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The Most Difficult Corner On The Planet


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KK,

 

Yeah, Watkins on the short course doesn't have as many turns as I would like, but there is no way we were ever going to run the full course with some of the run off problem they have. There is one turn you head straight for the Armco, potentially unhealthy.

 

OK, I think I'm going to start a new thread on what's the favorite turn.

 

CF

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  • 4 weeks later...

My top 3 would be:

 

the triple left-hander at Oschersleben (germany) followed by a 180 degree right hander. The left hander is

partially blind and if you dont wan't to lose too much time, you need to start braking almost knee down and

over the kerbs for the right-hander.

 

The 180 degree left-hander at Magny-Cours. You have to leave your turn entry point so much later then

you think. Like 1doohan stated earlier, so much tarmac, it's easy to feel lost. Specially when you have'nt

heard about ref. points and doing everything by sight and feel. Wich is hard there because he's a sort of

blind.

 

Finally, the Ramshoek at Assen. You approach it through a very fast right-left kink and need to be very

focussed to get an almost straight line through there. Then you let the bike run a bit wide to the right and

turn left into the completely blind Ramshoek. This is not one for the faint hearted. The good guys are doing

something like 200 km/h at turn-entry point.

It used to be my favourite, until i messed up my front suspension in the fifth race of my first ever racing

season and went out with a huge tankslapper, folding up my lovely Aprilia RS250 and myself.

 

Mike

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  • 4 weeks later...

A tight, decreasing radius blind turn in a canyon, especially if the road is new. <_<

Too much entry speed is what eats a lot of new riders in SoCal.

 

(yeah, yeah, its not a track, but its a corner)

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:ph34r: Evil minds think alike... :lol:

I was pondering that when I wrote it, but elected to leave it out because I've seen (and heard of) newbies do it on level ground too. I'm the Safety Nazi, I see all the motorcycle mishaps come across my desk sooner or later.

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  • 1 month later...

Hardest corner for me is Lost Hill at Buttonwillow. Relatively fast uphill right hander that switches to an off-camber descending left hander just BEFORE you crest the hill. It's just ugly. I've been off-track there so many times in my Corvette that I've lost count. The first time you nail it though.. it's magic.

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  • 2 months later...

Bridgehampton - Turn 2: End of the front straight, flat out, pinned WFO under the bridge, thru kink, down the hill, thru 2 at the bottom and all the way to turn three. (But only on a smallbore.) Slightest off-track excursion onto the beach = broken bones. Kinda like coming onto the front straight at Road Atlanta. A good bit faster and imagine no curb and the immediate runoff three inches beyond the edge of the track being deep sand. Always gave me butterflies. Brutal cornerworker training, what with bones sticking thru leathers and exploded bodywork/machine clean up after every crash. It was so normal that I never saw a race stopped for an ambulance on track until I left the northeast.

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  • 4 weeks later...

For technical difficulty: I always found riding off the edge of the Earth and around the outside of a basketball in Turn 3 clockwise at Grattan to be a challenge. Totally blind sudden steep drop-off the horizon into an off-camber down hill left and continuing back up again. All negative camber. Hard to describe. And this was the old smooth and narrow surface before repaving. I used to describe Grattan to my friends who hadn't seen it as Mid-Ohio turned upside down and inside out by the devil.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hey all,

 

I discovered this evening that, although Bridgehampton Raceway was sold and converted into a golf course some years ago, the sequence of turns I talk through in my first post, and only those turns as it happens, still exist and can be viewed on Google Earth. Check out the north shore of the south fork of Long Island, NY where the Little Peconic Bay becomes the Noyack Bay near Mill Creek. You can't miss it.

 

The tilt function doesn't really do justice to the elevation change from on top of the front straight to the bottom of the hill between turn two and turn three. There is a kink past the bridge clockwise that is turn one. In any case, the drop is about 80 feet or so. About equal to the drop from the bridge to the front straight at Road Atlanta. After a long 3/4 mile straight, with the appropriate gearing at redline in 6th gear, I would roll off (no brakes) and backshift just once under the bridge, drop over the edge and pin 5th gear down the hill through T1 and T2 catching 6th gear for the run to T3. The challenge on a lightweight machine, like Road Atlanta, was not to back off before T2 which I would guess-timate was over 100 MPH. If memory serves, it was only one or two rear teeth more than Daytona gearing.

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  • 5 months later...

My new nemesis..

 

Turn 4 at Big Willow. The climbing banked blind right hander that switches to decending off-camber at the apex.

 

Well.. that and having the balls to twist the throttle from the exit of 6 all the way through 8.

 

My best time on the big track is 1:38 and I scared myself a couple times.

 

Pretty sickening to watch Jeremy Toye run around it at 1:21 this weekend.

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  • 1 year later...

Another turn I've never quite mastered is Turn 4 at Nelson Ledges. It is hard to describe but...you approach this lefthand sweeper on a slightly rising and crowned road surface. There is good postivie camber through the turn, but, the entrance transitions from that rising crowned surface to the postive camber by actually dipping the left side, as opposed to raising the banking, so, the road sort of falls away from you just as you turn in from the crowned camber of the approach chute and if you are on the classic wide line, your turn in is actually on negative camber of the crown on the right side. Many riders approach mid track and take a narrow turn in point to avoid that negative camber but the road still dips right at the turn point. While I did get better at judging my entry speed, I never quite wired it there and ALWAYS found myself WAY too slow when I got back on the gas. I kept telling myself that if I just htrew it in hard the banking would "catch" me but I never found a line I felt confident with.

 

I guess it doesn't help that the first time I ever fell down on a race track was on the brakes approaching that corner the first day after a less than fully cured repaving job left a thin layered tarmac transistion between the old and new pavement in the braking zone for that corner that disintegrated under my front wheel on the brakes. I went down hard from full upright onto my left hip. BIG bruise. And a BIG hole torn in the pavement from my front tire...lol.

 

Another turn I have difculty with is the left hander after the esses at Road Atlanta. (Turn 5?) It is an uphill left and the hill acts like banking when you throw it in but I always felt slow there, too. Never felt confident enough to really turn in hard and utilize the hill like positive camber, although, I didn't get passed there like T4 at Nelsons.

 

Also coming down the hill onto the front straight at Road Atlanta. I never could force myself to keep it completely WFO. Always rolled off a bit as I lined up my entry down the hill. Also entry speed for Turn 1 there. I did get better but always felt like I could carry more entry speed when I got to the apex.

 

Also, the uphill left hander from the new section back to the original course at Laguna Seca just before going under the bridge. I was fine under the bridge and left to climb the hill to the corkscrew but the turn just before it I always went too slow.

 

Turn two at Putnam Park is also challenging for me.

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  • 1 month later...

For me it's turn 2 at Mosport (Clayton's Corner?), it is difficult to line it up just right so you can carry as much speed going down the blind drop. I guess sometimes the blind drop also plays tricks with my head. Moss corner is a bit tricky too, but surprisingly after 4 days of track time last year I feel that I have a good handle on linking the two right handers together.

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Someone mentioned the Alabama Roller Coaster at Barber. This one is very tuff for me. going down the straight at a good clip, down into turn 7, straighten the bike up for the curbing, brake for the curbing, down shift, off the seat over the curbing, down into the seat and drop it into the right hander. Very busy little corner for me.

I would like to work on this one in May.

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Someone mentioned the Alabama Roller Coaster at Barber. This one is very tuff for me. going down the straight at a good clip, down into turn 7, straighten the bike up for the curbing, brake for the curbing, down shift, off the seat over the curbing, down into the seat and drop it into the right hander. Very busy little corner for me.

I would like to work on this one in May.

 

You're right, there is a lot going on there. For sure we can work on this. A side question: do you use gp shift? I find it easier in general, and there specifically.

 

C

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You're right, there is a lot going on there. For sure we can work on this. A side question: do you use gp shift? I find it easier in general, and there specifically.

 

C

I use GP shifting. Although I don't know anything about Barber, I find GP shifting really useful when you want to upshift coming out of a left-hander. Upshifting between T5 and T6 at Big Willow is a perfect example. Pushing the shifter down helps initiate my body position change whereas trying to dig your left foot under the gear level (where there isn't a lot of room anyway) gets your body twisted the wrong way for the upcoming right-hander (T6). This is especially important here because you want to get your turning done early coming out of T5 so you get can take T6 as straight as possible.

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Someone mentioned the Alabama Roller Coaster at Barber. This one is very tuff for me. going down the straight at a good clip, down into turn 7, straighten the bike up for the curbing, brake for the curbing, down shift, off the seat over the curbing, down into the seat and drop it into the right hander. Very busy little corner for me.

I would like to work on this one in May.

 

You're right, there is a lot going on there. For sure we can work on this. A side question: do you use gp shift? I find it easier in general, and there specifically.

 

C

 

Cobie,

I do have gp shift and look forward to the two days coming up May 31, Jun 1.

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Cobie,

I do have gp shift and look forward to the two days coming up May 31, Jun 1.

 

OK, next question: do you downshift w/out the clutch? If not consider trying it. It can be done with or without braking, just a tiny blip to unload the transmission for a moment. I guess I'm assuming you clutchless upshift, but if you don't, that's very easy to do, just roll off for a moment (unloads the transmission) and shift. The only 'DON'T's' on clutchless shifting is preloading the shiftlever for a long time, or banging it in if you get a missed shift.

 

If this doesn't make sense, now sure how to do it, let me know at the next school, we'll go over it.

 

C

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Cobie,

I do have gp shift and look forward to the two days coming up May 31, Jun 1.

 

OK, next question: do you downshift w/out the clutch? If not consider trying it. It can be done with or without braking, just a tiny blip to unload the transmission for a moment. I guess I'm assuming you clutchless upshift, but if you don't, that's very easy to do, just roll off for a moment (unloads the transmission) and shift. The only 'DON'T's' on clutchless shifting is preloading the shiftlever for a long time, or banging it in if you get a missed shift.

 

If this doesn't make sense, now sure how to do it, let me know at the next school, we'll go over it.

 

C

Cobie,

I do have GP shift and I do clutchless up shift. I have thought about the clutchless downshift since you mention it before in a thread. So you blip the throttle and between the higher rpm's of the blip and before the engine starts to act as a brake, you down shift? Does it make any difference whether you have a slipper clutch with clutchless upshift or downshift? Thanks.

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Cobie,

I do have GP shift and I do clutchless up shift. I have thought about the clutchless downshift since you mention it before in a thread. So you blip the throttle and between the higher rpm's of the blip and before the engine starts to act as a brake, you down shift? Does it make any difference whether you have a slipper clutch with clutchless upshift or downshift? Thanks.

 

No difference if you have a slipper clutch. I think one of the main reasons the slipper clutch was invented was riders couldn't do the brake and downshift together very well. I don't know that I've ever used the slipper clutch, I'm so used to doing the blip.

 

There is just a bit of timing on the downshifts. If it isn't timed right at the blip, the bike won't shift. If riding hard, brake first, scrub some speed off, then blip and backshift (racer-ese for downshift). It'll go right in, if timed well. If you have scrubbed some speed off, the blip won't have to be super high either. Some riders downshift too soon, and they have to blip the engine to the moon.

 

Give it a shot, let us know.

 

C

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So we have favourite tracks but what about most challenging corners? For me it's the crested-hard-on-the-gas-into-a-first-gear-chicane challenge at Almeria in Spain. You come out of a chicane and get hard on it with the rear wheel struggling for grip and drive hard over a corner on a crest :o . Once you get to the brow and still with the bike leant over you have to get HARD on the brakes for another chicane :( . Get your vision wrong here and you add seconds to your lap times :blink: .

 

What challenges you?

 

I've always had a hard time with the last turn of the day; Whether into the pit lane or the driveway, my bike seems to want to keep going straight.......Can't seem to find the proper adjustment to correct that either......

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quote]

 

I've always had a hard time with the last turn of the day; Whether into the pit lane or the driveway, my bike seems to want to keep going straight.......Can't seem to find the proper adjustment to correct that either......

 

Last turn of the day is tough eh? We need to get you riding some more:)

 

C

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Last turn of the day is tough eh? We need to get you riding some more:)

 

C

 

Definately need more riding!!! I live in farmland Illinois and 90% of the roads are straight and flat. And after doing levels 1 & 2 straight and flat is getting kind of boring. But there is good news: I am in the process of buying an old F3 for track days and I do live only 20 miles from the Autobahn Country Club track. So there are curves ahead. Don't worry Cobie, I'll be a coach before you know it.

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Definately need more riding!!! I live in farmland Illinois and 90% of the roads are straight and flat. And after doing levels 1 & 2 straight and flat is getting kind of boring. But there is good news: I am in the process of buying an old F3 for track days and I do live only 20 miles from the Autobahn Country Club track. So there are curves ahead. Don't worry Cobie, I'll be a coach before you know it.

I've heard of guys in the midwest who are so desperate for turns that they'll just keep going around the freeway cloverleafs. Man, that's desperate!

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