Let's Ride (9 page)

COUNTERSTEERING

Y
OU NEED TO UNDERSTAND
countersteering before you think about starting up your motorcycle. If you’ve never ridden a motorcycle, you’re going to find it’s unlike any other vehicle you’ve ever ridden or driven. You control a motorcycle by leaning into corners rather than turning into them. The closest thing to riding a motorcycle is probably flying an airplane. Like a plane, a motorcycle rotates on a central axis. Imagine a line running through the center of the motorcycle-rider combination. This is the central axis.

To initiate a turn, you countersteer the bike. No subject in motorcycling generates more debate than countersteering, and most of the people doing the arguing don’t really understand the principle. Even though they don’t understand it, they use it every time they ride. Most of them just don’t realize they’re doing it.

You countersteer a motorcycle every time you ride at any speed faster than a slow jog. It’s the quickest and most efficient way to lean a motorcycle into a turn. It’s pretty simple when you get down to the mechanics of it: you press the handlebar on the side in which you want to turn. If you are turning left, press the left handgrip. If you want to go right, press the right handgrip.

This may seem backward, and it would be on a different type of vehicle, like an ATV or a snowmobile. If you press the left handgrip of an ATV it would turn the front wheels to the right, thus causing the ATV to turn right. The same thing happens when you press on the left handgrip of a motorcycle; this also makes the front wheel move slightly to the right. But unlike a four-wheeled vehicle like an ATV, when the front wheel of a motorcycle moves to the right at any rate above a fast-walking speed, it leans the motorcycle to the left and initiates a turn to the left. Once the motorcycle is leaned over at the correct angle to complete the turn, you release enough pressure for the front tire to fall to the left and the bike goes to the left.

In other words, once you’ve initiated the lean with countersteering, you steer through a corner as you would any other vehicle—countersteering only gets you leaned into the turn in the first place. The thing is, the turning you do after you’re leaned over is so slight that you won’t even notice it; you just notice the countersteering pressure needed to initiate the lean in the first place. In fact, you’ll probably feel like you’re countersteering all the way through the corner.

In some instances you will continue to use countersteering in a corner. If the corner tightens up—if it’s what is called a “decreasing radius” corner—you may need to use countersteering to lean the bike over farther so that you turn sharper. This is where understanding countersteering will save your life. If a corner surprises you and gets tighter midcorner, you have two choices: turn sharper and make it through the corner, or run wide and either ride off the road and have a terrible crash or ride into oncoming traffic and initiate a head-on collision, depending on which direction you’re going. If you can’t sharpen up your turn by countersteering and leaning the motorcycle farther over, the first option won’t be available to you.

Larger bikes require more pressure to make the bike bend into its initial lean. You may feel like you need to pull on the opposite handgrip as well as push on the original handgrip. That’s because the larger a bike is, the more pressure it will require to initiate countersteering. This is a good reason to start out with a smaller motorcycle.

CRANKING IT OVER

W
HEN YOU FIRST RIDE
your new motorcycle, make sure you do so in a safe place where there’s not any traffic. I recommend finding an empty parking lot. Even if you have your license, it’s still a good idea to familiarize yourself with your new machine in a place where you don’t have to worry about other people hurting you so you can concentrate on not hurting yourself.

If your bike has a center stand, place it up on that. A lot of Japanese and European bikes have center stands; unfortunately most American bikes don’t have them. I think this is one area where the other countries have us beat, because a center stand is one of the handiest features a bike can have. They make most maintenance jobs a lot easier, and they’re much less prone to sinking into the tarmac on hot days.

Center stands are easy to use, provided you use them the right way. The trick is to follow the proper procedure:

1. First, stand beside the bike, facing it from the left side, and grasp both handlebar grips.
   
2. When you have a firm grip on the bike, take your right foot and lower the center stand until you feel both its feet resting securely on the ground.
   
3. While keeping downward pressure on the center stand with your foot, balance the bike by the handlebars so that it rests perfectly upright.
   
4. There will most likely be some kind of handle down below the rear part of the saddle (some newer bikes will have a retractable handle); grasp the handle. If there’s no handle, grab the frame below the saddle.
   
5. Lock the center stand tang (the metal tab sticking up from the bottom of the center stand) in place with the heel of your boot so that it doesn’t slide around. Make certain you have a good bite on it with your boot.
   
6. Push downward and rearward with your boot while rolling the bike backward with your arms.
   

As long as you’re using your leg to do the actual lifting and just using your upper body to roll the bike backward, the bike should roll right up on the center stand. If you’re not lifting with your leg but rather lifting with your arms, you probably won’t be able to get the bike up on the center stand. It’s easy if you do it right; it’s impossible if you do it wrong. It doesn’t even matter how big the bike is. If you do it right, it’s almost as easy to lift an 1800-cc Gold Wing as it is to lift a 250-cc Rebel. If you do it wrong, you’ll have your hands full with the Rebel, and you can forget about the Gold Wing.

If your bike lacks a center stand, straddle the bike (remember, you always get on a motorcycle from the left side because the kickstand is on the left, so it will be leaning that way), hold both handgrips securely, and squeeze both the clutch and the front brake lever. You’ll need to hold the clutch lever in to start most motorcycles, and holding the front brake lever in will keep the motorcycle from rolling when you start it.

If you don’t have a center stand, you’ll have to climb aboard the bike and hold it up yourself. When you’re standing securely over the bike with one leg on each side, raise the bike up so that it stands upright. Once you’ve comfortably balanced the bike, you can rest your weight on the seat. Remember to raise the kickstand up, since many bikes won’t run with the kickstand down. Even if a bike doesn’t have a circuit that kills the engine if the kickstand is down, you still want to make sure you raise it up because if you ride off with it down it could catch on something and cause you to crash.

Next, turn your ignition key to “on” and make sure the kill switch is not in the “off” position. I’ve seen more than one person wear out a battery trying to start a bike while the kill switch was in the “off” position.

With your left foot, make sure the bike is in neutral. You will see a green light on the dash that indicates the bike is in neutral, but a word of warning—don’t always trust that light. I’ve ridden many bikes that have a neutral light that will come on when the transmission isn’t completely out of gear. I trust my left foot more than I trust my neutral light. I make sure that I can feel the bike is in neutral before I start it. If you haven’t yet developed a good feel for the shifter, release the clutch and brake levers and carefully roll the bike back and forth to see if the rear wheel spins freely. If it does, the bike is in neutral. (Don’t forget to squeeze the clutch and front-brake levers again once you’ve gotten the bike into neutral.)

Once you’ve determined the bike is in neutral, turn on the choke or fast-idle circuit if your bike is so equipped, especially if the engine is cold. If it’s been warmed up, you shouldn’t have to bother with this. On a properly tuned modern motorcycle, you should now be able to push the starter button and start the motorcycle with no drama.

If the motorcycle doesn’t start immediately, don’t hold the starter button down. This will wear down the battery and can flood the engine or even burn out the starter motor. Instead, check for obvious problems. If there is a problem with your electrical system, you’ll probably be able to hear the starter motor turning over sluggishly. If your bike is in good running condition with a good charging system, chances are that the problem is something as simple as your having bumped the kill switch into the “off” position. This is very easy to do.

Another possibility is that you may have a bike that needs just a bit of throttle to start properly. This indicates that something is not quite right in your carburetion or fuel-injection system, but the problem might be so minor that you’ll never be able to track it down. Usually it’s best to just figure out how much throttle you have to give your bike to start it.

This will be tricky, because the bike will likely just require the slightest pressure on the throttle return spring; anything more than that will flood the engine with gas so that you won’t be able to start the bike at all. Developing a feel for dealing with your throttle on start-up is an art, one you’ll only be able to perfect with time and practice.

I’ve actually seen this procedure turned into art—I saw a professional comedian in Reno do a hilarious routine in which he reenacted the process of starting a carbureted Harley-Davidson. The bit lasted half an hour and was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Fortunately for you, this is a novelty act that isn’t performed very often out in the real world, thanks to modern motorcycle technology. As fuel-injection systems get better, this sort of problem is becoming increasingly rare.

ENGAGING THE CLUTCH

C
HANGING GEARS WHILE RIDING
a motorcycle is similar to driving a car with a manual transmission, except that you use your hands on a bike to do what your feet do in a car, and you use your feet on a bike to do what your hands would do in a car. The clutch works the same in a bike as it does in a car: it disengages the transmission from the engine. You just operate the lever with your hand instead of your foot. When you have the clutch lever pulled in all the way to the handgrip, the transmission is disengaged. As you let the clutch out, the plates in the clutch come into contact with each other and connect the transmission to the crankshaft.

The area in the travel of the clutch lever where the plates start to come into contact with each other is what the MSF calls the “friction zone.” As the plates engage, the motorcycle starts to move forward. To find the friction zone, pull the clutch lever toward the handgrip and shift the transmission into first gear. To do this, push the lever down with your foot. Then, with both feet planted firmly on the ground, keep holding down the front brake lever and slowly let out the clutch lever. When the bike starts to move forward, you’re in the friction zone. As soon as the bike starts to roll, pull the clutch back in and stop. If you don’t, you’ll kill the engine because you’re still holding the front brake lever. Do this a couple of times to get a feel for where the friction zone begins.

HITTING THE BRAKES

Y
OU’RE JUST ABOUT READY
to start your parking lot practice, but before you start riding, you need to make sure you can stop. Stopping will require you to use both of your hands and both of your feet, all at the same time. In one motion you’ll pull in the clutch lever with your left hand, let off the throttle, squeeze the front brake lever with your right hand, push down on the rear brake lever with your right foot, and downshift with your left foot. And when it’s all over, you’ll have to remember to put down your feet to hold up the bike. Again, it’s not that different from stopping a car, except that you have one more brake control to deal with and you’ll need to hold up the bike once you’ve stopped.

It’s critically important that you use your front brake when stopping. An average motorcycle relies on its front brakes for 70 to 80 percent of its stopping power. Bikes with a more rearward weight distribution, like long cruisers, rely a bit more on their rear brakes, but the front is still the most important. Short wheelbase sport bikes barely rely on their rear brakes at all. In fact, if you watch a motorcycle race, you’ll see that the rear wheels of most of the bikes are slightly off the ground as they brake hard for a turn. On a racetrack, you mostly use your rear brake to settle the chassis in a corner; you use it very little, if at all, for stopping duty.

You’ll want to develop a good feel for your brakes because good brake control will save your life more than any other skill. The Hurt Report mentioned earlier in this chapter found that not using the front brake and locking up the rear brake was a factor in the majority of fatalities, and recent reports by various state agencies have found that this is still the case.

Motorcycle manufacturers have recognized how deadly this problem is, and some high-end motorcycles now use linked braking systems with valves that direct a percentage of the braking force from the rear brake pedal to the front wheel. This makes it much easier to engage in quick, straight emergency stops, but the technology is generally used only on the most expensive motorcycles, like my Victory Vision, and Honda’s Gold Wing. Most likely you’ll have to develop your braking skills on a bike that isn’t equipped with this technology.

If you lock up the brakes and go into a skid, it will be something of a miracle if you don’t crash. If you’re lucky, you’ll just fall down and slide down the road. If you’re not lucky, you’ll have a high-side type accident, as discussed earlier.

TAKING OFF

N
OW THAT YOU’VE GOT
a handle on what you need to do to stop and where to find the friction zone of your clutch, you can finally start riding your motorcycle. To get moving, find the friction zone of your clutch once again, only this time you’re going to release the clutch lever all the way and move through the friction zone. To do this you’ll have to release the front brake, but remember to cover the brake lever with at least two fingers from your right hand so you can grab the brake and stop quickly in an emergency. Covering the brake is a good habit that you should have throughout your riding career.