Fast cornering on your motorcycle: a self help guide

So perhaps you are a new rider. Perhaps you have been riding for years but never really thought about going a little faster. Perhaps you have just forgotten. Here are a couple tips for getting through those twisties a little quicker.

First of all, we all know you have to lean your motorcycle. That's just the way it works. We have all experienced, however, that moment when you are halfway through a curve and suddenly realize that leaning isn't enough. That brief panic when you think you are leaned as far as those guys on the Racing Channel, but your bike is slowly drifting towards the oncoming traffic. What do you do now?

Lean more. No seriously. Try this on a gentle curve on a smooth road with little traffic. Lean your bike to go through the curve, then lean your body just a little more than the bike. What just happened? You lowered the center of gravity of the bike by moving your body in the direction of the turn. At first it feels weird but pretty quickly you discover that if you lean your body more, you can actually lean the bike less for the same turn at the same speed. You are now keeping your tires closer to the center patch and improving your handling and stability. (PS If you really want to go through fast, shift your butt off the seat until it is hanging in the air, racing style. That really lowers your CoG. Looks a bit strange on a street bike though.)

So. I promised you a couple and here is tip two of two. Tip your head in the opposite direction of the lean. That's it. Seems simple, doesn't it? So why does that help? Well, if you are leaned into a hard corner and you have followed tip one, your body might be over at a 25 or 30 degree angle. The world, it turns out, looks weird from that angle. Tip your head back until it is straight up and down, and all of a sudden your brain doesn't have to process a tilted world. Bam. Reactions are quicker, you corner better, ...

Finally, a bonus, not included in the "couple" tip. Look in the direction of the turn. No seriously. Look way the heck over in the direction of the turn. If you are on one of those crazy 180º bends, you should be looking at the road that is going in the other direction. (OK, that might be a slight exaggeration.) Try this. Go find a decent isolated road that has a few sharpish bends. Try going around them a couple times the way you normally do, which generally is that you are looking at the road about thirty feet in front of you. Then go through again and look all the way across the curve. Look at where you are going to be when you are most of the way around the curve. What happened? Chances are when you turned your head sharply in the direction of the corner, you suddenly shot across into the oncoming lane because your turn radius suddenly decreased dramatically. (I did tell you to do this on an isolated road, remember.) Turns out that you generally go in the direction you are looking. Look straight ahead, you will pretty much go straight ahead. Look across the curve and you will go through that curve much faster.

You'll want to play around and practice all three of these but I find that I generally rocket through curves dramatically faster than the guys I ride with who haven't quite got this all down.