Equipment that can teach you to turn faster…
Jan 14th, 2010 by Leo
Turn the sound off for this video, you don’t want to listen to it, trust me.
Okay maybe a piece of hardware can’t actually TEACH you to turn faster – but it CAN help you learn faster… This is another gratuitous gymkhana video: And the winner here is not the smaller displacement bike, which is often the case and makes for a good story – but in this case the 600 won…so big woop. But what’s interesting is to watch closely and see precisely WHERE the 600 was faster here. It wasn’t the straights that the 600 pulled ahead here, but the turns. The rider was noticeably faster on the turn-y bits.
So how can you improve your cone skills this year? All the basics apply in terms of throttle control, body position (sitting straight up in line with the bike), counter steering… But what I’ve found is that there is onepiece of equipment that can really aid in learning how to toss your bike around at these speeds: upright bars.
There’s something about the upright riding position that makes it easier to toss sportbikes left and right. Ducati riders who switch over to Hypermotards comment that they are able to reach a new level of cornering skill just by switching bikes. Sport riders who hop onto SV650s feel the same way. It’s much less work leaning over a bike with upright bars. Then you can get back to your low clip-on bars with a better sense of what the bike can really do…
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