Wiggle Room
Jul 2nd, 2009 by Leo
Someone asks, “How do you ride on THAT road without losing traction?” There are some roads, and definitely some bridges, with slippery spots built in, slippery all year round in whatever weather, but especially in the rain. How do you deal with them? What you need to realize is that bikes move around sometimes, and sporty bikes move around…a LOT. We don’t usually call all those wiggles “losing traction” because if you look from a distance, the bike is still following the line. But it’s bucking and wiggling all around the place while doing it!
Now you probably will never experience the level of bucking that racers handle but you will get a strong wiggle or what feels like a mis-step… you might even call it a “slide.” What do you do to keep these small wiggles from causing major problems?
First, keep the throttle control rule. What’s the rule? Once you open the throttle you roll it on gently. Unless you’re braking on a straight or slowing to turn, you crack open the throttle as soon as you can and roll on *gently.* If you close the throttle because of a wiggle, you just might cause a major slide.
Second, keep your arms loose. Front wheel wiggles and rear wheels slides are both self-correcting. Even if your rear wheel slides out the side, if you were not putting any pressure on the bars, the bike would still track the line you were facing before the slide. The only thing you could do to mess up this auto-self-correcting feature built into the physics of your bike is by clamping down on the bars. But if you stay loose on the bars, rear wheel slides won’t affect the steering, and front wheel wiggles will cause some shaking of the bars, but it will eventually self-correct. The slipperier the riding, the looser you need to be on the bars!
Do these rules sound familiar? In other words, once you know that it’s normal for bikes to wiggle around, all the normal rules of motorcycling apply… In fact this is the kind of riding that most of the rules are designed for.
Related posts:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=gary%20mccoy%20slide&sourceid=navclient-ff&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-33,GGGL:en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wv#