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Countersteering
- Johnsorc 4y agoFrom my days of racing downhill mtb and cycling this came naturally to me when I first got on a moto. I still have a really hard time describing the how, but can execute it intuitively. It's a really strange concept to wrap my head around.
- copperx 4y agoMany people do this when driving a truck when turning 90 degrees to offset the small turn radius, but I have also seen people in cars do it, which is dangerous for the people in the next lane. I had always wondered where that behavior came from, but now I realize that they probably are motorcycle drivers.
- w10-1 4y agoCountersteering as a concept is also use in flying (i.e., not just single-track vehicles on the ground). It's always required to stop a turn, and may be required to maintain a constant (steep) turn, depending on the plane geometry. But in flying and in riding motorcycles, it's dangerous to fly/ride by thinking, e.g., "counter-steer before the turn". It all depends on you and the machine, and there are other ways to do things. For example, throwing your weight around also changes the center of gravity. On a dirt bike, sliding friction can enable you to be lower than you would otherwise, and sliding acceleration can help you be higher. The question is what happens in the inevitable case you get it wrong. In dirt if you're low while accelerating and start to high-side, typically you'll instinctively drop the throttle, which is the right thing. On a road bike you want to have some degrees of freedom left both in how low your body is and how much you're asking of the tires, so if you're too low you can in-steer (taxing the tires more) without losing road grip. So it's great to plan by thinking, but in a moment of hard riding/flying, it's much more important to feed everything through the cerebellum and not the cerebral cortex, and to have margins for responding to dynamic instability that track instinctive responses. I.e., actually practice racing and aerobatics.
- taylodl 4y agoI loathe the term "countersteering" preferring to use the term "push steering" instead. Rather than think "turn left to go right" think "push right to go right" or "push left to go left." People say it's the same as on a bicycle but not really. On a bicycle you can easily use your body weight to lean. The bicycle is light and your speeds are low. Motorcycles weigh several hundred pounds and go at speeds unthinkable on a bicycle. It's a completely different ballgame and push steering is essential to not getting yourself killed. To wit, if you're running wide on a right-hand corner you'd better be pushing on that right handlebar to tighten your turn so you don't drift into the lane with oncoming traffic and experience a deadly crash. That's why motorcycle courses stress the importance of push steering. The good news is it's very intuitive once you've done it a few times.
- superice 4y agoThis Veritasium video touches upon the same phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNmUNHSBac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNmUNHSBac
- Asooka 4y agoSadly it's wrong. My gripe with it is that it presents countersteering as necessary, while it's just a technique to more quickly initiate a turn. Basically by steering right while leaning left, then snapping the handlebars to the left, you can change your centre of gravity relative to the bike's faster than you can just by leaning left. When leaning your body left you also naturally push the handle bars right which produces a countersteer as well even if you didn't mean to. However, you can easily observe a bicycle steering without first initiating a countersteer. The easiest is if you just push it and let it coast by itself. It will naturally start leaning one way and continue turning that way until it falls on the ground without any countersteering. Another way is, if its geometry permits, to ride it without holding on to the handlebars - you can see you're steering left and right by shifting your weight on only the seat without any countersteering. Or you can consciously avoid doing a countersteer and make turns that way - noticeably less quickly than if you do countersteer, but quite possible. Another proof would be the fact that monowheels work and can be steered. You cannot countersteer a monowheel, yet it steers just fine. Look also at Destin's backwards bicycle experiment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 . I really don't think you can countersteer that thing anyway, yet it steers just fine. I think if Veritasium had given people more time (days? weeks?) to adjust to the bike, they would learn to make turns without countersteering. I know it took me a while to learn to do it when I first heard about countersteering and thought to experiment. Finally, I really hate the word "countersteering". It is very misleading and logically impossible. Obviously you can't have to turn left before turning right, because then you have to first turn right in order to turn left in order to turn right, but you have to first turn left in order to turn right in order to turn left in order to turn right... ad nauseam. A much better term would be "counterjerk" - you're jerking the bike to the right so that you can more quickly shift your centre of gravity left and make a sharper left turn.
- 4y ago
- rasz 4y agoalso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_flick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_flick
- exDM69 4y agoThe original article is about counter steering in bicycles and motorcycles to initiate a turn, not counter steering (or "opposite lock") in a car (or motorcycle/bicycle) in response to oversteer. That said, they're quite all quite interesting phenomena in vehicle dynamics.
- sph 4y agoThe flick is not about responding to oversteer. It's about using the physics of weight transfer to more easily negotiate a turn. On a rally car, the counterweight is the car itself, on a bike, it's the human.
- exDM69 4y agoI guess they have some superficial similarity but the vehicle dynamics are really different. In a scandi flick, the weight transfer is used to unload weight from the outside tyres to make them slip. In two wheel counter steering it's to initiate a balanced lean to the inside. In both cases, the driver turns the steering to the "wrong" direction.
- saagarjha 4y agoKANSEI DORIFTO!!?!
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoN-nani??
- sph 4y agoHere's an example of a beautifully executed Scandinavian flick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CQ-fsoGkd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CQ-fsoGkd8 — very common in rally driving. Often it's very well modelled in rally games as well, and crucial for making the best times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhfW1Vwgek0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhfW1Vwgek0
- HPsquared 4y agoIt helps to think of the bicycle/motorcycle as an inverted pendulum. To sustain an acceleration in a given (lateral) direction, it must lean in that direction. Countersteering helps to control/initiate the lean angle. To lean to the right, the rider steers to the left and the wheels (at the bottom) move to the left while the centre of mass stays where it was initially, thus the angle begins to lean to the right, initiating a steady rightwards acceleration.
- CraigJPerry 4y agoThere’s a lot about riding a motorbike that feels counterintuitive. The way this article is written it sounds like you can only initiate the steer with a counter steer but even if you’re already in a bend you can provide a counter input to tighten your line and steer harder. It’s taught pretty early on for new riders and it saves lives. There’s loads of other weird things, because the rear tire is wider than the front, the contact patch is bigger at the rear, so to extract maximum grip you need a rearward weight transfer, so lightly accelerating in a turn is optimal. Even when not pursuing max grip you’d still do this to keep the envelope large around your actual grip requirements. Although The front wheel has a smaller contact patch, the contact patch at the front is often a different shape- the front wheel is often a larger diameter so it has a longer but narrower contact patch than the rear. That makes for a vehicle that tracks and responds differently over uneven ground at the front vs the back which leads to you needing to let the front move itself, a relaxed grip is needed on the bars over uneven surfaces, otherwise you will transfer so of that motion from the handlebars, through your body to the pegs and the seat. That will lead to a loss of control. Utterly counter intuitive that to retain control over rough ground you want to almost let go of the handlebars. There’s two great books - for direct machine control, “a twist of the wrist” volume 2 by keith code and for more abstract how to think about machine control - not So much how to steer but why to steer and where to - then roadcraft by the uk police is another great book.
- sushiburps 4y agoIt's fascinating that the explanation of a countersteer is counterintuitive, but most people pick up on it without being taught. Kids learning to ride a bicycle will naturally add the countersteer before a turn.
- wanderingmoose 4y agoKeith Code (author of twist of the wrist) has a bike with fixed handle bars that he lets you ride as part of his superbike track/race school. It is really eye opening on how little control you have without countersteering. Here's a vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VqXBA-sGHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VqXBA-sGHA His school: https://superbikeschool.com/ https://superbikeschool.com/
- 4y ago
- jpe90 4y agoWhen you lose traction in your car from rain or snow, your instinct is probably to countersteer, but you should instead steer into the turn and countersteer when you regain control. I can't remember if they actually taught that in driving school, but my dad had me deliberately lose traction repeatedly in a parking lot in the snow to get the hang of it. It saved my life a few times because I was a reckless idiot as a teenager.
- arghwhat 4y agoThe proper response depends on the type of traction loss. What you describe is the appropriate response for understeering, but will amplify oversteering. Although to be fair, considering how common front wheel drive is these days, understeering is what us most likely to occur, and the proper response of following the failure is less intuitive than counter steering. On a "proper" 4x4 sliding, increasing throttle will often straighten the path of the vehicle irrespective of current steering input - a fun quirk of locking differentials.
- mellavora 4y ago> increasing throttle will often straighten the path of the vehicle irrespective of current steering input "when in doubt, gas it out"
- tbyehl 4y ago"Full throttle will either solve the problem or end the suspense."
- HPsquared 4y agoEven understeering, to recover grip you need to reduce the load (slip angle) on the front tyres- by straightening the wheel a bit. Not turning the wheel even further. So the same general principle applies, but it's less urgent when understeering as it's a kind of 'stable' situation.
- deelowe 4y ago
- Uptrenda 4y agoI'm now imagining some poor child's dumbfounded look as a HackerNews parent explains how to ride a bike by breaking down countersteering. lmaoo
- HPsquared 4y ago"First, let's start with some control theory..."
- ekzy 4y agoFrom the Wikipedia article: > While this appears to be a complex sequence of motions, it is performed by every child who rides a bicycle. The entire sequence goes largely unnoticed by most riders, which is why some assert that they do not do it.
- Enginerrrd 4y agoIt's worse than that even... Historically, (before balance bikes) a lot of kids would progress from having training wheels all the way down, to two-wheeled dynamics. The problem is, having training wheels all-the-way-down means you have a tricycle, which doesn't have countersteering dynamics. So as soon as you pull the wheels up, they have to totally forget what they've learned.
- amalcon 4y agoI don't think I've ever heard of training wheels at literal ground level when the bike is upright -- what would even be the point? It's basically a tricycle, like you say. When I've seen them, they've been at least an inch or two above, which (coupled with telling the child that the game is to prevent them touching the ground) would seem to mitigate this problem while still effectively preventing falls.
- synu 4y agoHere in the Netherlands kids learn to ride a bike on little two wheeled wooden bikes, that they start to “glide” on. It’s a nice system that gets them right into learning how a real bike behaves.
- frankdejonge 4y agoIn the Netherlands, countersteering is part of any motorbike practical exam. This is not standard in a lot of companies, but it is such an essential skill. It literally saves lives.
- mort96 4y agoI'm not sure what you mean by "it literally saves lives". Anyone who rides a single-track vehicle will instinctively do it any time they turn. Do you mean that having a more conscious relationship with how you countersteer when turning can help keep control in particularly difficult turns?
- McNutty 4y agoI really feel like when a motorcycle is travelling at greater than 30 40 or 50 kph, countersteering is the only way to steer. But doing it subconsciously and doing it with knowledge on the subject are 2 different feelings.
- Hamuko 4y ago>Anyone who rides a single-track vehicle will instinctively do it any time they turn. I've seen videos that suggest otherwise. Not linking it, since the last time I did, I got downvoted to hell and back for it.
- ehnto 4y agoYou can't turn a bicycle or motorbike without counter-steering, so these people are just not turning their bikes? It's not possible to not countersteer as the bike would lean to the wrong direction and you'd turn the wrong way (since you'd have been initiating a countersteer, afterall). Are you seeing people just manhandle the bars the wrong way in emergencies? I could believe that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNmUNHSBac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNmUNHSBac
- projektfu 4y agoThat's exactly it. Countersteering is a learned behavior that people aren't aware they do. They will describe it as leaning into the turn or whatever. Then, when they are in an emergency and need a tighter turning radius, they instinctively put in the wrong input and the bike straightens up. Explicitly teaching countersteering helps teach them to respond to emergencies with the correct input.
- thefz 4y agoIn mountain biking where you turn more by leaning the bike and rotating the hips, it is very evident that briefly steering by rotating the handlebar to the opposite direction points the head tube of the frame right into the turn, and then it's just a matter of straightening the handlebar and leaning into the corner.
- ehnto 4y agoI think the hips is mostly about the ergonomics of getting the right weight distribution for the bike, but the countersteering is the same. lean the bike over with the opposite steering input, and the whole situation leans over (including you!)
- thefz 4y agoTurning the hips does a lot of subtle things, it impresses a rotational force to the rear wheel helping it to pivot on itself, and a rotational force into the pedals to further help the frame to rotate on itself. Further than that, it forces your head to turn into the direction you are heading and your shoulder line to stay parallel with the handlebar. Man, bike-human mechanics are complicated.
- Ambolia 4y agoAm I missing something on the top diagram of the article labeled "A hypothetical curve on dry asphalt"? It has sections labeled "counterstearing" but I don't see any counterstearing in the movement marked in red. While on the real-life images below it clearly shows it.
- ehnto 4y agoIn the bottom right of the image is the text "countersteer left", denoting the part of the turn where you might countersteer left in order to get the bike to turn right. You would not go perceptibly left according to the line, when you steer slightly to the left, the bike immediately leans over to the right and the front wheel steers right immediately also. The act of countersteering is entirely about leaning the bike over, the resulting turn to the right is actually a second order effect of that lean.
- mod 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWuTcJcqAng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWuTcJcqAng
- agurk 4y agoI got a new (to me) motorcycle this year for a long trip I was planning and one of the things that surprised me was how much countersteer it needed to navigate tight mountain turns. I could definitely feel it in my arms at the end of each day. A few thousand kilometers into the trip I changed the front tyre as it had hit the wear bars and was amazed how completely it changed the handling of the bike. Instantly I stopped needing to consciously countersteer to enter turns and needed to shift my weight in the saddle a lot loss too. My assumption is that the new tyre has a cross-section that's a lot rounder than the old/worn tyres. I would have taken photos to compare them if I had realised that it would make such a difference. It was also a different brand (I didn't have much choice when I changed it) which also would have brought a different profile with it.
- pryelluw 4y agoNice, what bike?
- agurk 4y agoA Yamaha XSR900 - probably not what people would think of as a natural bike to go on a 5500 km journey from Northern Europe to the Balkans, but you really can tour on anything. It was great in the alpine roads - especially the few days I did unloaded. It wasn't ideal on the few unpaved roads I found - especially with road tyres - but I coped with it. A few more litres in the tank (only 14L, ~300km) would have been helpful. Luggage was a bit harder due to limited options but I got a 48L tailpack and a 12L tank bag. With a few straps and bungees I had enough space to fit everything needed for riding and camping.
- pryelluw 4y agoThat’s a nice bike. Enjoy!
- tbyehl 4y agoA noticeable reduction in steering effort and weight shifting sounds like the new tire was inflated a few PSI higher than the old. Every motorcycle I've owned takes the corners MUCH easier with 2-3 more PSI in front than the manual states.
- harvie 4y agoWhat happens when you don't understand countersteering: https://youtu.be/VVE79XT8-Mg https://youtu.be/VVE79XT8-Mg
- robust-cactus 4y agohttps://youtu.be/ZpV2Bg-WX0w https://youtu.be/ZpV2Bg-WX0w This visual demonstration was helpful for me!
- moolcool 4y agoThe video says "by many bike riders"-- actually all! The only way to steer a motorcycle (or bicycle) at speed is to countersteer, even if you don't realize you're doing it
- codingdave 4y agoI have never grokked written or verbal explanations of countersteering. I have been riding bicycles and motorcycles for almost 5 decades now - I do it all the time in practice. But explaining it makes it weird.
- mrnaught 4y agoThis! I think people from south east Asia can relate to this. I’ve been an active rider for over a decade before coming to US. When counter steering was taught in the motorcycle safety program,it felt counter intuitive. One reason I can think of is back in my home country max speeds were under 50mph where you dont have to counter steer that much.
- cdot2 4y agoYou're countersteering at all speeds. It's just not as obvious.
- MarkMarine 4y agoThis is actually why this needed to be written, new riders on a race track come with a malformed understanding of how the bike works, and when you need to put more force into the bike to turn at higher speed, they don’t know where to put the force. People think that just leaning does the work, but you can try to turn a motorcycle with your hands off the bar and see how that works… basically you just go straight. The part I find amazing is you understand how to make this work in a part of your brain that apparently doesn’t communicate with the conscious understanding part. People can ride a motorcycle and not even understand how to make it turn, yet they do it.
- toast0 4y ago> The part I find amazing is you understand how to make this work in a part of your brain that apparently doesn’t communicate with the conscious understanding part. People can ride a motorcycle and not even understand how to make it turn, yet they do it. Being able to do a thing is vastly different from being able to explain how to do a thing. If you ask me how I turn on a bike, the real answer is I just have the intention to go that way, and then I start going that way. Lots of other things are like that too; ask someone who is fast at word searches how they do it and it'll be something like "I kind of look at the grid and the word(s) pop out; and if it gets really tough I move my head around a bit and then they pop out" Not very helpful if that's not what happens to you, but it's what I do.
- abalaji 4y agoThere is a surprising lack of pixar Cars references in this thread... it's where I was first exposed to counter-steering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUWtaw5Fra8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUWtaw5Fra8
- rcxdude 4y agoWhile it's sometimes called countersteering and is superficially similar (you wind up steering in the opposite direction to your intended turn), the mechanics are quite different: it's not a technique you'll use in normal driving and you wind up steering into the bend sharply and then away from it, as opposed to steering away from the bend and then into it.
- amarant 4y agoThere's counter-steering, and then there's speedway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_speedway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_speedway Interesting physics indeed!