Over the years I’ve been a rider coach, I’ve done a lot of thinking about my riding, and I’ve realised I’m both a realist — that is, someone who accepts the world as it is, not as it should be — AND a pragmatist — someone who’s actions are based on what’s been shown to work. Running wide on blind bends remains a leading cause of serious motorcycle crashes, and no amount of technology can compensate for horribly misjudged entry speed or unseen and dramatic changes in radius. In fact, improved grip and electronic safety nets may encourage some riders to commit harder and later, increasing the risk when the road tightens unexpectedly. Superior tyres, better suspension and rider aids do not — and this is crucial — remove the geometric reality of running out of road. The solution is still the same as it has always been: conservative entry, delayed commitment, and a willingness to revise the plan mid-corner without panic.
Ever gone into a corner too hot and had it tighten up on you?
Of course you have – you’d be a very lucky rider if you hadn’t. I’m a realist. That’s why my training courses are called Survival Skills. Remember, any bend can get worse out of sight and this is a classic biking problem – the ever-tightening corner that just seems to go on and on. Unfortunately, by the time we spot the bend is tightening, it’s often too late, and we’re going to run wide. If we run wide on a right-hander (in the UK) we will run off the road. It’s a common bike crash. But if we run wide on a left-hander we’ll cross the centre line. If we’re lucky, nothing’s coming the other way and we get away with it. But if we’re unlucky, we meet a Scania coming the other way. Running wide into oncoming traffic is a major killer on roads not just in the UK but anywhere in the world. And it’s worth mentioning that when we hear about head-on collisions between a bike and a car on a bend, whilst riders often assume it must have been the car driver on the wrong side, it’s nearly always the rider who’s crossed the line.
I’ve yet to meet the rider who doesn’t make mistakes, so whilst it’s easy to say it’s a mistake we shouldn’t make and that a good rider would avoid getting sucked into a corner too fast, the fact is that it’s often not so easy to spot a decreasing radius corner until it begins to tighten.
‘Limit Point’ analysis is no use if the bend tightens out of sight – we’ll already have set our speed based on what we could see before we commenced leaning. And one technique I would advise anyone on two wheels to avoid is what’s sometimes called ‘chasing the Limit Point’. It’s normally explained with a statement such as:
“The Limit Point moves away from you, telling you that the corner is beginning to open out, so you can get back on the gas and chase the limit point out of the corner.”
‘Beginning to open out’. Think about that for a moment. What happens if we’re NOT seeing the end of the bend? What if the bend suddenly tightens up again? Now we’ve been conned into accelerating towards a second apex in a corner that’s not over yet. In fact, hardly any of our rural bends are actually smooth corners, they are nearly all complex shapes with multiple radii in a single bend. So rather than try to add speed as the bend appears to open up, ask yourself “how could this go wrong?” If we can imagine a decreasing radius, downhill, off-camber corner with a wet surface that’s covered in loose gravel lies just beyond the point where the bend appears to open out, it’s a good incentive to delay acceleration until we really can see our way out of the corner and down the next stretch of road which has completely straightened out. This will avoid the “OhMiGod the corner’s tightened up again and gone downhill and it’s off-camber and… etc” problem!
In fact, the best clues to dodgy corners are nearly always the road signs, specifically the red and white triangular warning signs. They are placed to warn us about hazards that have caught others out and are often out of sight. So the moment we spot a bend warning sign, particularly when it’s backed up with a SLOW marking, it might be a good idea to go into a corner a little slower than the Limit Point might have suggested. And if we’re lucky enough to glimpse a black and white chevrons sign, that’s almost certainly where the corner gets awkward.
It may be the Worst Case Scenario, but that’s what we have to plan for on every single blind bend. And we do that not by setting our speed to the ‘distance we can see clear and stop’, but by using the Limit Point to set our entry speed considerably lower, so we have a built-in safety margin in case the bend gets worse just out of sight. A cautious entry speed allows us to deal with a tightening bend by adding leaning angle, rather than hitting the brakes immediately. Apply the Survival Skills approach to riding once again – anticipate where things will go wrong, and don’t assume you’ve got everything right until you’re upright and accelerating away again.
But even a cautious rider, looking for trouble in bends still won’t get every bend right, and so right now we’re looking at a bend that needs some quick revisions to our line and lean. What are our options for getting out of trouble mid-corner?
Here’s our first option, which often mentioned on post-test training courses. Stand the bike up, brake in a straight line and then lay it over again. Hmm. It needs some room, even though once upright we can brake very hard indeed. And if we’re already on a wide line around the outside of the lane, we’re don’t have the space to straighten up – we’re straight off the road. So there’s a variation on the theme where we actually turn TIGHTER before we stand the bike up – this way we can maximise the straight line braking distance. But unless we absolutely have to lose a huge amount of speed – or stop – then if we have the room to lean in, pick up, brake hard, and lean in again, we probably could have made the bend in the first place. And if we don’t get the bike slowed enough…
…we’ve just guaranteed we’re going to run out of road. So although I’ve mentioned this option first, it’s really to move it to the back burner, behind some alternatives.
So are there better options? I mentioned above that we if we’re going to maximise the space for upright braking, we need to tip into the corner first. If we have this additional lean angle in hand AND we’re confident enough to use it, we could just keep the throttle open – which stabilises the bike – and keep the bigger lean angle going right through the rest of the corner. This should deal with a corner that tightens just the once, onto a sharper radius, so long as we didn’t make the mistake of turning-in too early.
But what about a corner that progressively tightens up? We can only increase the lean angle so much before we run out of ground clearance. So we may have to exploit some basic cornering physics – a motorcycle cornering at the same angle will turn on a tighter line if we reduce the speed. These are techniques we explore on the Survival Skills Performance: SPORT two-day advanced riding course.
So how do we reduce speed to turn on a tighter line?
The simplest solution is shut the throttle. The bike WILL slow, and it WILL turn tighter (provided we’re not going downhill at the same time). Don’t slam it shut as that will destabilise the bike, but roll off smoothly – this allows us to cope with the change in steering geometry. We can help out a little by applying the rear brake, but if we’re already generating engine braking, there’s often not a lot the rear brake can achieve before the rear wheel starts to lock, triggering the ABS or skidding on a non-ABS machine.
So if we need to tighten the line even more, then there’s only one way left – and that’s to apply both brakes together. The weird thing is that we see racers braking into bends all the time, yet the technique is frowned on in bike training. It’s true there’s a risk, because sudden applications of the front brake mid-corner can make the bike sit up and go straight on – which isn’t what we want particularly on a left-hander – or if we’re really hamfisted, we can even lock the front wheel.
So the point I’ll make here is that most the crashes happen as a result of a panic-grab, when the rider is surprised by events, rather than through a controlled application. Braking into bends is actually surprisingly easy just so long as we ease the front brake on to allow us to adapt to the geometry change. Here’s the big plus. With the brakes on, we’ll lose speed very rapidly – and as the speed comes down, our line tightens equally rapidly. So we rarely need to brake hard to adapt to a decreasing radius corner, just smoothly and progressively.
So to sum up, if we enter corners mentally blind to the possibility of them getting tighter out of sight, that’s when we’re most likely to arrive too fast AND to make the panic-grab at the front brake that causes all the problems. But if we are more pragmatic and anticipate that what’s out of sight could get awkward, then we’re far more likely to respond in a controlled way to a decreasing radius corner when we do get it wrong.
By admitting we can make mistakes in judging the radius of a corner, we have taken a huge step to improving our risk management and margins for error out on nice twisty roads.
Our first problem is how to read the radius – the tightness if you like – of a corner from far enough back to get our speed right. One of the techniques you may have heard about is to use the ‘Limit Point’ (sometimes called the ‘vanishing point’ or ‘distance point’ – it’s all the same thing). The idea is that we enter a bend at a speed that allows us to stop before the road vanishes around the corner.
But there are three problems:
- at any one moment, the Limit Point is just a single snapshot of what we can actually see. It cannot give us any clear idea how the bend ahead might change – nor can it warn us of other hazards. If we wait till we have a series of these snapshots suggesting the bend is tightening up, it’s likely we’ll react far too late to the decreasing radius.
- focusing too much on the Limit Point actually pulls our attention down and away from the longer view where we look BEYOND the point at which the road itself vanishes and pick up clues about the road’s future path.
- if the bend does tighten, we may have to brake mid-corner – something usually frowned upon, but actually an essential skill. How’s your mid-corner braking technique?
If we rely too much on the Limit Point to make an educated guess about where the road goes beyond what we can actually see, it’s a bit like making a weather forecast – the further ahead we forecast, the less accurate it’s going to be. Do we really want to commit ourselves into a corner on what is effectively a guess? I don’t think so.
To overcome this problem, advanced rider training often focuses on getting riders to pick eyes up and look further round the corner – we may see the back of the hedge on the inside of the corner, buildings, telegraph poles, trees, even the tops of approaching vehicles and the speed they enter and leave the bend. Clues are just that – they’re not definite knowledge, but they can help us make an informed guess about what’s beyond the Limit Point.
But in my experience hardly any trainers mention an obvious clue – road signs! If the council have gone to the trouble of sticking up a triangular warning sign, painting SLOW on the road and putting a black and white chevron ahead of you, don’t you think the road engineer is trying to tell you something? And that you should pay them some heed? They don’t just tell us the direction of the bend, they tell us that other people have been caught out in the past. And the more effort that’s been made, the more dramatic the change of speed or direction is likely to be.
Once we’ve realised that, then instead of trying to figure out how fast we can go into a bend, we need to recalibrate and instead think about what might make us slow down (or even stop).
OK, so all that might help us avoid running into a decreasing radius turn too fast, but I’m a realist. We don’t get every bend right, and so we need ways of getting out of trouble mid-corner. That’s why my training courses are called Survival Skills.
So how do we do this? Well, if we’ve followed the advice above, we can go in, increasing our lean angle to follow the tightening bend. But what if we’re running out of lean?
Then there’s only one solution – to lose some speed, because slowing down means the bike automatically turns tighter at the same lean angle. So how do we slow down?
If we’re lucky, we can simply ease the throttle shut in a smooth roll-off. . If we’re not so lucky we are going to have to brake. The usual suggestion is to use only the rear brake. Unfortunately, if the throttle’s already shut, then we’re not going to scrub off a lot of speed this way – try too hard and there’s a real risk locking the rear wheel. And that’s disconcerting even with ABS.
So that leaves both brakes together. So one suggestion is to pick the bike up, brake in a straight line and lay it over again. Errr, yes. Well, if you have the room that required, you could have made the bend in the first place.
Another option is to brake with the rear. Unfortunately, you can’t scrub off a lot of speed this way, you still compromise stability and there is always the risk of locking the rear, and if you aren’t careful, having the rear overtake the front.
So what about the front brake? This is where trail braking becomes important. So long as we’re not already sliding the front tyre, there’s some braking grip available. So long as we apply the brake gently and progressively, we can exploit it to add to our rate of deceleration.
But of course, it’s always better NOT to need technically-demanding techniques like this, and a better answer is not to be able to “get out of trouble” but to use an approach to riding that tends to keep us out of trouble. And that’s why the ‘slow down in, cautiously round, fast out’ approach to bends pays off. If we enter a corner with lean angle to spare, we have the option to start using it and to slow down at the same time if things turn bad later on. But if we’re cornering close to the limit, well, there’s not much of a margin for error, is there? .