Learn to Lean your motorcycle- Part 2

Contd. from http://beagoodrider.blogspot.in/2015/09/learn-to-lean-your-motorcycle-part-1.html

What did we do?

WARNING: I strongly recommend that you wear proper head gear, elbow padding, chest armour, knee guards, and ankle top boots- always- and even in Exercise 4- you absolutely must. 

Every ride do this

Strap up your safety gear, and every day, every ride follow these exercises. You can never tire of them, and even if you do the same road every weekend, try and better yourself. Be vigilant- be alert.
I meet riders who claim close to a million 'quality miles' which to me are a very good thing- but without the training for the basic evasion and the confidence of banking in first gear, the  reflex and trust you need in your control will gather rust. As with wearing gear- its very strongly recommended that you review exercises 4+5 listed below once a quarter with cones about 12' apart. You will come out a better rider. I know that.

Exercise 1- Chin Up

Pic 5- Chin Up

From the unending bends in Chorla (Karnataka, India), SD sent this picture- a beautiful illustration to show you to learn to ride with your chin up. Look in front. At speeds of 75-80Kmph (~50mph) nothing down is going to be of use to you if you have not seen it earlier. The arrow in the green is highlighting the place where your vision should be, thats what you should be preparing for. 

As you notice in Pic 5, the rider is already preparing for the lean and the more you study the image, the more you feel connected to the road and the upcoming lean, the bend and the line you need to take to make a safe run at that speed thru the turn. Again- readers in distant lands have to understand India had a plethora of 100-135 cc bikes for about almost 25 years before larger cc bikes entered the market. So we have a good class of riders in the 30-58 age bracket who have not seen potent high speed bikes in operation with their own hands. So everyone rode these 100cc bikes with their relatively sad brakes and hard 'high mileage' tires that lasted forever. And by now, they are just so attuned to staring 20' away due to habit, that the whole lean/bend circus becomes almost impossible to achieve. 

Exercise 2- Check Gear

Pic 6a- Looking down

The visual cues are indicators for your line of sight and NOT the line your bikes are to take.
See the cues in Pic 6a. I have used markers to show how many new riders approach bends, eyes down and not looking up. This will prevent you from adjusting your gear and checking your speed, and then there is this hurried action when almost entering the bend. And that is the most difficult position to be. Unenviable and not only that, your indecision will create unnecessary anxiety in the riders behind you, who will wonder 'What the hell is he doing? Which way is he going to go? Slow or wide?' All it needs is for two incidents like this for your fellow rider to lose his confidence in you, and then on be wary about your capability on every turn. It just eats away his joy of riding. Not a nice way to ride.
Scan the edges of the road- try and visualize yourself 10-12 seconds down the road. At 100kmph- ladies and gentlemen - thats almost 330 meters ahead or at @80 its about 260m.

Pic 6b- Chin up

So where do I want you to look- up into the far corners. Look at the cues in Pic 6b. How do we achieve this? By checking our speed before entering the corners. By following Exercise 1, we look ahead, we drop a gear, we come to 4th from 5th, or in this case, down to 5th from 6. Once in a lower gear you automatically gain traction on the rear wheel. And that allows you to control your bike better. Be wary that you do not drop too many gears at high speed- that you will cause wheel spin and get into more trouble than you imagined.
Being in control allows you to see what the riders would be doing- the lead has his eyes on the far end apex, the second rider- keeping an eye on the shoulder, watching the lead in his front-right while the camera bike has a direct line watching whats way ahead till his eye can see- enabling all three riders a fantastic view of the road at a speed well over the ton mark. If you want to take a bend this is the way- absolute calm. And yet with a lot of leeway to react, change track- if anything untoward were to happen.

Exercise 3 - Steady Throttle

Having looked ahead and gotten your speed under control to enter a bend- the most crucial part of the bend- to hold a very steady throttle and not 
a)let go of it and cut out the accelerator
b) yo-yo the bike with on-off throttle movements or
c) decrease the throttle, unless you want to power out and stop alongside the curve.

Pic 7- Steady Throttle

If you hold the throttle, the power stays on the rear wheel and your center of gravity stays in one place, slightly to the rear of the bike. The minute you let go, what happens is that you shift your load to the front and thereby loading the slimmer front wheel. This is what brought us to the overall exercise in the first place. The front then straightens up and if you do not have enough road to correct yourself, then you will run wide and crash, either off the road or into incoming traffic. 

As seen in Pic 7  the camera bike as held his line and a parallel bend to the leaders and with a clear sight of the apex. like earlier, if you study the picture, you see SR astride the Street Glide in a complete relaxed state of ride and with the bike in full control- 400Kg (about 800lbs) in full tilt- amazing- ready and anticipating any untoward intrusion in his line.

Exercise 4+5

Steering or counter-steering- I thought very hard about this- and I found this impossible to teach this. As it is riders are having trouble leaning are not achieving speeds to take corners properly. Leave alone concentrate on the bends in an enjoyable manner. They have no bandwidth to figure out the meaning of counter-steering and the logic that some riders use to explain/vouch for it. Once you learn to look up and search for your 'exit' and check your gear and get your bike in a steady throttle state- your steering will follow automatically.
Another issue that riders have is not being told/taught to exercise their elbows. Start doing the 'Figure of 8' and start in riding circles. Do three '8's' and three 'Circles' and then take a 100' ride in a straight line. Come back and do the 8 and the Circle in the other direction. Do not over do it to a point of vertigo and crash or fall.
On this 1914 Bailey Bridge outside Mumbai, SN and me managed to get the Fat Boy and the 48 in a ballet of sorts. Fantastic roll-on the road- desolate- no traffic.

Pic 8 Circling on the Old Bailey

The 'graduating test' if I were to design one- 12 cones, of which the first 8 would be the Slalom, ending in the 9th, and the figure of 8 run twice between the cones 9, 10, and 11- but inside 12.

What does your pillion do when you bank?

Often times you get asked this Q. And I say lean with the bike. Then often, you see people try and struggle and sit straight while some tragically funny ones actually try and lean counter to the rider. Here, as seen in Pic 9, Mr & Mrs RKa show the way- with the Mrs doing the perfect job on the rear seat.

Pic 9- Pillion- Lean into the turn

If you struggle against the lean, you will upset the flow of the bike and the vertical plane of the CG will then have an unnatural force acting on it.
The best way is to place your hands on your knees- for the pillion and then stay that way, so that the upper body sways automatically which ever way the bike leans.

Where do we go from here?

The inspiration to lean and bend has to come from somewhere- whether by learning or by riding alongside. I can think of none other than my #BombayHarrier brother SN, seen here in Pic 10, exploiting his 48 on a crowned road. Keeping his otherwise scraped foot peg read for the raised edge coming up. Chin up, throttle on, eyes on the apex.
The more you look at this- the more you want to get up, get off, check your tires and get leaning like him.

Pic 10- Bend it like 'Smokey'

-KD

#BombayHarriers

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