Steering a bike’s easy

Steering a bike’s easy – you either lean into the turn, or turn the bars right to go right, and left to go left, right?

Wrong. Once you’re on the move, shifting your bodyweight to try and lean into a turn has almost no effect. If you don’t believe us, try riding along with no hands and leaning your weight one way or the other – you can initiate a gentle curve, but tighter turns are impossible unless you flick the whole bike violently, in which case you’re indirectly turning the bars anyway. So you have to use the handlebars but not the way you might think – you need to turn them the opposite way to the way you want to go. It’s called counter steering and here’s how you do it.

1. The approach
As you come up to the point where you want to turn, you want the bike settled, so get your braking and gearchanging over and done with in plenty of time. We’ll assume a right hand turn for the moment.

2. The turn-in
At your chosen turn-in point, either pull gently and briefly on the left hand bar, or push gently and briefly on the right hand bar. This momentarily sends the front wheel in the wrong direction, so the bike starts to steer that way, but will lean the other. If you were to keep pointing the bars in the ‘wrong’ direction you’d lose control and crash, but in fact the gyroscopic effect of the spinning front wheel and the effect of the front suspension geometry will make the front wheel want to centre itself in the direction the rest of the bike is pointing (as a shopping trolley wheel should centre itself as you push it along), so the bike will ‘fall’ in the opposite direction to the way you first pointed the handlebars – in other words, you’ve now got the bike leaning to the right.

3. The turn itself
Now that’s fine and dandy, but you’re still falling to the right, and if you don’t do something to balance that you’ll just fall over! What you do is use the throttle to get everything back in equilibrium. As soon as you’re committed to the turn, get back on the throttle gently – you’ll notice an immediate improvement in feel from the front tyre, and you’ll stabilise the bike. As you pass the apex and start to get the bike more upright again, you’ll be wanting to apply proggressively more throttle and to drive harder out of the corner.

4. But I can’t do that!
Oh yes you can. In fact you probably already do, but subconsciously. If you want proof, just go and get a ride on a sidecar outfit. Because they can’t lean, you have to steer an outfit in the direction you want to go, same as you would a car. Put a normal biker on an outfit and nine times out of ten either they can’t steer it at all and go straight on, or they go in the opposite way to where they intended!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Articles, Training Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Steering a bike’s easy”