Cornering Lines - Drive or Momentum?

 The Kevin Schwantz Suzuki School just returned from three
 weeks and four two-day schools in Germany where we had
 a wonderful time and apparently impressed our German
 students and German guest-instructors alike. The German
 students were a bit more serious about learning than the
 typical American student but they were also more reluctant to
 accept anything that diverged from the curriculum they were
 all taught in their basic rider training. Part of their seriousness
 comes from the fact that the Germans incur roughly $2500 in
 costs just to earn their motorcycle street license and I suspect
 the other part is that they are, after all, German.

 The points in our curriculum they had the most difficulty
 accepting were Kevin´s instructions to shift body position,
 even if only slightly, to help steer the motorcycle and to use
 less lean angle for a given radius and corner speed, and the
 fact that not all corners must be taken with the commonly
 accepted theoretical late turn-in and late apex. It wasn´t too
 difficult to get even street-only riders to see the advantages
 of shifting their weight to the inside of the corner but the late-
 turn-in, late-apex philosophy (which we will refer to as the
 Late, Late Line from here on out) took a bit more
 explanation and demonstration to convince them. One need
 only look at the photo above with KSSS instructors Lee
 Acree (outside) and Jamie James (inside and in front) to see
 the eventual outcome - but let´s not get ahead of ourselves.

 It seems there is a tendency for some riding schools to teach
 an over-simplified "this is the one-and-only way to do it"
 method, whether it is using primarily either the upper or lower
 body to steer a motorcycle or the Tight-Line-Only or Wide-
 Line-Only philosophy of cornering lines. It certainly simplifies
 what to teach, but reality is rarely that simple. Just as KSSS
 emphasizes the need to use the upper and lower body
 together to steer the motorcycle most effectively, we teach
 that different types of corners require different cornering line
 philosophies.

 In addition to the aspects of defining a corner (radius,
 camber, elevation and pavement surface/available traction)
 discussed in the Defining Corners column in a previous issue,
 perhaps the biggest factor in determining what the most
 effective line for a given corner is what comes after it: In
 other words, is it simply another corner, or a significant
 straightaway? To give a general way of classifying corners ...

 Text and Photography: Kevin Schwantz and Lance Holst
 back