Countering the Steering Myths

Countering The Steering Myths

EDITORIAL

Left is left, right?

For many people, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” are words to live by. But when it comes to riding a motorcycle, they’re more likely to be words to die by.

If you need convincing, not to worry; I’ve brought some evidence.

Exhibit A: A sportbike rider is swiftly arcing through the turns on an unfamiliar, twisty road when something momentarily breaks his concentration. When he returns his attention to the road up ahead, his paralegal fun turns to paralyzing fear, for the corner he’s about to enter is much sharper than he had anticipated. He’s going too fast, so he jumps on the brakes to scrub off excess speed, but somehow, he can’t seem to make the bike lean over very far. So with the rear wheel locked and the bike almost vertical, he skids off the road; if he’s lucky, he doesn’t run into—or off of—anything before coming to a stop.

Exhibit B: An average motorcyclist is riding an average motorcycle on an average city street. Suddenly, a car pulls out of a side street and is about to intercept Mr. Average. He recognizes the need to take immediate evasive action, so he yanks on the handlebar—and turns into the car rather than away from it. If he's lucky, he lives to tell about it.

These two uncompromising situations-and thousands of others much like them that happen each yearcould easily have been handled by the riders without any problems. Yet they weren’t. And not necessarily because the riders panicked or lacked experience. Instead, these incidents occurred because the riders didn't understand one fundamental, all-important aspect of riding: how a motorcycle steers. Consequently, their reactions were backward; they either attempted to turn the wrong way, or in fact succeeded.

These riders assumed, as most riders invariably do, that if you want a motorcycle to go left, you turn the handlebar to the left, and that if you want it to go right, you turn the handlebar to the right. But as logical as that might seem, it’s absolutely, unequivocally, unarguably wrong\ The

fact is that to get a motorcycle to go in one direction, you have to turn the handlebar in the opposite direction. Countersteering, it’s called, and it's the means by which a motorcycle is made to turn-all the time through all corners taken at all speeds above a walking pace. And until all riders know and understand this basic law of moto-physics, too many of them will commit mental errors of the sort described in Exhibits A and B.

Actually, countersteering makes perfect sense once you think about it for a moment. When you're riding a motorcycle in a straight line and turn its front wheel in one direction, say, to the right, centrifugal force causes the bike to lean in the opposite direction, to the left. If you were to continue holding the handlebar to the right, the bike would just keep leaning farther and farther to the left until it fell over altogether. But you only initiate a lefthand turn by steering to the right, which causes the bike to start leaning to the left; as soon as the desired angle of lean is achieved, you turn the handlebar the other way, to the left, so that centrifugal force can work in the opposite direction and make the bike stop falling to the left. You then maintain your lean angle through the lefthand turn by regulating the direction of the front wheel; you steer to the left to sit the bike up, to the right to make it lean farther.

Obviously, then, anyone who rides a motorcycle uses countersteering to do so; the problem is that the vast majority of riders don’t know that they use it. They’ve learned how to ride by rote rather than by studying

the dynamics of a motorcycle; they either don’t think at all about how a motorcycle steers, or merely assume that it’s a steer-left-to-go-left, steerright-to-go-right proposition as with a car. So for most riders, steering a motorcycle is a subconscious act.

But that’s why so many riders inadvertently steer the wrong way when trouble suddenly arises. When the sportbike rider in Exhibit A barrels into a lefthand turn going too fast, he no longer is riding at a subconscious level; but because he doesn’t know how a bike steers in the first place, his conscious reaction is to wrench the handlebar,in the direction he so desperately wants to go—to the left. Which, of course, makes the bike try to turn the wrong way. Confused, he ends up turning in neither direction and instead just locks the rear wheel in panic and skids off the road.

The rider in Exhibit B makes the same kind of mistake. He knows he has to veer left to avoid the car, so—as a driver of an automobile would do with the steering wheel-he consciously turns the handlebar to the left. But that sends him directly into the car he is trying to avoid.

All this might sound a bit wacky at first, but believe it—and not just because I say so. Dr. Harry Hurt, he of the famous Hurt Report, found that in a disturbing number of motorcycle accidents, the riders had turned into the object they hit, rather than away from it. And the reasons why they did so are the ones you’ve just read.

I bring this to your attention because numerous motorcycle magazines, supposedly the trusted friends and learned educators of you loyal enthusiasts, have done you a great disservice on this subject over the years. Oh, they’ve published articles about countersteering, all right, but they’ve made it sound like an option, a technique you use only when the spirit moves you, like doing a wheelie or hanging-off in a fast turn. “Try countersteering to become a better rider,” they suggest, or “to turn quickly, apply countersteering,” or something equally inane.

So, you see, what you don’t know can hurt you. But so can what they don’t know. The trick is not to let either one hurt you.PaulDean