Every so often I like to examine photos of riders at a given race and analyze their techniques and styles. Everyone knows these riders are incredibly fast and talented, but many times when a rider is asked, “How do you go so fast?” they don’t have the answer. These analyses can help.
Below, Ryan Dungey is in a left-hand bowl berm. I chose this picture because even without knowing which berm he is in, I can tell you he entered the turn on the far inside. The telltale sign is in both the angle of his motorcycle and also the position of his rear tire versus his front tire. Had he entered from the outside of the turn, his bike would be leaned further down. He would have drawn a more obtuse arc, and the higher speed would have allowed a higher degree lean angle. If he tried to lean over at a slower speed, as shown here, he would tip over.
Also, his front tire’s direction indicates that he is making a hard pivot instead of following the arc from an outside entry. All of these little variations were dictated by where he entered the turn and the angle he was forced to draw on exit.
The Justin Brayton and Cooper Webb photos above are taken in the same turn. In the first, Brayton is showing picture perfect form. He slid forward onto the front of the seat to gain leverage over the front of the bike and increase front end traction. He has his right leg out and is able to accelerate hard out of the turn. In the Webb photo, you can see he has let his form slip. His body has fallen backward toward the middle of the seat, losing precise control over the front tire. His right leg has dropped back behind him and is pulling him further back as he accelerates. This is a common occurrence when traction becomes spotty and high RPM in the corner becomes tough to manage. The bike caught traction before he was fully prepared to exit and he has been pulled backward because of it. The only way to counterbalance this effect is to do it preemptively. Had he set up before the turn with his ideal form, he would been far enough forward to react. Over the course of a race, there are hundreds of examples of Cooper executing a turn perfectly but as you can see, even the elite make mistakes in technique.
This picture is of Marvin Musquin over the main triple after re-entering the stadium. Riders hit this triple with little to zero throttle input, because they were going really fast in the section before. The riders could easily jump much, much further than they need to on this jump. In this situation, where accelerating is an afterthought, scrubbing is everything. As you can see in the first picture, Musquin has turned his front wheel over to try to scrub the speed he accumulated in the previous section. By the second photo, he is already mid-flight and reaping the benefits of his technique. His trajectory is very low and while it could just be the angle of the photo, he looks to be much lower than Reed in front of him.
Cole Seely is shown here in the first turn of the track. This was a long, flat, 180-degree turn. All of the riders would flat-track around the inside before seat bouncing the small double on the exit. The key here was to maintain traction because the turn was very slippery. Aggression had to be tempered and technique really played a vital role. In this case, Seely is doing his best to weight the outside peg and put himself in the best position to control the bike’s lean. As he is carrying speed around the corner and has nothing to bank on, the bike wants to stand upright. He is counteracting that by putting all of his weight on the outside of both the seat and peg. Had his weight been on the inside, he would have no control over where the bike went, and the bike would want to continue to the outside as momentum dictated. This is a case where the rider has to ride the bike and make sure the bike isn’t riding him. Many times the best way to ride is to allow the bike to work beneath you and do what it wants to do. That’s not the case for corners like this, though. Fighting the bike’s natural momentum is usually ill-advised but here it’s vital to get maximum acceleration on the exit of the turn.
The technique above is called… well, I'm not allowed to type the words for what this move is called. Webb felt that Chris Alldredge had been purposely getting in his way during timed qualifying and apparently he'd had enough of it. He went for a very… umm… err… “aggressive” pass that resulted in both of them flying into the concrete. I don’t think I can recommend this technique but I must say it was well executed.
Above, Ryan Dungey is pictured simulating what I go through every time I speak to Racer X’s Steve Matthes about his outlandish theories.
