lean the bike over more, what should you do with the throttle?

Think of holding up a barbell with only one hand in the middle of the bar. If you put 10 lbs at either end, you get a total force of 20 lbs pushing down on your wrist. If you put 20 lbs on ONE end and none on the other end, you still have 20 lbs pushing down on your wrist, but now the bar will exert a twisting motion on your wrist because one side is weighted more than the other. That's why I think weighting the inside peg more could produce a "roll" torque - the twisting force you'd feel in your wrist.

OK, I'll take a shot at this; not sure I can manage plain English, though. First, let's tackle weighting the pegs (either, or both) as opposed to sitting with all your weight on the seat. When you need to steer the bike, you have to lean it over, or rotate it about its roll axis. Putting weight on the pegs instead of on the seat puts your weight closer to the center of mass which makes it easier to steer the bike, because the bike rotates around the center of mass. (As Keith puts it in Twist II, "The center of mass is the part of the bike that moves the least, so getting your weight closer to it means you have to move that weight less distance"- see page 85 in Twist of the Wrist II.) Hypothetically, once the bike is leaned over, putting more weight on the inside peg would put the weight lower than putting it on the outside peg, and possibly that could help tighten your line - however you are talking about trying to overcome substantial gyroscopic forces, so unless you are going paralyzingly slow, I don't think it would make very much difference - certainly not enough to overcome the better BODY stability and anchor points we get from putting weight on the outside peg instead. Weighting the outside peg helps you get a very strong pivot point from which to initiate your counter-steering effort (which of course takes more effort if you are going fast), and this aspect is so important that I think it far outweighs any marginal benefit you could get from weighting the inside peg. I also think switching weight from one peg to the other mid-turn (to try to tighten your line) could cause instability in your body and thus possibly wiggle the bike, not desirable mid turn. One other point - I'm speculating here, but if the rear tire was already at the edge of traction (slippery surface, for example), it seem to me that weighting the inside peg more than the outside would introduce a rotational force that would want to make the bike roll MORE to the inside - potentially breaking loose that rear tire. (In contrast, using hook turn instead would put the weight to the front, using the front suspension to help tighten the line.) Obviously gyroscopic forces are much stronger (at speed) but if the bike is already about to slide out, seems to me that weight on the inside peg would NOT improve the situation. Do I recall that dirt riders, when traversing a steep hill, weight the outside peg to keep the rear tire from sliding out?

Here is a page with good info from Snell: http://www.smf.org/helmetfaq#aDroppedHelmet Something I read recently said you should not hang your helmet on a side mirror or handlebar, because it puts pressure on the inside and can crush parts of the foam lining. I had never thought of that.

WOW. That is quite a turn, and you weren't kidding about it being light bulb shaped! Maybe see if you can find a place where you can get on a constant circle, set your speed and then try doing a slight, gentle roll-on, then gentle decrease of throttle, with your arms VERY relaxed on the bars, and observe how your line changes. Too much will make you go wider, but not enough will end up slowing you down and making your arc tighten. Cornering and wind forces will have the effect of slowing the bike, so holding the throttle FLAT with no roll-on at all will end up with the bike slowing down. So, if you are smooth with it, you should be able to use your throttle throughout that whole long turn to widen or tighten your line as desired. If, at the end, you find that you are a little wider than you want, hook-turn would be very useful - have you been to CSS and seen that technique? It is a challenge in a long turn to use enough roll-on to stabilize the bike and hold your line but not so much that you end up with TOO much accumulated speed at the end. If you feel like you are having to steer the bike back out, though, I'd try adding a bit of throttle instead and try to correct it that way.

That sounds like a throttle control issue - if you are not rolling on the throttle ENOUGH, you may be slowing down, which will tighten up your arc, making you have to steer the bike to the outside to keep it on your desired line. Do you recall, from Twist of the Wrist or the Twist II DVD, how MUCH acceleration is required for good throttle control? Anyone else want to chime in on that? If you are sure that you are rolling on the throttle enough to maintain at least a slight acceleration, it could be a suspension issue, the front end 'packing down' and causing the bike to steer in tighter - in that case, stiffer on compression and/or looser on rebound might help. But I'd for sure try doing a more progressive throttle roll-on first, that is most likely to fix it. You are using the term "maintenance throttle" and I think that can mean different things to different people - what does it mean to you?

I'm not quite sure if you are talking about the school policy, or personal preference - so just to be clear, in Cobie's example, the student crashed and hit his head, at the school. Therefore he was not allowed to keep riding that day, that is school policy. The school cannot safely determine if someone is ok to ride after head impact; it wasn't like Cobie just randomly noticed a scratched helmet and told him he couldn't ride. Obviously in other circumstances, only you would know what sort of history your helmet has, and it would be a personal judgment whether to continue using one that had been in a 'minor' fall. Personally I'd rather ride in a $200-$400 helmet that has never hit the ground than a $700 one that had been through a crash... Since racing rules require a new helmet at least every 5 years and recommend it every 2 years, I just stopped buying $700 helmets! Anyway, I think it is free to have a helmet manufacturer check your helmet, that would be a good way to be sure it still offers maximum protection. Something to consider - in reading up on helmets I remember that the major head impact from a motorcycle fall (assuming you don't hit an obstacle) is from the HEIGHT of the fall, not sliding fast on the pavement. Sliding is a less damaging thing and handled by the shell, but the fall from riding height has to be absorbed by the helmet lining material to protect your brain from trauma. I suppose, based on that, a helmet could appear to be almost undamaged but still have a crushed inner liner.

hmm, I'm not a helmet expert either and certainly less expert than most in riding per se. That said, I never heard of the "one time use". It seems like it would be a matter of degree like most other things. It would make sense to disqualify the lid if you knew for certain that the helmet protection was compromised --shell or padding. But would a little scuff ("minor scratch") as a result of a fall where your head contacts the pavement disqualify that helmet absolutely? How many of us would trash can a $700 helmet for that? How many helmets have fallen off bikes and gotten scratched. There no head in it, in that case but still... I am not suggesting we be cavalier with our head safety but there must be some reasonable way to decide that without a black & white, yes or no rule for helmet contact. I know Shoei (for example) will inspect your "damaged" helmet and let you know if it is still doing its job as specified and therefore safe to continue using. You don't see riders throwing away racing suits after an off (usually). I respect that you have your rules at Superbike and maybe you are right to have them. It just seems like DQ'ing a helmet for any contact is a bit extreme. I'm not an expert either, but I have read up on this, mainly researching whether the costlier helmets really provide any better protection than the mid-range helmets, so here is my understanding: The problem is that the material inside the helmet is crushable, that's how it absorbs impact. After being crushed, it doesn't spring back to shape and thus has lost its ability to protect you in another impact. That crushable material is between the outer shell and the inner padding, you can't see it, so the ony way to check it is to send it (as you say above) for inspection by the manufacturer. In a crash, the inner material is crushed by your head's inertia inside the helmet - so the shell hits the ground, but the crushable stuff between head and shell cushions the impact, slowing your head down and helping to keep your brains from slamming into your skull, and /or your skull crushing on impact. Personally, if my helmet fell off a bike, I would be a little concerned about its protectiveness after that but I probably wouldn't junk it - since there is nothing heavy INSIDE the helmet to crush the inner liner in the fall. And yes, that could potentially scratch the helmet paint a bit, but in my limited experience, that does not look like the broader scuffs that occur from an actual crash impact. However, if a student crashed, hit their head, and there was visible damage to the helmet, I would absolutely not think it was wise for that person to continue riding, it's too difficult to tell if someone has a head injury or not; they might think they are fine when they really are not.