Tuning for the Twisties

[Yogi]

This may have been posted before but since I am fairly new here and hadn't seen it thought it might be useful to some http://www.ducatimeccanica.com/articles/twisties.html

[Carl_T]

I like his road clues and agree with the importance of looking well up the road. Nice article, although I do have a couple of decided and definite disagreements personally a with a few parts of what was written.



Visualize your eyes being a very rapid auto focus camera zooming up the road as far as you can see then back to where you are. This is repeated over and over as often as you can. This is a very poor way to use your eyes. Every time your main focus changes to a new spot the eye must take time to refocus. It does this very quickly, but rapid eye movement will give you a poorer picture of things and decidedly increase your mental sensation of speed, which then will compromise your ability to feel in control and process information quickly enough.

It is fine to scan up or back, but it needn’t and shouldn’t be done as often as you can in a turn. Peripheral vision is not clear, but it can be trained to pick up adequate movement/color/texture cues to warn when a direct scan is needed.

It’s easy to practice driving in a car and noting surface changes in peripheral while looking up the road. It’s also possible to learn to steer around them with peripheral vision in a car. You can use peripheral vision in a car to roll up to the stop line in an intersection etc. while looking past the stop line down the road (an exercise to train yourself how to use peripheral of course don’t do new things in traffic, use low traffic roads). Some real time in practice during car driving will get peripheral working for you and show you just how much or how little you are able to rely on it. Also watch TV for a while staring at one corner of the TV while watching the program in peripheral.

A rider can watch the vanishing/limit point (or exit) in direct focus and read the surface and line of travel peripherally with only one scan up, just before turn in, on shorter turns. Perhaps one scan back extra might be needed in long turns where the surface is questionable.

Of course you bring your main focus back to anything, anytime that looks like trouble in peripheral vision to quick check it out more clearly. Otherwise looking at the exit/vanishing point/limit point gives you valuable (sometimes critical) information, helps you go where you need to go, adds to your control and management in the turn, and you check for other things with your peripheral vision awareness. You can look at a spot in the distance and become aware of other things closer to you without looking straight at them and while continuing to look at the spot in the distance.

Watching the exit, vanishing/limit point will give the rider total perspective of the turn, pre-warn in enough time of approaching problems, and reduce the mental feeling of speed so the rider can better handle the turn in proper control.

Scan backs repeated as often as you can, will decidedly reduce your control of the turn and situation at hand.

Well now, you say "the first time out in my car I was able to look way up the road and scan back, but truthfully, I did not see too much and my planning for the direction of the next turn was not as accurate as I had hoped".

Not being able to remember what you saw looking as far up the road in tight twisties is what I call "missed clues". It is sort of like a twisties road mystery.

Here the author has himself pointed out one part of the problem with his method of eye use and some of why this method is not the best plan to use. It gives you a more fragmented picture of what is going on and requires a further split of mental processing power and attention to assemble puzzle pieces. It can indeed make things a “road mystery” perhaps at a critical time when they should not be a mystery and your attention should be on what IS at the time it IS, not assembling a mystery puzzle.

When I get time I’ll post my personal dissenting view of how to use eyes while riding turns in a separate post where others can agree, or post their own dissenting views.

Clue 4 - Road/Tight Turn History
The major clue to study while looking as far as you can up the road in the twisties is the history of the road for the last few miles... Only a very, very, very, generalized aid.

(it is not likely the civil engineers would all of a sudden take a totally different design approach starting say two miles into a mountain pass). BUZZZZZZ…. WRONG ANSWER!

If you are smart you will take road history as only a small extremely GENERALIZED clue to the road. Roads in some areas (like my riding area) will often have hidden turns that VERY STRONGLY VIOLATE road history. If you are not mentally ready for this and if you do not ride at a speed that equates with what you can actually see in my area, you will be just another splat on the road all too quickly. Road history is a general feel of a road yes, but always expect a strong deviation from road history at the next bend, if you ride around here.

Otherwise the article seemed useful to me.

I would also change a statement in the article to this instead (changing many to one)... "The goal here is to take A picture of the far away road situation so you can have time to study the picture in your mind and form a plan before you get to the turn."

I'd also change a line of copy to this.... "The second part of your plan is the "scan up" as you look way up the road,"

[Blrfl]

There are a couple of nuggets in that article, but I think the author spends far too much time on looking way up the road. I don't know what part of the east coast he rides in, but in the mid-Atlantic states there are many, many twisty roads where you're lucky to get any clues about the next turn, to say nothing of what's a few hundred feet beyond it.

--Mark