Part 7 – Confront your cornering fears 1

Bikers are sometimes the victims of crazy or careless car drivers no doubt. But don’t kid yourself – most bike prangs are things we could avoid if we mastered our brains, our brakes, and the bends. Follow our series of guides on how not to crash, and start adding the years of accident-free biking to your riding life…

According to the latest figures, 40.2 per cent of bikers who crash do so on their own, in bends. And that’s not including the little mishaps we don’t tell anyone about, and the near-misses when we bottled it mid-corner, sat her up and only just got round, blushing and cursing.

Pay some attention to the specific negative thoughts your brain is in the habit of running through at the worst possible time, and you could make the difference between coming off and staying on.

‘I’m going in too fast’
It’s easy to get into the habit of thinking rushing up to a bend means you’re going to corner fast. In fact, it usually means the exact opposite.

First take a step back. Why are you rushing up to the corner? Is it because you’ve told yourself over and over that cornering is everything, and you must try and go faster and faster through each bend?

If you have, you might find this thought helpful: corner speed doesn’t win races – which is why corner speed kings like Biaggi and Rossi had to relearn how to ride in the four-stroke era, or keep crashing.

The key to being fast is how soon you can open the throttle out of the bend, and propel yourself down the next straight.

Focusing on corner speed as the be-all and end-all of riding is a form of target fixation as likely to bring you to grief as staring at the lamp-post on the outside of the bend. In both cases, focusing on the exit is the answer.

Stop focusing on your corner speed, thinking ‘the faster I’m going at the apex the better I am’, and you’ll stop arriving at corners too fast.

Don’t think about how fast you’re going, but how soon you can start opening the throttle and powering onto the next straight. Practice getting better at the exits and your entry speed will set itself.

‘I’ve got to get rid of the chicken-strips on my tyres – must… lean… further…’
If you teach yourself to feel good the more you lean over – a hero when the peg touches down – you’re probably just making bends sharper than they need to be.

And that could catch you out the day you hit a deceptive decreasing-radius bend.
If deep down you lack confidence in cornering, your probably start turning in early to ‘make up’ for your perceived lack of skill.

What you’re brain’s telling you is starting turning early means you won’t suddenly need to steer hard later on.

Trouble is, this means you’re getting closer to the apex before the corner is even half way over.

The result? You’re going straighter at the apex than the corner is and you need to build up to a big lean angle to finally get round without running wide.

Find a speed that doesn’t produce panic, and practise turning later into each of the bends on your favourite road. Do the bends seem less sharp than before? Could you take them faster with less lean? Isn’t powering out of the bend more fun than trying to carry as much speed and lean as possible and coasting round?