Tag: vision

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75. Apex or Exit – what’s important when cornering?

I have little to add to add to this except to say that twenty years on from penning this article, riders are still obsessing over finding the apex on the road, when that’s really not what matters. Waiting until we can clearly see where the road leads beyond the bend is what allows us to select the line that copes with mid-corner threats and avoid the classic ‘turn-in too early, run wide later’ cornering error.

Apex or Exit – what’s important when cornering?

Back in the summer of 2006, I was seduced by a magazine’s big cover splash promising “Twenty pages on cornering faster”. Despite reading it cover-to-cover, I could only find a couple of pages on cornering technique. The remaining eighteen pages were thinly-veiled adverts for expensive aftermarket accessories or services to get the bike tweaked. Anyway, cynicism aside, the two pages on riding were the valuable content because the best bolt-on accessory on any bike is the rider, and the most cost-effective tweaks we can do are to our own skills. A good rider can still corner well on a wallowing hippo of a machine. But all the bolt-on bling in the world won’t turn an incompetent owner into Valentino Rossi or Marc Marquez. It’s depth of wisdom, not depth of wallet, that helps us to good cornering out on the road.

So what did the article say? Well the writer spent a lot of time talking about “finding the apex”. You may be wondering what the apex of a corner actually is, because it’s a word bandied around with some freedom when talking about corners. Think of a triangle – stand it upright – the pointy bit at the top is the apex. Now, connect the three points with a smooth curved line and the point at the top is still the apex. If we now give that curved line some width, so it becomes a road, the apex is where the point of that triangle touches the inside of the corner halfway round.

On a race track, where we can use all of the surface, if we start on the OUTSIDE of the corner and if we also exit on the OUTSIDE of the corner, by just touching the INSIDE of the track halfway through the turn – the apex of the triangle – we take the maximum radius (and thus the fastest) ‘racing line’ through the corner. So if the corner is a nice symmetrical one, the apex is ‘mid-corner’, halfway round the bend.

What about ‘early’ or ‘late’ apexes, two more terms you’re likely to hear in any discussion about riding a track? An early apex comes before we are half-way though the corner, and generally indicates an increasing radius turn – the corner opens out. A late apex comes after we are half-way through the corner and may indicate a decreasing radius turn – a corner that gets progressively tighter. On the track, we learn our lines by going round and round until it all flows nicely. Even on a blind corner on the track, we learn to use marker points (which is why they put cones out on track training sessions) to guide us round.

But the road is not a track, and this ‘racing line’ which may be the fastest way around the track, is not a great idea on the road where we have to deal with a number of other problems. For starters, we don’t get the chance to learn a bend by going round it over and over, and we don’t get markers (at least, not handy cones). We have to ride it as we see it, which isn’t easy when most of the corners on UK roads are blind – that is, we can’t see all the way through them from beginning to end. Aiming for an apex where we cannot see out the other side of the corner isn’t a great idea – we could end up turning-in too early, which inevitably leads to running wide later in the corner.

But even when we can see right through the corner, cutting into the apex on a right-hander brings us into close proximity to oncoming vehicles. And on a left-hander, cutting into the apex puts us close to where there might be hidden turnings and driveways on our nearside.

As it happens, the way to learn a track (if the handy cones are absent) is to work backwards. We start by finding the direction we want to be headed on the way out of a bend – the ‘exit’. Keith Code’s definition of the exit is a good one to work with – it’s where we can put the power on as hard as we like. Once we know where we want to be pointed at the exit, then we can find the line backwards to the ‘apex’, and from there back to the ‘turn-in’ point where we would cut across the track to clip the apex, and ultimately back from the turn-in point back to the ‘entry’ which is where the corner forces us to steer or run off the track.

On the road, as I explain in the articles on ‘Point and Squirt’, the solution is to delay turning-in to the corner to the point where we can clearly see through the exit and where the road goes BEYOND the end of the corner. So if – as is likely – our view around the corner is obscured, we simply stay on a wide line around the outside of the curve until we CAN see the exit – where we’re pointed where we want to go next and can accelerate in a straight line, remember. Only when we reach this point do we decide if we should turn-in tighter, aiming to cut across the lane and exit the corner in as straight a line as possible, and this is the key to corners on the road – staying wide in the turn till we can actually see the exit.

Get this right and we avoid almost all ‘running wide in the corner’ errors whilst the apex looks after itself – it’s not something we need to worry about. In fact, far from being an aid to cornering on the road, the apex is a red herring and even a distraction from focusing on the exit and the mid-corner hazards I mentioned a moment ago. For good cornering on the road, simply ignore any debate about the apex.

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71. Off-siding – a technique that crosses the line?

The crucial decision here is to balance risk versus benefit, the potential gain in situational awareness versus the real possibility of putting ourselves in a dangerous position. The perception of our manoeuvre from the other driver’s perspective is all-too-often completely overlooked. However, that doesn’t mean we should never consider taking up a position on the other side of the centre line and hazards such as narrow single-lane bridges can create real vision problems if we don’t exploit the full width of the road.

Off-siding – a technique that crosses the line?

I originally wrote this tip as an expanded response incorporating questions being asked by a nearly-new rider. With a year’s experience since passing the bike test, he was shown the technique of ‘offsiding’ on a riding assessment. If you’re not familiar with the term, offsiding is positioning to the RIGHT of the centre line (here in the UK) to improve the view ahead, rather keeping within our own lane. I remember being told many years ago that “you’ve paid to use all the road – so do so”. I’m not implying he was being encouraged to use this position but many riders do, myself included on rare occasions – I’ll explain the limited circumstances in a moment. In the time I’ve been involved in rider training offsiding seems to have gone from a technique that was generally accepted “but do it carefully” to one that’s generally frowned upon as “controversial and we really shouldn’t”. So what’s the right answer? Is there ever a time when it’s a good idea to cross the centre line to gain a view?

Before we go any further, we need to sort out if it’s legal. So long as the centre line is broken – that is, we’re looking at crossing either the short lane divider markings or the longer hazard line, it’s not illegal – we can cross a broken centre line. But we could end up on the wrong side of the law if we’re seen to be riding carelessly or even dangerously – in the case of a longer hazard line, the Highway Code says we can cross the line “if safe and necessary to do so”. Much will depend on who is interpreting ‘safe and necessary’. My view may not be the same as that of a policeman or magistrate.

If we can say “yes, it’s legal”, my approach on Survival Skills advanced motorcycle rider training courses is always to get trainees to ask two questions in order to perform a basic cost / benefit analysis:

  1. what are the benefits

  2. what are the risks?

The usual benefit that is proposed is extra vision – the further right we move:

  • the further we can see ahead around a blind bend to the left

  • the more we can open up a view into a blind area on the left

  • if we can see further, we may also be seen from further away

Let’s start with the the blind bend, and the idea that we can open up the view from riding right of the centre line. What about the risks? The most obvious one is in riding along the ‘wrong’ side of the carriageway, sooner or later we WILL meet someone coming the other way. As we’re on the same side of the road, we’re on a collision course.

It should be fairly obvious we need to be able to return to our side of the road WELL BEFORE the other vehicle gets anywhere near us. But if we have this kind of clear space, isn’t it likely we’re already seeing a long way ahead? What exactly are we adding? As I’ve said elsewhere, the practical reason for extending “the distance we can see to be clear and expect to remain clear” is nearly always to carry more speed. Whilst speed might be essential as part of a police rider’s pursuit activities, it’s NOT part of the remit for an ordinary civvie rider.

If there’s a bit of a question about the advantage, what about the disadvantages? A bit more thinking should reveal some real problems:

  • the shock experienced by the oncoming driver who finds a motorcycle on the wrong side of the road in front of him

  • the need not just to get back left of the centre line, but to shed any extra speed too

Let’s reverse the position. If we were rounding a right-hand bend and suddenly found a car approaching on the wrong side of the centre line, how would WE respond? Would we be thinking calmly: “ah, advanced driver doing a bit of off-siding”? Would we be thinking at all? What’s the chance we’d respond with a WTF and a panic grab of the brakes? I rather think it would be the latter. And what if we panic-swerved too, to our right into the other lane and away from the car? What happens next? This confusion alone is a very good reason to avoid offsiding into a blind corner – we should always avoid putting ourselves into situations where our safety depends on other road users behaving reliably. Even if we don’t scare the bejasus out of the driver, we still have to return to our side of the centre line. A typical response is along the lines of: “I only off-side at a speed that allows me to return to my side of the road in time”. But what if the other driver is going a bit quicker than usual? What if the oncoming driver has cut the corner to straighten it out? Check out the worn paint on the middle of a lot of fast kinks – the reason it’s worn is vehicles straight-lining that bend.

And if we were carrying more speed towards the corner to exploit the better view, we now have to get rid of it. Have we got enough space to do so? And if we’ve had to cut back to the left closer to the bend, does that means we’ve just turned into the corner too early? And is there a risk we’ll now run wide later in the bend? ‘Turn-in too early, run wide later’ is a classic bike cornering crash accident so why take a line that could actually precipitate this error? About the daftest ‘benefit’ to offsiding I’ve heard is that “you get a longer braking distance because you’re not directly behind the vehicle in front”. Eh? Have a think about that for a moment. What if something comes the other way? Could we now safely return to our side of the road and slow down before running into that vehicle going the same way? I’m baffled by the thinking here, and if I feel my braking distance is being compromised by the vehicle ahead, I’ll open up space ahead, and probably slow down too.

If the argument FOR offsiding towards a blind left-hand bend is that we have plenty of space to deal with the above problems, then we can make an argument AGAINST offsiding that our view around the left-hander probably isn’t that bad in the first place. And the sharper the left-hander, the less the benefit but the greater the risks.

However, there is a time I will CONSIDER offsiding approaching a left-hand bend, and that is where an off-side position will MAINTAIN a view that I already have – that is, I can already see clearly and by crossing the centre line I avoid losing the view ahead. It’s sometimes possible that as we exit one corner – typically but not always a right-hander, we can see round the following left-hander, usually because it’s a gentle kink.

For example, on one of my training routes we encounter a narrow single lane bridge. As we exit the previous right-hand bend, we actually have a long view ahead, across the bridge and for around 400 metres further down the road. So if we turn IMMEDIATELY onto the ‘wrong’ side of the road we MAINTAIN the view that we already had, as we ride up to and over the bridge, and we can see if there are oncoming vehicles we might have to give way to.

But if we don’t offside, and do the conventional thing and remain in the left-hand lane, the view ahead gets cut off by the hedge. Now the bridge is blind, and we have to ‘pop out’ from behind it to GAIN the view over the bridge at the last second. In this case, the long forward view beyond the bridge more than compensates for any potential hazards from oncoming vehicles – we have ample time to ‘see and be seen’ and we can move back if necessary – there’s also a chance the driver coming the other way will give way to us.

So if by moving to the right of it we can MAINTAIN the view we already have, then there is an argument for offsiding. But early planning is essential. What I nearly always see in this kind of situation is that riders take too long to work out the lines-of-sight, then move too late, often only when they realise they have lost the view. Now we are attempting to REGAIN it. It’s risky because even if it’s only takes a couple of seconds, that’s a couple of seconds we’ve been riding blind. Sometimes, riders will anticipate a right of the centre line position could open up a view and move to GAIN it, but move far too late. Now the risk is we might gain a close-up view of the front of a Scania – something we didn’t really want to see.

There’s one last case. I mentioned that crossing the centre line can open up a view into a blind area on the left, and that may help someone see us coming:

a driver about to pull out of the blind area to see us coming. The roads are littered with blind driveways, entrances and side turnings, and sometimes I will spot a particularly risky one. I could slow right down just in case a vehicle started to emerge, but I could also slow down AND move to the right if the view ahead and behind shows the road is free of traffic

approaching a left-hand bend with a car parked on my side of the road on the corner. It’s a situation not dissimilar to the bridge I mentioned earlier – by moving right early, I MAINTAIN the best possible view around the parked car, and give the oncoming driver the best chance of spotting me coming. What I don’t want to do is pop out jack-in-the-box style, and GAIN a view only to meet someone head-on

So, to sum up…

…there are some occasions when I will cross the centre line. But it’s always tempered by the realisation that whilst I am in control of my own speed and position, I cannot control how the driver coming the other way reacts. I also have to distinguish between the advantages of ‘maintaining’ a view and the risks of attempting to ‘gain’ a view.

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70. Overtaking, lifesavers and following distances

Crash stats don’t lie. Overtaking continues to be one of the most hazardous manoeuvres a rider can perform. The core message that mirror checks alone are insufficient and that well-timed blind spot checks can provide critical and complementary information remains an important one. The coming trend towards technology such as blind spot warning systems may assist us, but I very much doubt they can fully replace these fundamental techniques. Since overtaking is inherently high-risk, anything that reduces the threat should be considered.

Overtaking, lifesavers and following distances

My position on ANY technique that we use whilst on the bike is that it should IMPROVE safety by reducing risk. Or to put it another way, if a technique increases our exposure to risk it’s worth asking if we should be using it. Overtaking is inherently high risk. However good we are, we can only reduce those risks, we cannot make overtaking ‘safe’. Think about it. It’s about the only accident we’d ever accelerate into. But we’re also involving other human beings, and humans don’t always behave predictably. Ovetakes often go wrong when the driver we’re planning on passing does something we didn’t expect. And now we’re carrying a lot of speed. And of course, no matter how fast we think we are, there’s always someone quicker. And they might just possibly be planning on ovetaking too. We need up to date situational awareness before we commit ourselves to an overtake.

A regular ‘advanced riding’ debate is: “should the rider perform a ‘lifesaver’ before pulling out to pass another vehicle?”

As with any question like that, the answer revolves around what we’re attempting to achieve. As explained in another article, the ‘lifesaver’ is a final over-the-shoulder blind spot check that we make before moving sideways into a position where there might possibly be another vehicle.

The debate hinges on whether or not we can rely fully on what is sometimes called ‘mirror history’. The theory is that if we check our mirrors often enough, we’ll have spotted another vehicle catching us, and we’ll know that there is nothing in our blindspot.

Here’s the issue as I see it. Here’s the upside. If we DO check, and there’s something there, we can abort our manoeuvre. And if there’s nothing there, we’ve taken our eyes off the road ahead for a second or so to take the look. Does that really matter? Not unless we’re very close to the vehicle ahead, or we’re trying to squeeze the pass into the tightest possible opportunity.

But what if we’re relying on the mirrors? However often we look in the mirror it can only tell us what’s behind us, not what’s alongside in the blind spot.If we spotted something in the mirrors, then we abort the manoeuvre. But if we didn’t spot the vehicle in one or more of our mirror checks, WE DON’T KNOW IT’S THERE. Now the danger is that we commit ourselves into the overtake and put ourselves at risk.

The real problem is that we have limited attention, and the busier the road gets, the less likely we are to make our mirror checks frequent enough to fill in information about what’s catching us from behind. As one contributor put it:

“I find there are some situations where I think a shoulder check is essential and some where they aren’t needed. It all depends on the complexity of predicting the future. If you have gathered a stable but dynamic, developing ‘picture’ of the space around you from the information gathered in the period before the manouevre – other traffic, behaviour, speeds – and can confidently predict that nothing will adversely affect the manoeuvre… then you make the move without a shoulder check. If the situation is one of high complexity then you make the check.”

In essence, I agree. But given the human propensity for making mistakes, I’d have to be very, VERY certain there was nothing around me NOT to do one. Positions of vehicles change very fast and we need up-to-the-minute situational awareness, and it’s debateable whether mirrors alone can ever provide this.

Look at it this way. We wouldn’t rely on three or four glimpes of the road through a tall hedge before deciding it was safe to drive straight out of a minor road. We’d take a final look before committing ourselves. Mirror checks give us the rearward equivalent of these glimpses. Only a shoulder check can show us directly what is actually IN the blind spot.

On a single carriageway, at least we know where the danger’s coming from – behind us. But on multilane roads, it could be from either side. In the middle lane, a vehicle will come up fast on the nearside, then swoop across behind us, switching to the outside lane. There’s a significant risk that any checks in the right mirror will not have spotted this vehicle. Even if we’ve made mirror checks to the nearside, it’s unlikely we’ve spotted what’s happening unless we look at just the right moment. This can also happen as we pass the ‘on ramp’ on a motorway or dual carriageway. And drivers also move up into, then sit in the blind spot so we can’t see them either in the mirror or peripheral vision. The only way to see is via a blind spot check. In either case, all that’s needed is a quick ‘chin-to-shoulder’ glance into the blind spot before we commit ourselves.

So if looking into the blind spot can only have positive effects on our situational awareness, what’s the objection?

“It’s potentially dangerous if the car ahead suddenly slows down.”

That’s easily answered. If the car ahead slowing down instantly puts us at risk, we’re too close. No arguments. No “if’s”, “but’s” or “maybe’s”. If the car ahead slows and we are instantly put at risk, it doesn’t matter where we’re looking – it could have been in the mirror. We should have been further back, no matter we’re looking to be in the ‘overtaking’ position. If we can’t look away from the car’s brake lights, we are too close. And what’s less obvious is that if we’re in the least bit worried about running into the car ahead, we’re not going to be giving our overtaking planning full attention! It’s a form of target fixation.

“A lifesaver takes too long.”

Someone once quoted two seconds as “the time it takes to look behind”. That shows a bit of a misunderstanding about WHERE we’re looking. There’s more about this in another tip, but we’re only looking into the blind area, not ‘behind’. If we combine our final mirror check (and you ARE going to make one, aren’t you?) with the over-the-shoulder lifesaver, it doesn’t actually take all that much longer than the mirror check alone – try it.

You may see it as a ‘belt and braces’ approach, and you might argue that if we’ve got a good belt, we don’t need braces. Maybe, but belts do slip and then we might be very glad to have the braces to hold our trousers up.

One of my least favourite expressions is “if I didn’t overtake, I might as well be driving a car”, as if a motorcycle is an automatic licence to overtake.

It’s hard to Personally, I believe that there’s nothing more dangerous that we do on a bike than overtaking.

So I tend to think that everything we do that decreases risk when overtaking is a good idea. And one of those good ideas is knowing what’s behind you, which is probably the area that most riders forget to check! “After all”, they reason – “if you are overtaking you’re going faster so the hazard must be in front of you, no?”

Well, actually, no! If you’re thinking about an overtake, so will someone else be. The most obvious candidate is another bike but there are plenty of cars out there these days with stunning acceleration – ask Jeremy Clarkson!

Given the ever-more crowded state of the roads, the chances of an overtake being completely free of oncoming traffic is going down every day – you need more attention AHEAD of the vehicle you’re planning to pass and behind you too, not less by worrying about running into it.

It’s been claimed that looking behind takes too long. Some quoted two seconds

Half the reason for this argument on the issue is that many riders still think that a lifesaver is a long look behind. That was what riders were supposed to do until fairly recently, thanks to the DSA’s reluctance to acknowledge bikes had mirrors till the late 90s, but it’s really not necessary. A lifesaver is simply a chin-to-shoulder blind spot check timed before an important change of position, into a potentially dangerous position. In other words, it’s the timing rather than the action.

It’s simple enough to combine a mirror check and follow through straight into a blind spot glance. Your head check has now filled in the entire picture alongside and behind. I really cannot see why people are so against the idea of doing them. If it’s timed correctly it’s no more dangerous than looking in the mirror.

Whilst I’m on overtakes, I’ll comment on the habit of moving up to a very close “overtaking” position behind the vehicle ahead when looking for an overtake. It’s recommended by police instructors and can be seen demonstrated on the Bikesafe 2000 video. For my liking, that position is far too close – at one point on that otherwise excellent video, there is barely a single hazard line between the bike and the car ahead. Even their safer “following” position is about half the distance I’d like to keep between me and another vehicle.

So, I’d double the distances shown in that video – my following position would be around the 2 second minimum safe distance, and my closer up overtaking position around 1 second back.

Whilst it’s true that the holding a more distant 1 second “overtaking” position means you are accelerating from a greater distance, with good timing you don’t need to twist the throttle so hard because you can get something of a “run” at the overtake. Hanging back further allows you to catch up in the final part of the corner, and often makes it easier to pass without excessive speed or any wasted time. If you are too close, it’s hard to accelerate before you are wide and clear, which tends to lead to big throttle openings.

In reality, if you overtake from further back, what you have to avoid is carrying too much speed into the overtake. If a situation starts to develop that looks awkward, you may have to pull back in. If you can’t pull back in, you are passing with too much speed. You should pass slowly enough that you can bail out if you need to. I can’t begin to say how many times I’ve been in the middle of a pass and something goes wrong that I’ve had to brake to avoid, and I don’t just mean misjudgements on my part – but brain out manoeuvres by the other driver.

If you yo-yo between the close “overtaking” position and the more laid back “following” position, you need to think how incredibly distracting that can be to the driver you are trying to pass, particularly if you have lights on. And something else that’s rarely mentioned is that as soon as you move up, the car behind YOU maintains their own “is that a fly on that bike’s numberplate?” following position, so dropping back becomes problematic, if not potentially dangerous – another reason for not getting too close in the “overtaking position” and finding yourself the meat in a sandwich.

Following too close through a bend is a mistake too, as most drivers decelerate until they can see their way out of a corner – if you’re too close, that means you decelerate too and end up at lower revs than you meant to.

Slow + high gear = longer time to make the pass when you finally go.

Another factor which is frequently ignored is that cars are massively more powerful than they were even 10 years ago. Even something that looks like it ought to trundle out of a corner like a massive 4×4 can often accelerate pretty quickly. Yes bikes are faster too, so we end up using ever higher speeds to make up the pass.

Even a good overtake is potentially dangerous – so it makes sense to make them as safe as we can, not to risk all on a hurried and botched pass.

There are two problems, if you discount the obvious one of failing to look often enough. Working out speed and distance – and then deciding when that vehicle will arrive along side you. to do this

You’ll need to look into the blind spot to see the bike or car that comes up so quickly that you don’t spot it between regular checks. Do some sums. At 60mph you’re travelling around 27 metres per second. Say you check your mirrors every 5 seconds (and that’s pretty enthusiastic mirror checking, too) – in that distance you’ve travelled around 130m.

Now, what if there is a bike (or possibly even a police car) doing 120mph coming up behind you? If you check your mirrors four times at 5 second intervals, with the final check when it’s along side you, the first time you check it’ll be over 500m back – more than a quarter of a mile. There’s not that much chance you’ll spot it – think about how mirrors make things look further away!

Second check and it’s now 270m back – that’s still more than the length of two football pitches – there’s a pretty good chance you still won’t see it if there is a lot of other traffic in the lane.

Next check will be when it’s 135m behind you. Sounds easy enough to spot, but if it’s in the same lane, and there is another vehicle close behind you, will you see it? And even if you do, if you didn’t see it in either of the two earlier checks then what you don’t know is how fast it’s going.

On your fourth check, the car/bike is alongside you. Scary.

Another problem with mirror history that you may find on a

So, things can change very fast indeed on motorways. Even if you think you know what’s there and it’s going to stay there, you might be wrong. Read this:

“The dangers of the assumption above were brought home to me when I was being observed a few years ago. We were on our way back and it was getting dark; my observer was riding a Pan and another Pan had caught up with us which I hadn’t seen; this second Pan had gone past the observer who had moved over accordingly, so the lights I saw in my mirror weren’t his at all; thus there was very nearly a meeting of fairings when I pulled out to overtake, thinking that my observer had anticipated the overtake and was ready to follow me through, when, in fact, it was the “foreign” Pan overtaking me.”

So, given the safety benefits, why are some riders and instructors so dead-set against them?

 

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69. Where does Point and Squirt come from?

It’s the cornering technique that pulls everything together but I didn’t learn it from Motorcycle Roadcraft. If there’s one topic I’ve always felt UK-based training at basic and post-test level has been seriously lacking, it’s a comprehensive approach to cornering that goes beyond the mechanical inputs and positioning, but covers hazard recognition, risk assessment and risk management. In short, I picked up the various elements from a number of different sources, tested them via trial-and-error, then combined them into a system of cornering that I used personally. When I started post-test coaching, I taught riders what I’d learned and called it ‘Point and Squirt’ for the “slow in, late apex, quick steering, delayed and upright acceleration” combination that seemed to me to work best on awkward bends. It remains a highly practical and, adaptable approach to cornering.

Where does Point and Squirt come from?

Although I’m often told that what I teach on my Survival Skills post-test training course is the same as you’d find if you read the police handbook ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’ (the most recent critic called it “Roadcraft with lipstick and blusher” which made me chuckle), that’s not actually correct. There are plenty of areas of commonality, not least that the aim of ‘Roadcraft’ and Survival Skills is to try to keep riders upright and that there’s nothing any rider can do with a motorcycle except change speed and direction. But Survival Skills is most definitely not ‘Roadcraft’ under a different name’. The Survival Skills approach avoids seeing ‘progress’ as the goal of advanced riding and changes the ‘do it the right way’ approach to riding to a more pragmatic ‘have we prepared for things to go wrong’ approach. And in particular, Survival Skills has always offered a far more organised approach to cornering. In the mid-90s, the current edition of ‘Roadcraft’ barely covered the topic – steering wasn’t even in the book. Even now, with a much-improved updated edition, it’s my opinion that the Survival Skills Performance: BENDS and Performance: SPORT course go way beyond ‘Roadcraft’s’ new content. Read on, and decide for yourself.

In the UK, and with just a few exceptions, most advanced training – whether it’s delivered by the IAM, RoSPA-certificated instructors, or even in a watered-down form by the ERS (thanks to the connection with the DVSA) – has its roots in UK police practice – the police handbook ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’ is recommended background reading and they all apply the ‘Police System of Motorcycle Control’ as a core component of their training.

However, whilst I make USE of ‘Roadcraft’ as well as the IAM’s offerings and various books from the DVSA, my training certain ISN’T ‘Roadcraft-based’.

Looking further afield than the UK, there are other training schemes around the world and many writers with valuable things to say about riding, so I have drawn heavily on outside sources. I’ve looked at the work of US rider coach Keith Code (of the California Superbike School) and his concept of cornering reference points. There’s David Hough’s huge amount of work, the laid-back approach of Nick Ianetsch, as well as ideas from Lee Parks (Total Control) and Reg Pridmore (CLASS) all to be found in my courses. I’ve obtained training material from contacts with the US-based MSF which have influneced my thinking. I’ve incorporated techniques from the Australian ‘Ride On’ programme. Even more recently, the internet has allowed me to swap ideas with and ride with trainers and other motorcyclists from all over the world. And I also have my not-insignificant time as a courier to draw on, something that taught me how easily things can go wrong on the road.

Survival Skills cornering courses have always focused on three aspects of cornering:

  1. hazard awareness, risk assessment and risk management

  2. a system of ‘reference points’ that allows any rider to navigate around any corner

  3. a method of mapping machine inputs – braking, steering, throttle control – to the reference points

Put together, Survival Skills has delivered the unique ‘Point and Squirt’ approach to cornering since 1997. So, is my Point and Squirt approach to corners “Roadcraft with lipstick and blusher” as that critic claimed? Not in my opinion.

Almost as soon as I bought a bike – a lovely little Honda CB125S – and set off on L plates (no compulsory basic training back then) I wanted to find out more about cornering. Just a few months into my riding career, I got hold of the old ‘Blue Book’ police manual. I soon added an IAM book, and progressively added more – who remembers ‘Superbiking’ by Blackett Ditchburn? No? I thought not!

Unfortunately, despite learning about the ‘Police System of Motorcycle Control’, trying to apply it to corners didn’t help much when nobody had told me how to steer – it wasn’t in ‘Roadcraft’ back then. I actually discovered counter-steering thanks to a magazine article whilst I was at college. Turn the bars the wrong way? Madness! But it worked. I taught myself to ‘push right, go right’ and ‘push left, go left’. Even though it wasn’t in ‘Roadcraft’, it got me round corner and also I realised it could help me swerve out of trouble – something that saved me a number of times when I became a courier.

I also learned about how I should use “acceleration sense”, matching the throttle opening (and thus speed) to the radius of a corner as judged by changes to the ‘Limit Point’. Opening and closing the throttle as the radius of the bend changed worked OK on a 12hp 125, and reasonably well a couple of years later on a 37hp 400-F with stiff suspension when I passed my test. But when I added a CX500 to my collection of bikes in 1982, a bike with 50-odd horsepower and a shaft drive, I found any on-off throttle round corners destabilised the soft and relatively long-travel suspension. By trial and error, I found the best way to keep the bike going where I wanted was to slow down a bit earlier, then to keep the throttle steady all the way through the corner from entry to exit. If the bend changed radius, rather than try to change speed with the throttle, I changed lean angle instead. It also worked better on my 400-F, and the technique I’ve continued to use successfully on every bike from a Husqvarna 610TE enduro to a GSX-R sports bike. In short, it works on anything.

Another learning experience was that using a ‘maximum radius’ line that “works the tyres less hard” (that’s a quotation from an early 2000s West Midlands BikeSafe video, one I have in my collection) could have its downsides. When I started riding, the advice in the Highway Code was that riders should still ride three feet (just under a metre) out from the kerb. But more and more riders were rejecting that. So what to use instead? Well, there were lots of magazine articles about the ‘maximum radius line’ where we exploit the width of our lane by riding a ‘wide in, clip the apex, wide out’ racing line. Even if not explicitly suggested, it was definitely hinted at in Roadcraft – just to check my memory was correct, I recently dug out my old ‘Blue Book’ edition of Roadcraft and it does indeed show near-symetrical maximum radius lines worked into the full width of the lane.

So I started using it. There’s another article which goes into more detail but suffice to say, I discovered its drawbacks on the road when I nearly had my head removed by an oncoming police car in the middle of a right-hand bend. In retrospect I suppose ‘racing line’ should have been a clue. The driver didn’t seem too impressed with it either. I’d also discovered that if I got it a bit wrong on a left-hander, I would (and did) end up in a field, I started to use less-aggressive lines that avoided both grass and oncoming police cars. Nevertheless, it’s still being talked about in that much later BikeSafe video.

Although I was still reading anything I could lay my hands on, my cornering skills stagnated through the 80s, mostly because nearly all my riding was as a courier mostly in and around London. But then in 1990 I moved back to Kent. And now I was doing a lot of cross-country courier runs and clocking up a LOT of miles on twisty roads. By coincidence, a series called ‘Survival Arts’ began appearing in the old ‘Motorcycle Sport’ magazine.

In April 1990, the article on cornering jumped out at me. The diagrams showed the rider going much deeper into a corner, then turning tighter later in the bend keeping well away from the centre line (right-hander) or the kerb (left-hander) before exiting on a far less extreme line. It was very different line to the line I’d seen before. And yes, I still have that source too, to double-check.

I remember the day I tried out the Survival Arts line. I was on a run out to Wales on a nice sunny day, and finding it difficult to pass a tractor on a twisty road. I suddenly realised that taking a line on right-handers which went a little deeper in to the turn gave me a good view on the way up to the bend, kept me away from oncoming traffic mid-corner whilst using a quicker, more positive counter-steering input to square off the corners helped me get upright and lined up with the straights sooner. Coming out of a right-hander, I turned the bike tighter onto a straight long enough to pass the tractor. Having got past, I kept trying it, and found it made riding the twisty road a lot easier on left-handers too. It was an absolute revelation. I’ve got some notes dating from 1992 when I actually started to write up the ‘on the road’ benefits of what would become ‘Point and Squirt’. Why Point and Squirt? Because that’s exactly what we do. We wait till we see where the road is going next, then turn sharper, ‘point’ the bike at the exit and turn the throttle harder to ‘squirt’ the bike out down the road to the next hazard.

Soon after, I borrowed a buddy’s copy of Keith Code’s ‘Twist of the Wrist 2’ because I was about to do my first track day. Although a lot of the book was irrelevant to the road (and some almost incomprehensible on first reading), I did take away some postives. Code confirmed my ‘open the throttle all the way through the corner’ approach was right, and his thinking on stability issues and the need to keep the bike upright as much as possible, also confirmed the benefit of the Survival Arts deep in, quick steer approach. He also said “turn only when you see the exit” which I realised is what I was doing with my Survival Arts line. Code’s “steer once” advice and his definition of the exit (“where you can do anything you want with the throttle – pull a wheelie if you want to”) all made immediate sense given what I was already doing.

Code supplied a crucial missing link with his concept of ‘reference markers’ (repeating and easy-to-recognise points in bends). You won’t find this in ‘Roadcraft’ or any of the books based on it. Yet Code’s ‘Two Step’ technique (in short, an approach which gets us to search for one reference point, then when we see it, move our eyes further forward to look for the next) explained when to look, where to look, and what we are looking for. Code provided some crucial missing links and by putting Code’s quick-steer approach, the ‘Two Step’ and the reference marker concept altogether, we have a way of timing braking, steering and acceleration inputs consistently.

By combining what I’d learned from Code with my Survival Arts cornering line, I developed a consistent style that used positively-timed (but NOT ‘harder’) braking to slow whilst upright, a slower, squared-off turning point late in the corner that gets the bike upright earlier, allowing early, positive and upright acceleration out of the bend. My cornering technique took another big step forward – rather than carrying corner speed using the ‘maximum radius’ line as I had on the 125, I was positively sacrificing it.

I got plenty of chance to polish Point and Squirt on long rural courier runs, so let’s fast-forward to 1994 when I got online and began to discuss riding, including my Point and Squirt cornering approach with riders from all over the world. MSF instructor Don Kime sent me some training material which showed how to break down corners using the ‘Slow, Look, Lean, Roll’ approach (quite a few years before Thames Valley Advanced Motorcyclists hi-jacked the technique, incidentally). Now I’d added a way to break the corner down into easily-defined chunks which matched Code’s machine inputs. I also got useful feedback from US riders who’d done Code’s California Superbike School as well as Reg Pridmore’s CLASS in the United States, where the ex-pat British former racer seemed to be teaching a road line not-dissimilar to my Point and Squirt.

By 1996 I was working down in Lydd as a CBT instructor, and I joined a local IAM group. Boy, Point and Squirt did not go down well with my observer. Braking, squaring off, then accelerating upright out of corners; nope, that was all wrong. Instead, I was told how the ‘proper’ approach to cornering was to “vary throttle and speed with radius” and to “smooth out the radius of the corner”. OK, maybe not quite so close to the white paint as my old approach to right-handers, but essentially I was being shown the throttle control that hadn’t worked on my old CX and a near-identical line to the one I’d discarded after the near-decapitation by the police car.

Just a few month later, I ran my own advanced course for one of our trainees who’d recently passed his bike test and turned up with a new machine. I got a day’s warning from the boss, spent the previous evening roughing out a syllabus, and rather than the IAM line it was my own Point and Squirt approach that I showed him. When launched Survival Skills Rider Training in 1997, this reference point-based, slow in on the gas, quick steer and late-turn line was a key part of the two-day Survival: SKILLS course. I’ve continued to develop Point and Squirt, but the essentials were in place.

In early 2000, I was invited to run an advanced riding section on a national motorcycle forum. It rapidly gained members, and questions soon popped up about cornering. When riders had issues cornering, I’d describe the benefits of the Point and Squirt approach. And suddenly, I was being told that this was “the line you’d take if you’d followed the advice in Motorcycle Roadcraft” or that I’d “misunderstood Roadcraft and that if I’d taken IAM training, I’d have been shown how to ‘interpret’ it correctly”.

I checked over my extensive collision of books, articles and videos which date from the early ’70s to see if my memory really was failing but, nope. The Survival Arts line is quite obviously different from diagrams in the ‘Blue Book’ edition of Roadcraft. And there’s that 2000s West Midlands BikeSafe video too (even if the footage clearly shows the rider demonstrating what I’d call Point and Squirt. With hindsight, I’ll concede that there IS a written warning to “tuck in tighter and not to exit too close to the white line on left-handers” in the Blue Book, and the “turn only when you see the exit” advice IS in the mid-90s editions of Roadcraft. But in neither book is the message given any great prominence, possibly because – as is also regularly pointed out – the book was intended to be read alongside the police practical training. However, my response to that is “why write a book with half the story?”

A less charitable suggestion was that I was trying to “score points over other trainers”, or wanted to be the “sole Guardian of the Truth” – if that were true, I’d hardly be explaining how Point and Squirt worked, would I now?

For what it’s worth, a few years after the first “Point and Squirt is just Roadcraft properly explained” bun fight, I met a very nice bloke on a group trip in Europe. He’d had his IAM pass for 20 years but was active in his group. At the end of one of our rides, he quizzed me on the lines I was taking. I explained Point & Squirt. “Nah”, he said, “I don’t like that… it’s all stop/start and sudden jinks… I like match the throttle to the bend mid-corner… and I like to lean the bike and use wide sweeping lines because the bike’s more stable… it’s how my two mates who are both ex-police riders ride too”. Next day I followed him. He was rolling the throttle on and off mid-corner and taking the maximum radius line round bends.

So if Point and Squirt really isn’t ‘Roadcraft-revisited’, does anyone else teach something similar? Some years AFTER I’d talked about Point and Squirt online, Andy Ibbott – then director of the UK outlet of Code’s California Superbike school – wrote about Code’s cornering in ‘Motor Cycle News’. Without calling it Point and Squirt, Andy Morrison of Rapid Training explained it very well indeed in a series in ‘Bike’ magazine between 2005 and 2006, more than ten years after I first started writing about Point and Squirt online, and almost as long after I started teaching it.

So I think I’ve shown that there is a significant difference between the Point and Squirt approach to cornering and what’s covered by Roadcraft-based training. If you’re still struggling to accept that after reading my explanation, maybe book up a course and see for yourself.

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56. Wide lines, tight lines, right lines – the law of Diminishing Returns

This article challenges the idea that “positioning for view” is ‘necessary’ to be seen as an advanced rider. Whilst it’s accepted that “positioning for safety” should always be first in the hierarchy of ‘safety — stability — view’, as an absolute rather than a trade-off. As I’ve said elsewhere, “safety” is an abstract goal, as in “more view must be safer”, but risk is a trade-off between exposure and benefit. Riders often accept a large increase in exposure (to oncoming traffic or hidden hazards) in exchange for a very small gain in information (measured in metres or fractions of a second), without consciously evaluating whether that trade is favourable. The extra metres of visibility only have real value we intend to act on them, and in practice that usually means carrying more speed through the bend, which magnifies the consequences of any mistake. That’s the paradox; more view doesn’t automatically make us safer if we simply use it to ride faster — and that’s where risk creeps back in. The safest line is not the widest or the tightest, but the one that leaves the greatest margin for error when something goes wrong — including our mistakes as well as the mistakes of others.

Wide lines, tight lines, right lines – the law of Diminishing Returns

Years ago, I went along to one of the very first BikeSafe courses run by the Met Police, and had a good day, picking up a couple of useful tips and generally being impressed with the comments. One of my few negative observations on the day was the way the police rider taking us out held a wide line, right out on the white line, around left-hand bends even when there was traffic coming the other way*. I felt the position was too extreme, and when writing up my day out, I made this comment on my regular bike forum. The ensuing discussion surprised me.

One forum member, a former bike cop himself, took me to task and insisted that if the rider gained an extra half-second view ahead, then the wide position was worth it.

I thought about the cornering crash stats, and just how many riders are killed on left-hand corners. It’s pretty obvious that seeing the spiky thing on the front of the tractor half a second sooner if it’s about to impale us doesn’t really help much. A second trainer :

“There are times when position for view is the last thing (but not ‘final’) to be considered. Narrow lanes, tight blind corners? Forget ‘progress’, hug the left verge.”

Then up popped a third instructor with:

“Seeing something half a second earlier CAN make a difference. What is important is that your speed is right such that you are able to deal with any situations as they occur.

“Very often people are simply carrying too much speed as opposed to being in the wrong position. The two combined are a lethal combination, 2 mph can be too much, just lose it and manage the problem.”

So which is it? Should we hold that wider line and get a slightly better view around a left-hander? Or should we tuck in a little closer to the nearside and sacrifice a bit of view for some extra clearance to oncoming vehicles?

The answer, to my mind, usually lies with the simpler option.

If we hold the wide line out alongside the centre line, and we DO see something we need to avoid, then we need to move – and pretty rapidly too – to the left to get out of the way.

If on the same corner we hold a slightly tighter line, we have slightly less view around the corner, but the chances of meeting a vehicle cutting the corner and requiring some evasive action are lessened. And we’ll probably not have to move so far for that evasive manoeuvre.

But there’s another consideration. The only real reason for holding a wide line around a corner is to carry more speed. Think about it – we need to be able to ‘stop in the distance we can see to be clear on our side of the road’ etc. That’s the instruction from ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’, the police manual. If we move left, we can still apply the rule, just at a slightly slower speed because we can see a little less far.

How much is our view restricted? Well, mid-corner it’s not nearly as much as is generally believed. The diagrams in Roadcraft are massively exaggerated in terms of width of the road, simply to make the point clear. But on real roads which are much narrower, the extra distances we can see by taking up wide positions is just a few metres. If you’re sceptical, you can easily see for yourself. Stop near a left-hand bend, and walk to the centre of the lane – look up the road and see where the limit point is. Now walk out to the centre line, and have a second look. You won’t be seeing much further around the corner. If you don’t fancy getting round down, you can achieve much the same result by using the satellite view on Googlemaps and zooming in on a bend. Lay a straight edge over the screen and move it around to simulate the different lines of sight. I think you’ll be surprised how little extra the view moves forward as you shift from a centre-of-the-lane position to the extreme right.

The real benefit of the wide-right position on a left-hander is not what we can see of the the road ahead, it’s actually an earlier view – and more separation from – the other big threat on any twisty road; blind driveways, entrances to fields, and side turnings on the inside of the corner…

…and if we DO find something pulling out from the left or turning into the entrance across our path, we better be able to stop in short order.

Suddenly, the benefits of carrying more speed around the bend don’t look quite so important as the ability to stop when we find the road blocked.

  • I repeated BikeSafe in 2018 and am happy to report that the police rider was taking up rather less extreme positions!

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49. The ‘Point and Squirt’ approach to corners

This particular article has its origins in some heated debates that took place online on my regular bike forum. The core problem it addresses — riders committing to a corner before they can see their way out — is still one of the most common precursors to serious road crashes. The debates concerned the difference between what some called ‘conventional’ cornering lines, and what I have been teaching since 1997 as the ‘Point and Squirt’ technique. Point and Squirt has its origins in a series of articles published in the 1980s in the old Motorcycle Sport and Leisure magazine, one of which showed some cornering diagrams which featured a ‘late apex’ line. I’d long since realised that running wide on the exit to bend was best avoided and the late apex line got me thinking, and also experimenting – not just with late apex, but with a quicker steering input to make the best use of it. That was something that went pretty much against the grain at the time. It was usually stated that machine inputs should be smooth. The trouble was, smooth was usually interpreted as ‘slow’. But the fact is that quick steering inputs can be also smooth. It’s all in the timing. I developed over many despatching miles, and when I started training it was a natural way to cover cornering. Point and Squirt remains relevant precisely because it is based on vision, timing, and options. The fact that modern bikes accelerate harder, steer faster, and forgive more errors only increases the importance of when riders choose to turn and apply throttle.

The ‘Point and Squirt’ approach to corners

Let’s go back to basics. Riding a bike requires us to be able to:

  • change speed

  • change direction

That’s all that the machine itself can do. Of course, there are other issues:

  • managing stability

  • managing risk

But it’s our ability to change speed and direction first and foremost that allows us to manage stability and risk in a bend. So what I teach on my Survival Skills Performance cornering courses is all about getting these basics right.

Here’s the first point to consider. It’s easy to get a motorcycle to either change direction OR change speed. We can mix-and-match, but it’s not so easy. So whenever we can, it makes sense to separate the braking and acceleration forces from cornering forces. On the approach to a corner we can achieve that quite simply – we get all deceleration, whether by closing the throttle or braking, completed upright before the corner. Once we’ve finished steering – which is the moment the bike is clear of the curve and upright again – we accelerate positively. So it’s this late turn-in and the upright acceleration which gives the technique the ‘Point and Squirt’ name.

What we don’t try to do is ‘chase the Limit Point’ by accelerating whilst still leaned over in the curve, as it says in ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’. With Point and Squirt, when the machine is leaned over, it’s ONLY having to deal with the cornering forces.

Now, here’s the second point. To minimise risk, we need to respond to hazards, whether that’s the shape of the corner itself, the presence of other vehicles and places they could turn, the state of the road surface and possible stability problems, or other issues such pedestrians and animals. To manage the risks posed by those hazards, we have to SEE them – or at least realise that we CANNOT see them! So until a mid-corner hazard forces a change of position on us, our line around the bend is dictated by what we can see. The line that gives us the best view of the road ahead is what I call the ‘Vision Line’, and we follow it from the moment we enter the corner to the point at which we can clearly see where the road goes next. To maintain the view, we usually position ourselves towards the outer edge of our lane, just so long as we don’t put ourselves at risk from oncoming vehicles (on a left-hander in the UK) or blind entrances or debris at the edge of the road (on a right-hander).

And thirdly. We need to know where we are in a bend – we need some kind of road map. And this is where I borrow from track technique – we can define ANY corner in terms of:

  1. the ‘entry’ – where the bend forces us to steer or run off the road

  2. the ‘turn-in point’ – where we can see the exit

  3. the ‘exit’ – where we’re upright again and pointed to where we want to go next.

Once we realise that committing ourselves to turning-in to a corner when we can’t see our way out of the bend is liable to lead to us running wide later in the corner, then it’s fairly obvious that we should only turn-in and attempt to widen the line around the final part of the corner when the view opens up for good. It’s this view of the way out – the exit – that locates the ‘turn-in point’. Using a late ‘turn-in point’ minimises the risk of turning in too early, and running wide later in the bend.

Why the controversy? Firstly, I was told “it’s in Roadcraft already”. It isn’t, although there are common elements such as the wide ‘vision line’. But the Point and Squirt approach emphasises the advantage of separating from the steering the inputs that make the bike do a ‘rocking horse’ on the brakes or under power. It also emphasises the late turn-in, late apex line. And it requires a moderately quick steering to make the direction change when the view opens up. Whilst it’s always possible to interpret ‘Roadcraft’ that way by reading between the lines, none of these elements are made explicitly clear as they are in Point and Squirt.

A more negative view was that Point and Squirt is a racing technique. Because I was talking about braking rather than simply rolling off the throttle, it was assumed that it must be all about dashing up to the corner before braking late and hard, and that the late ‘turn-in’ would result in the rider banging the bike over on its side before firing it out with a handful of throttle and wheelspin. Clearly that’s NOT what I’m suggesting. Of course, if we want to, we could brake later and harder, then maximise acceleration out of the turn, but getting through the corner quicker isn’t the raison d’etre. A moment’s thought will show that because Point and Squirt is about views and lines, it works just as well with a police-style ‘acceleration sense’ approach to riding.

What else? “Point and Squirt line’s ‘late apex’ requires a big steering input which could destabilise the bike.” It’s true that Point and Squirt gets the bike turned over a shorter distance, but if we’re travelling a little more slowly, it’s not a problem – in any case, there’s nearly always plenty of grip available to steer the machine, mid-corner it’s braking and accelerating grip that’s in short supply. We also get the bike upright sooner which is a benefit.

And “by taking a very late apex and making a more rapid change of direction, a rider is prevented from reducing the severity of a bend by ‘maximising the radius of the corner’.” Whilst in theory, this wider line ‘works the tyres less hard’ – that’s the very explanation given in a West Midlands BikeSafe video, the reality of what riders do with a wider line is very different. We all use it to carry more speed, not lean over less. The benefits are non-existant! What was really ironic in the West Midlands video was that having explained the benefits of the maximum radius line, the police rider then demonstrated a sequence of perfect Point and Squirt lines!

A more reasonable response was that it doesn’t apply to all corners. I’d totally agree, but I’d point out that it all comes back to the view. If we can see clearly right through the corner from one end to the other, then there’s no need to delay our ‘turn-in’, and we can indeed open out our line to ‘maximise the radius’ but in the UK at least, it’s rare to find a corner where there is nothing blocking our line of sight. Turning in too early means we’re relying on guesswork to figure out where the road goes. Even then, the wide exit means our steering must be spot on. If we get it wrong, we’ll run wide. What defines Point and Squirt is that delayed ‘turn-in’ which is controlled entirely by our view of the way out of the bend. That means it applies to any corner where we can’t see the exit on the way in, which happens to be most bends in the UK. And it’s also an excellent way to negotiate mountain hairpins where running wide could be catastrophic.

Nothing about Point and Squirt is particularly unique – you can find elements of it in various different books. What is unique is that way it’s all put together, and how it pulls all aspects of cornering – assessment of the bend, managing risk along the way, choosing a line and timing machine inputs – into one neat and self-contained system.

Funnily enough, right in the middle of the big online debate Andy Ibbott used his MCN column to explain how to “Separate throttle and steering and never run wide again”. Covering precisely the theory behind Point and Squirt, he stated:

“We need to get the bike pointing in the right direction before applying the throttle”.

My point exactly!

 

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30. The Limit (or Vanishing) Point – is it enough?

Years after I wrote this, and even now after I updated it, I still think that the belief that the Limit Point is of prime importance when setting our speed in corners is massively overstated. What I would add now is that there is a distinction between the static Limit Point — where road edges converge at any particular instant — and the dynamic Limit Point — how is our sense of how this point is moving back and forth as our bike moves along the road. And — in my opinion at least — it should never be the sole determinant of speed into a corner. It’s often hard to detect road irregularities on fast sweeping bends until we’re much closer, the gaps in hedges where other vehicles may appear frequently only ‘uncloak’ well after the Limit Point is reached, and there’s no guarantee that any hazard that reveals itself via the forward movement of the Limit Point is actually stationary — if it’s moving towards us, we could easily run out of braking distance. To me, these are blindly obvious limitations. Yet decades after I first wrote about them, they are rarely covered in any discussion of the Limit Point. Treat is as one tool among many; a guide to road direction and potential speed adjustments, rather than a definitive target for acceleration, braking or — most crucially of all — stopping! For riders of all levels, it’s integrating “what we can see” with “what we can’t see” and being ready to deal with the latter, by thinking well beyond the Limit Point that is paramount to safe cornering.

The Limit (or Vanishing) Point – is it enough?

As soon as we take a look at post-test motorcycle training, one of the concepts we’re likely to come across is something called the Limit Point or the Vanishing Point (or Convergence Point or Visual Point – call it what you like, it’s the same thing). It gets particular focus in UK-based post-test training because it appears in the police handbook ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’. And because the police manual discusses it, it’s a feature of the IAM’s own RoadSmart ‘Advanced Rider Course’ and in the training delivered by RoSPA instructors and virtually anyone else who bases their training on UK police practice. Not surprisingly, it also regularly pops up on advanced riding videos and guides in magazines and on the internet. It’s also been adopted abroad. So just how useful is it? And just how do we set our speed for a bend? Is it ONLY based on ‘limit point analysis’?

Because the Limit Point has been explained so many times and done to a crispy turn on the internet, I left it the topic alone for many years – why add another article to an already-sizeable pile that say much the same?

So what changed my mind?

Have a read of this. It’s a post made on the bike forum I used to moderate by another advanced instructor with impressive ex-police credentials:

“The main thing you have to learn about safe riding is the visual point or vanishing point. I teach this to clients all the time. Some tell me in detail how or what they look at at and when I take them out on the road it seems no one understands it too well. All police riding is based on this because if you know how to use it, it gives you everything you want. Position on the road, speed on the approach to any bend, how fast you can enter the bend, how much power to apply to the throttle, where to move the bike from the corner for the next position. In my experience it is not the technique that is hard but the believing what you see and having confidence to use it anywhere in the world. It is very exciting once you know how it works.”

The writer continued by explaining the ‘stop in the distance we can see to be clear’ rule, and explained that as the limit point is as far as we can see, that’s where we need to be able to stop.

“Everything you want”?

Really? Not in my book it doesn’t.

Firstly, it’s assuming that any obstacle in our lane revealed by the receding Limit Point will be stationary. Of course there’s no guarantee that’s the case as any biker who has ever misjudged an overtake approaching a corner and gone into it on the wrong side of the road will know. The narrower the road and the tighter the corner, the more likely we are to encounter a vehicle crossing into our lane, and in the worst case, driving towards us in it. It’s important that we add the extra words that are actually clearly stated within ‘Roadcraft’ – and that is that we must actually be able to “stop WELL WITHIN in the distance we can EXPECT TO REMAIN clear”. That’s a significant difference.

Secondly – and this is not mentioned explicitly in ‘Roadcraft’ – there’s always the possibility of an oncoming car turning across our path. Now, if we’re rounding a left-hander, we’ll see that car appear a few moments before we can see the junction it’s aiming for on the inside of the corner – our line of sight always unveils the outside of the bend before we see the corresponding point on the inside of the corner. What that should tell us is that we won’t know if there’s an emerging car on the inside of the bend, even though our formal Limit Point is already beyond it. The reverse applies on a right-hander. We’ll see the junction to the inside of the bend, but the oncoming vehicle about to cross our path into it will be out of sight. Just as ‘Roadcraft’ says – without explaining why – we MUST be able to stop well before we reach the Limit Point.

Here’s a third issue that isn’t mentioned either. Let me introduce you to what are sometimes called ‘Surprise Horizons’. A Surprise Horizon is any point which lies between us and the Limit Point, from which another vehicle (or cyclist, pedestrian or even an animal) MIGHT EMERGE and BLOCK OUR PATH. And that means we actually need to do is be able to STOP at that point, NOT at the Limit Point. And that is a very different concept. The term Surprise Horizon comes from a book called ‘Mind Driving’ by Stephen Haley, a car trainer.
Even though we might have a clear view of the Limit Point itself, a Surprise Horizon can lurk unseen in any blind area. Even on a near-straight road, a slight kink in the hedge, the narrow gap between two buildings, an opening between parked cars, or a blind crest all have the potential to conceal anything from a tractor tugging a trailer to a sheep.

So what’s my conclusion? That used sensibly it works well with other observation links but that it should be considered just one tool in your box of tricks to read corners, not the “be all and end all” of your cornering technique.

Anyway, I posted something to this effect on the forum and two wags read it and replied…

“So isn’t the “Vanishing point” simply the farthest you can see down the road? Or is that too simple?”

“Way, Way too simple. This is technical stuff we’re talking about here. The vanishing point is the point where the left and right verges appear to converge, or in other words, the farthest you can see down the road. Does that make it clear?”

I had to laugh… sometimes a simple, useful technique that should be obvious and straightforward can be elevated to semi-mystical status!

The Surprise Horizon concept is one that really should be added to ‘Roadcraft’ and to any explanation of how to apply the Limit point concept to judge speed. If we simply see the road as guaranteed to stay empty between ourselves and the Limit Point, we really are risking a nasty SURPRISE! And remember…

No Surprise? No Accident!

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14. Who is writing your biking advice? Make sure it’s good!

I sometimes pick up criticism for commenting negatively on other articles on better biking skills. “Why are you being so negative? They are only trying to help” was something I heard a while back. The trouble is, not all advice is created equal. When it comes to cornering, there’s a still a focus on prioritising ‘progress’ and textbook lines over hazard awareness, leaving riders exposed to surprises. Where we look and how we think about hazards in corners matters more than how fast we take a bend; the aim of the article is to explain why situational awareness should always come first in advanced riding. The reference to the MAC courses from 1998 may seem out of date, but in fact there is still a need for similar cautions, particularly in this age of modern tech; that might change the machine dynamics but cannot replace situational awareness.

Who is writing your biking advice? Make sure it’s good!

Some years back I was reading a new section on advanced riding on another website. The section was designed to pull in readers to the business, and I wasn’t surprised to see that the first article dealt with cornering – it usually does! But rather than being written ‘in-house’, contributions were from readers. In this case, the article appeared it was written by someone who had completed a two day Motorcycle Appreciation Course (MAC) in 1998 as part of that now-defunct Honda-run training initiative. No problem, I thought, I’m always interested in new ideas and new sources. However, reading it more closely revealed a couple of misunderstandings. At least I hoped they were misunderstandings and not what was taught!

So what did I spot that concerned me? The most important one involved our old friend the Limit Point (or vanishing, distance or convergence point) and what we should do with it.

He states “quick riding particularly through bends is all about position. Correct positioning will enable maximum visibility and consequently more rapid progress.”

Uh-oh. First warning sign. Notice the emphasis on quick riding and progress. As I stated in a previous tip, skills-based training has to be tempered by a knowledge of what can go WRONG. My first thought would be “what might make me slow down and maybe even stop”, not how fast I can get around the bend. Our goal in a bend is NOT ‘more progress’. It’s all about identifying hazards that might make us slow down. IF and ONLY IF we are certain that we cannot see any reasons to slow down, THEN we can choose whether or not making ‘progress’ is appropriate. And I know this is where the Survival Skills risk-based approach to training parts company with a lot of other post-test training in the UK.

“Therefore moving to the left for a right-hander, staying in to the left watching the vanishing point until you can see the exit then drifting away from the left towards the right easing out the bend and accelerating away will open the bend out allowing more brisk progress. The opposite applies for left-handers”.

No. Once we realise that our first task is always to work out where we might to stop, then we need to look out for the hazards that might make us stop. Gaining the best possible view around the bend isn’t the same as maximising our view of hazards.

If we’re going to experience a nasty SURPRISE! on a corner, it’s most likely to appear from a hazard called a ‘surprise horizon’. The surprise horizon is a blind area between us and the furthest point we can see is clear. The reason a surprise horizon is a hazard we need to be aware of is because of the risk that a vehicle (or a cycle or a person or even an animal) could suddenly appear. And it’s appearing between us and the limit point.

And that in turn leads to two other conclusions:

positioning to see as far as the limit point MUST be subsidiary to changing position to open up views into these blind areas. If we simply ride to open up view around a right-hand bend, it can place us perilously close to these blind entrances on the nearside.

our speed must be set to allow us to take some evasive action at the surprise horizon, not the limit point

Are there any other hazards?

We mustn’t forget that the more we position to the right-of-centre and close to the centre line, there is the potential risk of conflict with oncoming traffic. The narrower the road or the sharper the corner, the worse the risk. Too far to the right and the only benefit will be that we see what we’re about to hit a moment sooner. We must give up position if keeping right on a left-hander would potentially expose us to a risk of head-on collision. We MUST maintain a broader focus on the ROAD, not just the the corner – we must maintain SITUATIONAL AWARENESS.

Then he continued: “if all this seems rather obvious, it is probably because it is and certainly it came as nothing new to me. So why was I losing speed on the approach to bends and in some cases while negotiating them?

“I had forgotten not the need to assess the line of the road well in advance, but to maintain concentration on where it was going, in other words where I wanted to go… It took me some while to realise that instead of watching the vanishing point and chasing it, my eye was straying to changes in the road surface, the instruments, or minor obstructions. As soon as my concentration strayed, my momentum through the bend or on its approach reduced.”

Maybe I’m deliberately failing to read between the lines, but to me (and possibly to someone reading this with whilst looking for advice) this reads as if the broader situational awareness is being seen as a distraction from the all-important task of ‘making progress’ through the corner.

Of course we look at the road surface, of course we look at ‘minor obstructions’. We have to, because we are not on a race track and we need to keep an up-to-date 360 degree mental map of our surroundings, and a lot of vital detail can only be assessed when we’re closer-up. What’s a dark patch spotted in the distance? Only close up will we be able to tell if it’s a road repair with different coloured tarmac, a pothole, a damp patch or a fuel spill. Clearly, there are good times to make mirror checks and glance at the instruments, and that’s probably not in the middle of the corner, but denying that we need to check the surface or what’s left and right of our path is just plain wrong.

My guess is that the entire diagnosis of the writer’s problems was wrong. It was not ‘lack of forward vision’ so much as a late response to the hazards he had spotted – hence running in on a closed throttle – plus a general lack of a plan allowing the rider to negotiate bends as a flowing sequence. Possibly he got a lecture on the dangers of target fixation.

That would tally with what he says later about it being “a truism that we go where we look”. That’s another old chestnut. We actually look at what scares us – it’s built-in to human responses to threats. It’s target fixation and it’s a far more natural response to the threats of the road, and it takes a real effort to lift our view further ahead and away from the threat. And one of the things that creates target fixation, pulling our view down and to the immediate surroundings, is trying to ride too fast – we start focusing on the Number One job which is simply staying on the tarmac. If we haven’t got time to spread our vision around, then we’re riding too close to our limits. And there’s another reason progress should never be a goal of training, but an outcome of eliminating risk.

So next time you’re out on the bike, have a think about where you are looking. If you’re being surprised by hazards appearng AHEAD, then you need to pick your vision up and search further ahead. If you’re being surprised by hazards appearing from the SIDES then you need to spread your view left and right. In either case, you may need to slow down initially, but what you should not be doing is focusing exclusively on the limit point.