Biking Techniques (Part 2)

Slow, Look, Lean, Roll

The MSF is right... sort of

The MSF teaches every rider how to go around a corner. Slow, look, lean, roll. They're right. That's exactly what we do on the track.
What they don't tell you is you can do a bunch of these at once. We'll lean as we slow, and roll as we lean, and we never -- ever -- stop looking.

Look where you want to go

Like the MSF says, you'll go where you look. So look where you want to go. That is never more true than on the racetrack, where you don't have to do much SIPDE and can concentrate on where you're going.
The MSF also tells you to keep your eyes up, look ahead, look through the turn -- but they don't emphasize it enough for the track.

The faster you go, the further ahead you need to look. When you exit Oak Tree, you should be looking for your turn-in at Courage, over half a mile away. When you've identified your braking point for Courage, you're looking for the turn-in. When you have identified your turn-in, before you even get there! -- you're looking for the apex. And as soon as you're on the gas, well before the apex, you're looking at your track-out point.

That's hard to do. It's much easier and oh so tempting to look at the next thing you have to do. You want to look at the braking point until you start braking. You want to look at the apex until you hit it. But by then you're not looking where you want to go -- because you're already there!

To start with today, you'll quite possibly not be able to force yourself to look that far ahead. Things will be happening rapidly enough that you'll have your attention full with just what you're doing now. But one of your goals during the day should be to move that attention point further and further away from you.

DON'T look where you DON'T want to go!

Almost more important than looking where you want to go, is not looking where you don't want to go. It's actually quite hard. When you're in Courage, you'll be tempted to see just how far that grass runoff area goes before it hits the woods. Don't look there unless you want to ride on it. Here's a clue -- it's a long way, but it's all downhill and grass; don't ride on it.
It's easier to look where you want to go if you aren't always worrying what's around you. Here's another clue -- if you aren't going to ride on it (and you won't if you don't look there) you don't need to worry about it.

Let me give an example:

A big key to riding the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course fast is to get through the famous Turn One. It's a fairly straightforward turn, except for one thing -- for most of the corner, you're aimed directly at a concrete wall. If you get the corner right, you'll exit the corner maybe three to six inches from that wall. If you can do that, you'll carry much more speed into the infield and can maybe even make a pass going into Turn Three, somewhere "everybody" knows you can't pass. The reason so many people get Turn One wrong is they get intimidated by the wall -- what if they make a mistake, they'll hit it hard! It doesn't worry me -- because I know I'm not supposed to drive into that wall, I don't look there. I'm looking at the exit of the corner, or the turn-in for the next, and so I hardly even see that wall.

The drop-offs in Deals Gap are Charlotte Walls. Don't want to ride off the edge of a cliff? Don't look there. And there's no reason why you should be intimidated by a big drop-off on the outside of a corner unless you're going to ride off the edge. A lot of Sleazeballs (a technical term we'll define later) take their bad line just because they're intimidated by the drop-off, and so they increase the chances of becoming Junior Birdman just by their mental attitude.

So don't bother to look at the runoff areas today. Sure, enjoy the scenery, but you should be spending all your attention on where you want to go, not where you don't.

Reference Points

Keith Code makes a big deal about Reference Points. They're points around the track that help you anchor where you are visually. This rock by the side of the road, that patch in the asphalt, this clump of grass, that piece of kerbing... if you want to do that, that's fine. I think that people can see more things at once, and don't actually need to mark something mentally to use it as a visual anchor.
I also find that if you pick a marker near your braking point, for example, not only is it a visual anchor, but it locks you into braking there. Once you have associated "this rock" with "brake near it," it's very hard to unlock the two. Sometimes you'll find yourself turning in where you have some sort of Reference Point, even though it's not ideal, just because there's something you can fix on there.

So if you're a Code advocate, go ahead and use Reference Points. Just make sure they're only visual anchors, not behavioral ones.

Site Picture

I use a full visual picture of the scene. A Site Picture for the approach to a corner, for example, is built around what you see as you approach the corner. You're not looking at the edge of the track trying to pick out things, you're looking for your braking point, turn-in, apex, and so on. But you're actually taking in a lot more than just those points -- your peripheral vision is noticing things around you even if you aren't focussing on them, and your picture at your braking point will include unconscious cues that will help you say "I recognize this."
It'll take a little while to build this picture, but the more you go around the track -- on your bike, in a car, on a bicycle, walking, it doesn't matter how -- the more you'll build a visual model of the way around it.

Your eventual goal is to be able to play a lap of the track in your head. Not only that, but to do it in real time -- it should take exactly as long to do the visual replay as it takes you to ride around.

Once you've reached that point, you can run practice laps in your head. When you come back to this track next time you'll hit the pavement already having run a hundred laps or so in your head. That'll give you a big advantage when you get to do it in reality. Bringing a different bike? Get familiar with the bike on the street, then visualize the track on the new bike -- the reality probably won't mesh perfectly with your visual one, but you'll have an idea of what to expect. It'll save a lot of acclimatization time and help you be fast straight out of the box.

From TrackDoD Novice Group Orientation