Counter steering is something that only vehicles that have all their wheels in one line experience have; as in motorcycles and scooters. By the laws of physics, motorcycles continue to travel in a straight line as the rotating wheels gain so much rotational inertia that they want to, intensely, continue travelling in a straight line. Turning the handle bar (to the left, say) upsets this balance, and the inertia causes the motorcycle to react to this by falling (to the right). If you kept the handlebar turned, eventually you will fall right over. What we do, instinctively, is to turn the handlebar right to hold a comfortable lean angle ending the counter steering input.
Overdrive (Nov. ’08) has covered the fine art of counter steering and says there are two schools of counter steering application.
The first school uses both hands to counter-steer a motorcycle. The basic rule says push left to go left, which expands into pushing the left side handlebar grip away from you to turn the motorcycle to the left. You can quicken the movement further by simultaneously pulling on the right side grip at the same time. Pushing and pulling at the same time feels awkward for a short time but it produces some very quick turn-ins on part of the motorcycle says OverDrive (Nov. ’08)
On the other hand, the second school believes one hand is enough. It recommends that you only push on the inside handlebar grip and ‘idle’ the other hand. Because of the motorcycle control configuration, this technique doe make turning right a little more complex than turning left since the right hand also has to control the brakes and the throttle. You will find that the one-handed counter steering technique produces some amazingly fluent feeling cornering action.
However, in an emergency, the priority changes to making a rapid direction change and avoiding action. This is where the two-handed flick comes into its own.
So maybe you can identify a good corner on your commute that doesn’t have too much traffic on it and try either technique of counter steering until you get a feel for which school you belong to – brute force or finesse. And then you could practice consciously feeding the motorcycle a measured steering input and making it take exactly the line you intended to take. The better you get at this, the quicker you will turn the motorcycle into the corner without exaggerated suspension movement suggests OverDrive (Nov. ’08) |
