Text and Photography:
Kevin Schwantz and Lance Holst






































 

 VISUAL SKILLS

 Whether you´re riding on your favorite road at a relaxed 
 pace or lapping Road Atlanta at speed on a Suzuki GSX-
 R1000, more than 90 percent of the information you take
 in and process is visual. How you look at things as you
 ride determines nearly every action you take on a
 motorcycle. And that´s why the Kevin Schwantz Suzuki
 School´s first lesson is in visual skills.

 The first thing we want you to do is look where you want
 to go. It sounds so basic, but especially in panic-provoking
 situations, it can be your greatest undoing. Your mind tells
 your body to go where you´re looking, whether you want
 to go there or not. Don´t fixate on what triggered your
 panic. Peel your eyes off that mid-turn patch of gravel and
 look for a clean way around it.

 LOOK AHEAD

 The next skill is to train yourself to look farther ahead (try
 for four to six seconds in front of your bike) in a scanning
 motion, making use of your peripheral vision, rather than
 fixating on individual points. This scanning gives you a few
 key advantages. First, it gives you what we call high-beam
 vision, rather than low-beam vision. It gives you the Big
 Picture of what´s happening in front of you, and it also
 slows things down visually.

 Imagine going down a two-lane road at 60 mph and
 looking one second in front of you at the yellow dashed line
 separating the lanes. The dashes are blurs OR blurry, right?
 Focus farther ahead and look five seconds in front at the
 same dashed line. Now the dashes appear to be coming at
 you more slowly, and you can pick them out individually.
 Your speed is still 60 mph, but you´ve slowed things down
 visually.

 A byproduct of this is that you also have more time to
 process the information. Think about your reaction to
 finding a flattened possum in your path one second in front
 of your wheel. A sudden, panicked steering input is your
 best hope of missing it, but it´s just that - a hope. Now give
 your­self five seconds to react, and suddenly all these much
 better, more controlled options open up.

 KEEP ´EM MOVING

 It´s also important to keep your eyes moving (scanning)
 rather than fixating on a single point. If your bike is in
 motion, it´s important that your eyes stay in motion. The
 minute your eyes fixate, you start falling behind where you
 should be looking.

 On the surface, some of these tips may sound too basic to
 be of value, but try them out and see if they don´t change
 your riding for the better. In practice they may not come
 naturally because in many ways these techniques fight our
 natural instincts of how to look at things. Remember, our
 instincts were programmed a long time ago for traveling as
 fast as we could run, say 15 mph, not as fast as we can
 now ride. In practice you should find that this way of
 looking at the world you ride through makes you more
 aware, confident, and relaxed, and puts you in better
 control of your motorcycle.

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