CORNERING WITH KEITH
16 January 2007 - Superbike School

Keith Code talks about cornering

CRASHING

Riding errors which lead to crashing follow distinct patterns. Once detected they can be used to make huge leaps forward in skill and confidence.

Reasons To Improve

My experience is that riders come to school for a variety of reasons. They say: to be safer, faster, more in control, learn the skills, have more confidence, get their knee down, improve and so on.

Beneath all of these reasons and consistent with each is a very fundamental personal reason: riders don''t want to crash. Everyone wants to experience the maximum freedom and exhilaration with the minimum of danger; and I fully agree with this.

For the school staff, this principle works out just fine. If a rider crashes on a school day, no one wins: we are deprived of the opportunity to finish up what we started and so is the rider. It puts kinks in the day for everyone involved.

Conventional Wisdom On Crashing

Unfortunately there is still a lot of really bad advice out there on crashing: ''You don''t know how fast you can go until you crash,'' is one of them. ''There are riders who have fallen and those that are going to fall,'' that''s another one that makes crashing seem inevitable. These pieces of ?conventional wisdom? miss the mark by miles. They are actually harmful.

I''m not saying that you can get through all of life without falling down. You may. But riders have and will continue to crash, bin it, fall down, go down, throw it away, pitch it, drop it, put it down and lose it.

A significant rider error, when aggravated and compounded by the rider''s ?corrections?, can result in violating the machine''s inherent stability leading to a bike and rider going down. That is the negative.

Errors Follow Patterns

On the positive side, there are key indicators of these basic errors and they follow a pattern. I say positive because if you intend to improve someone''s riding, but don''t have a clue about these indicators, you may see errors and try to correct them but miss their underlying pattern, which in turn creates a mystery as to why the rider suddenly runs off track, scares him/herself or falls down.

These indicators do have patterns and are specific in how they look. They generally break down into two main categories. 1) the riders who look uncertain and choppy as they commit them, a sort of advanced case of new rider syndrome and 2) riders appear to have abandoned their senses like someone with their first unlimited-purchase credit card. They are purposeful, very positive and absolutely committed to their silly riding. You see what can only be described as blind faith in the bike and the tires with absolutely no idea of limits and how these limits may be correctly approached and eventually controlled.

Steering Drill

Those of you who have already done the school may remember the simple steering drill we did with you in the paddock or skid pad area.

There are 6 corrections we can make on how the rider relates to the bike as it''s steered into a corner with that drill. Riders feel more in control of the bike from any of the six corrections, once corrected. However, one of the primary reasons we do the steering drill is to prevent them from making mistakes that, under very common circumstances, can lead to running wide, running off the track or even crashing.

When the coaches see these errors they know where the rider is going and what he thinks he is trying to do and how bad it can get if not corrected.

The Timid and The Brave

Some riders can''t get comfortable with the no limits idea the track provides and actually ride slower than they do on the street. While at the other extreme, some riders go on vacation from the laws of physics, speed, lean angle and common sense. Whichever mode they tend toward, certain patterns quickly develop in their riding that, to the trained eye, spell TROUBLE.

I hope I don''t blow any other schools out of the water with this but, all schools, all track days, all racing and of course street riding have crashes. Some people call them accidents but rarely are motorcycle crashes accidental; they are caused, more often than not, by the rider''s own hand.

Statistics on Crashing

I bring this up because of what has happened at our school over the past year and a half. For the previous 25 years we had a pretty consistent attrition rate due to crashing. All in all it wasn''t horrible, about one and a half million school miles to what you might call a serious crash: more than a broken collarbone or bruises kind of thing.

Because we pay attention to how riders are riding I was convinced it had more to do with the phases of the moon or something than observable riding patterns but we''ve had a fresh look at this and it began to resolve in the riders'' favor. Once we began to really see the errors and what they meant, what seemed like accidents or fate turns out to be lack of technical skills and is very correctable.

What happened? Well, when you have a 50% improvement in anything you know that you are on the right path and we have, on average, cut our crash rate in half. Considering that we have more school days and hence more students now than ever before, that floats my boat.

Preventative Measures

We are becoming pro at spotting these patterns and nipping them before they progress to the run-off-the-track or crashing stage. Looking at it from another perspective, students have told me for years that crashing on the track is most probably many, many times ?safer? than on the street. But one o
f the great rewards of teaching this sport are the scores of students who have come back and told us of the horrible riding situation that they avoided because they knew what to do.

I''m not saying that we can make you a safe rider. I''m not saying that you can''t crash at my school, you certainly can. Fortunately, we recognize something about ourselves and our sport: if riding was not dangerous it wouldn''t be nearly as much fun. We know the risks, we like the risks and we love the rewards of taking them. It makes perfect sense to me. Taking risks, with understanding, makes a rider as safe as he or she can be.

Problems Lead to Improvement

The other huge positive that has come out of this evolution is that riders are made more aware of the points that get them into trouble. It may sound crazy but more often than not the ?fatal? mistakes (resulting in poor control or catalysts to crashing type errors) mistakes are actually aspects of riding that the student felt were some of their best points. Clearing up these misguided ideas alone can open the door for vast improvement with any rider.

If this seems like I''m patting ourselves on the back, you are right. Crashing is a huge area of rider fear and eliminating 50% of the crashes on average is another milestone for us.

You have plenty of reasons to learn the skills of riding. We are doing our level (very) best to see that you get what you want with your riding and we are winning at it every school day. You will too.

See you at the track.

Keith Code

Copyright Keith Code, 2006, all rights reserved. - Reproduced courtesy of Superbike School.

www.superbikeschool.co.uk

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