Sliding The Rear Wheel

[bhairava]

How do you do it ? And most important, how do you train for it ?

Also, what part plays the rear brake in it ?

 

Thank you.

[Timmer]

Bhairava,

 

How do slide the rear tire? Easy, you apply the throttle coming off the corner until the rear tire starts to spin. Once the tire starts to spin you slowly roll off the throttle. Garry McCoy is VERY skilled at modulating the throttle to make the long slides that you see him make when he exits corners. It takes lots of practice.

 

The rear brake is usually not used to make the rear slide, unless the rider is using it coming INTO the corner. This is sometimes what causes the rear tire to slide around when guys are "backing it in" to a corner.

 

When you do Level 4 at the Superbike School you get to ride our Slide Bike where you will learn how to deal with rear wheel slides. It is a lot of fun too!

 

Timmer

[JeF4y]

Not to mention that Gary McCoy is on a bike that weighs nothing and has more HP than the van that tows my 23' trailer to the track....

 

I find traction works to my advantage personally... Sorry, I know I'm not helping..

[chickenthrower]

Does this mean you are applying more throttle than you normally would to stabilize the bike? Are you unstable during this time? How do you not run wide? Is it a quick rollon then a controlled rolloff? Last question is why would you want to do it? I don't think Rossi slides around and McCoy crashes hard more than anyone else I am aware of.

[Kevin Kane]

Tim,

Maybe you could help clarify a question I have regarding rear tire spin on exits. You write: "How do slide the rear tire? Easy, you apply the throttle coming off the corner until the rear tire starts to spin. Once the tire starts to spin you slowly roll off the throttle".

 

Where is the point between the rear tire starting to spin and highsiding?

 

The [very] few times that I have spun the rear was never intentional - it was when I was so focused on getting out of a particular corner as quickly as I could that I was out of it before I realized that it happened.

 

Kevin

[NC Rick]

Interesting discussion! You know, I have had the occasion of the rear sliding on the exits of corners on the track. I really never got real surprised and followed through on my throttle control. On the CCS ?slide bike? I was able to do long slides (when I say long, I mean to the point where the instructor said I should do them smaller) to my left. Going to my right, I could not get the thing to break loose. I finally did but I had the bike at 10,000 RPM in doing so. The bikes power came on faster than my throttle control, that along with other issues, caused me to high-side. Flying is cool but I found that I suck at sticking the landings. I hit my melon hard enough that my learning sort of ended at that point.

 

The moral of the story for me is that a person best have their body position just right, be really smooth and on something with a peaky power band you may want to not be on the edge of that either :-)

 

I wish I could have learned more from the experience by not crashing or even by having the instructors talk to me about what went wrong (it?s hard to talk to a guy who is stumbling around in circles). I still feel like riding that training tool was a big learning experience and there is no better place to make a mistake like that than on a skid pad with a bike on outriggers!

[supernouht]

Well all the 500cc motogp guys slide the back to some degree Mcoy just a little more so. you don't run wide as long as your front tire still has traction, and it makes the the bike turn sharper (because you're turning with the back wheel and not just the front, so it's like rotating the whole bike a little) and yes it can make you highside, you'll see highsides a lot in 500cc. Kenny Roberts Sr. was the first to do this kind of riding in the gp's, he started being a dirt circle track racer and those guys don't even have a front brake, they just tail slide all the way around a corner with the bike drifting completly sideways while holding the bike upright by dragging their foot on the ground , watch a dirt track race and you'll get it, so when he moved into road racing he thought it was slow not to slide in the corners at all so he started doing it, but then he wasn't as stable because he couldn't drag his foot on the ground on the road bike, so he wrapped his knee in tape and started dragging his knee to hold the bike up while sliding

 

ok, now i THINK that the operations for initiating a rear slide go something like this but don't take my word for it heh! you come into the corner maybe a little more to the inside than you normally would and tou use your rear brake a little extra just to kinda get the back loose at first and you turn the bike a little sharper than you normally would and you stay on the gas all the way through while grinding your knee slider into the road if necessairy .....but like don't try this you'll kill yourself!!!!

Kenny Roberts actually has a school called the K.R.T.C. where he teaches people how to do this and he starts them out on dirtbikes on a circle track

 

Ithink that the biggest advantage to sliding the rear is when you have to pass someone on the inside of a corner, it may or may not be the fastest way around the track, but when that nice outside real estate is taken by the guy you want to pass you can sometimes get by him on the inside this way

 

i've only actually done a version of this once myself, but it was on the outside, i had just passed a car on the outside comming into a right hand corner and i passed him by just braking way later into the corner so then i found myself deep in the corner still going quite fast and i had to turn like yesterday so i got on both brakes hard and turned it in while still on the gas a little (because that car was still running up my backside)and the back end just came out a bit, but it was no problem i just kept the throttle steady backing off just a hair when the back wanted to drift out and made it through the corner quite quickly...anyone watching probably would have been impressed, but it was really just an f-up heh