In de flow...
Sometimes, everything seems to fit together. Without being aware what you are doing, you choose the ideal line, you instinctively feel how every corner will behave, and you ride with the right speed, in the right gear, without thinking with hindsight that you could have had a higher speed, and you never get the upsetting thought that your speed is too high for the corner.
Practise conciously
Counterintuitively, you get in the flow most easily when you also try, from time to time, to be really conscious of what you do when cornering.
In cornering, everything is important: how you look through the corner in advance, how you plan your line, hou you sit on the motorcycle, how you start the corner, how you use the throttle and how you shift, how you brake in advance, and sometimes, unfortunately, how you brake or swerve in the corner itself.
Of course, reading alone will not make you better in cornering: you will have to practise, and learn to feel what happens.
But reading about cornering may help you there....
Looking
Mountain with winding road, visible from far away
Looking further and further and further...
By far the most important thing to do to get your cornering fluent, is, as always with motorcycle riding, *looking*.
Judge corners
You will have to learn to judge corners, in order to be able to enter an unknown corner with the right entry speed, and in the right gear..
By looking far ahead, you can sometimes see corners long before you have arrived there, and follow the line of the road by viewing trees or lamp posts, even when you don't see the surface of the road.
Judging unknown corners gets better with experience, of course, but to accelerate that learning process, it's always good to evaluate what went wrong and why, when a certain corner surprised you somehow, or when cornering didn't feel good. Try to think whether there were signs about the corner that you missed.
Look where you want to go
In the corner itself, it's important to look where you want to go, as always (so don't look at the lonely tree, but follow the line that you want to ride, with your eyes). Always look *far ahead*.
Try to pay attention, in a corner, to the way the corner behaves: tightening curves can be very treacherous. Keep track of the "vanishing point": when it comes closer, the corner is tightening.
Looking: line through the corner
Sylvia in the middle of the road in a right-hand corner
Keep at the outside of the corner as long as possible
On the track
The perfect line through a corner depends on where you ride: if you are on the track, then your goal is simply to get as fast through the corner as possible. You should choose your line such that you can ride one fluent line from the point where you lean in, and such that you are able to accelerate easily throughout the corner (pull the throttle open gently). This is what the books of Keith Code will teach you.
What you can see
Outside the track, almost always your *vision* is the limiting factor. Your line then will not be the line of the optimal speed, but of the optimal vision.
Therefore, you split a corner in two:
Outside
You start the corner (lean in) where it starts, as much as possible in the outside of the corner, and you make sure that, when necessary, you have already braked and switched gears.
Before entering the corner, you should have the correct speed, be in the correct gear, and have the throttle (slightly) turned on. Then you lean in, and you stay in the outside of the corner.
Straight out
Somewhere in the corner you arrive at a point from where you, from the outside where you still are, can ride on, in one line, to the outside of the road through the inside of the curve.
To do that, you have to lean in again, and now you accelerate out of the corner, via the inside of the corner, to the outside.
That way, you have maximum view all the time.
Looking: tightening corners
Warning for a corner with a decreasing radius
You will not always be warned in advance
Treacherous
It is not always possible to judge corners before you enter them. A nasty kind of corner is the one with a decreasing radius. Such a corner starts easy but gets tighter.
Sometimes there are warning signs so you will not be taken by suprprise, like in this photograph, but that's not always the case.
Corners with a decreasing radius are especially treacherous because you will often not notice it until it is too late to react.
Vanishing point
You are able to notice such corners longer in advance, when you, while in the corner, keep attention to the so-called "vanishing point".
In the photograph, the vanishing point is just behind the sign. It is the point at which the inner and outer side of the corner seem to come together.
When you observe that your distance to the vanishing points keeps getting bigger, everything is alright: the corner is widening up.
But when the vanishing points gets closer, you know that the corner will get tighter. You stull have time to decrease your speed with that back brake (gently of course), or to lean in more.
Oops, didn't see it coming
OK, but what to do when you forgot to observe the vanishing point, and you are surprised, mid-corner, by a decreasing radius?
-> Push your motorcycle to the inside, with your outside knee. Leaning in extra by pushing against the inside steering handle is possible as well, but often, you have a psychological barrier to do so in such a situation. Pushing with your knee is easier then.
-> Use the rear brake gently. You will not only decrease your speed, but the motorcycle will turn a bit around its rear wheel so to speak, so you will turn more into the corner. That's exactly what you need. Mind that you don't hit the rear brake hard in panic!
In general, you will ride corners in such a way that there still is the possibility to lean in more, on the street. After all, you only ride to the limits on a circuit.
Looking: negative camber corners
