Take control
Knees tight to the tank, arms out wide, eyes focused wholly on the lump of wood I was riding towards. How did things come to this? I’d only been at the training day a matter of hours, and already I was performing the kind of stunts I thought were reserved for Evel Knievel. From the outside it must have appeared like pure madness, but within myself I felt safe, secure and confident. As the metres rolled by beneath my Suzuki’s wheels, I actually looked forward excitedly to impact.
We’re generally scared of what we don’t understand, and when it comes to motorcycling there’s a huge amount many of us don’t know. You pass a few tests, tick a few boxes and the next thing you know you’re a certified biker. But ask yourself whether you truly appreciate what it takes to control that machine beneath you? I’ve ridden bikes for most of my life, I’ve raced at world championship level, and like most motorcyclists I thought I had a pretty good comprehension of what it takes to make a bike perform. In truth, I didn’t. But I do now, and it’s all thanks to the i2i Motorcycle Academy.
It was a friend that told me about the organisation; it’s a training school, but quite unlike any other I’ve come across. The focus is machine control, with days available based on road, off-road, track and even supermoto, each rammed with mind-blowing techniques that will change the way you ride.
Booked in for two days at the company’s Rufforth airfield training grounds, near York, the plan was to iron out a few of my riding pitfalls, learn a few more skills and have a good laugh in the process. Rightfully so, every new attendee has to start at the beginning – each level takes a day, and joining me was fellow pupil and BMF Scotland chairman Tom Duncan. He seemed a great guy and had a wealth of motorcycling experience, being an accredited BMF, RoSPA and IAM advanced rider. Like myself, he’d been told about the academy and was keen to see if he could enhance his riding further.
Over a brew and biscuits, i2i’s Tom Killeen introduced himself and got us pupils to give some perspective on who we were, what kind of riding we’d done and what we hoped to get out of the event, instantly putting us all at ease. He then went over the intricacies of the day’s course, which was to be broken down into multiple, digestible sections, comprised of demonstrations, theories and practice. possible. The feeling was something of a revelation, as though a consuming myth had been blown clean out of the water. I don’t know how many times I turned the bike around and came back for more, but I was feeling pretty confident by the time Tom placed a piece of wood down for me to run over. This was the next level, especially as I was stood upright, hands off the bars and doing 50mph. Braced for a fall, the bike merely hopped over the wood and carried on its way.
In Tom’s opinion you have two options when trying to stop as efficiently as possible; you either use the front brake or the rear. He explained that you can’t optimise performance when using the pair together, and that ideally you should look to the front brake to gain the best performance because of the actual physics of the process. When you roll off the throttle, a motorcycle’s weight naturally transfers from the rear of the machine to the front. This in turn causes the front tyre’s contact patch to become larger (more grip), while the rear’s becomes smaller (less grip). If you were to slam on a rear brake at this point, while the weight is at the opposite end of the machine, the rear wheel would lock up easily and you’d skid forward. To a certain extent, the same could be said about the front, owing to the squishy nature of the forks. So for the ultimate grip Tom explained you need to eradicate suspension compression, which you do by applying progressive pressure to the front brake lever.
With this in mind, Tom was back out on his bike and demonstrating what happens if you just give your front brakes a handful; instantly locking up his front tyre. The same was shown for the rear wheel, before he set off again with the intention of building the pressure through the front brake lever. At 40mph, it was remarkable to see him stop in less than 10m – the forks compressing fully before he really applied pressure to the lever.
Using fixed cones to identify the start of our braking from 30mph, we were asked to build in the front brake pressure while simultaneously whipping in the clutch lever. My first few runs weren’t great, often squeezing too hard, too soon and making the Suzuki’s ABS kick in. It took a good few passes to get on top of the technique, but the results were really impressive. Confident in our ability, the entry speed increased to 35mph before going up to 40mph. Earlier, we’d been asked to predict how far we thought it would take us to stop from 40mph, and I had assumed more than 20m. Performed correctly, the reality was never more than 15m, at most.
Asked how we thought our bikes changed direction, and what we did to encourage them to do so, we suggested steering and body position, but we didn’t really touch on what Tom had to show us. Armed with a cone, he began to talk about its relation to a tyre. At one end it’s bigger, and the other it’s smaller. The angle from the larger end to the smaller end dictates the angle of attack, which determines the rate of which the cone will turn if rolled into motion. This mirrors the principle of a tyre, being taller in the middle and less so on the sides (profile). The minute a tyre is pushed past that centre point, the contact patch becomes cone shaped and encourages turning. The further from the centre you go, the sharper the rate of attack and the quicker the bike will turn.
The next common misconception which was dispelled is that grip reduces as lean-angle increases. Tom pulled out an old tyre and set it on the ground at a sharp angle. Pushing his weight into the tyre, he lowered his body to mirror its sharp angle; it refused to lose grip. When your tyres lean over in a bend there is a force applied to them. This cornering force applies a positive G-force towards the outside of the bend. As the bike leans in, the cornering force is directed down through the centre of the bike which results in a weight being applied, first to the suspension and then to the tyres, which means the grip goes up when you lean the bike over, not down. There are many ways to change direction on a bike, but only one is efficient. That is counter steering. The reason counter steering works is because of a force called gyroscopic procession. To demonstrate this, Tom got an old bicycle wheel and begun to spin it on its axle. As we’d learned earlier, the gyro (wheel) was tremendously stable; to the extent that Tom could release a hand from one side of the axle and it would continue spinning on his remaining one. But what was really interesting was how he got the wheel to turn. With both hands back on the axle, he tried to steer the wheel to the right by pulling his right hand backwards. This actually caused the wheel to lean left and highlighted the power and significance of what’s commonly known as counter steering. The harder he pulled in one direction, the more the wheel fell in the opposite.
Always armed with an easy-todigest demo, Tom hopped on his bike, got up to speed and removed his hands from the bars entirely. He then applied forward pressure to the righthand bar (pushing the wheel left) with his thumb and the bike turned to the right. Pulling backwards on the left bar caused the same reaction, just as pushing forward on the left bar made his bike turn left.