This is an oversimplified assessment of these crashes. You can overload the front just by pushing on the bars too hard. You can unload the rear and high side by

This is an oversimplified assessment of these crashes. You can overload the front just by pushing on the bars too hard. You can unload the rear and high side by letting off the throttle. You can do either or both by shifting your weight while holding maintenance throttle (no throttle or bar input.) Tires in general, but especially motorcycle tires pushed to the limit of traction behave differently depending on how they are loaded, it’s a very non-linear system. If you suddenly put 85 units of force into the tire (ignoring what these units are, doesn’t matter for this discussion) you can overload the tire and break traction. If you load the tire progressively, you may be able to put 105,106 units of force in and have the tire hold. You may be able to push the tire to 107 and get a little drift but maintain traction. Different parts of the tire heat and cool differently, you may have been through 4 rights and 1 left, and the second left can only handle 95% of the force the last right can take. A cold tire can just slide out with no warning, no feel. Even the best riders in the world get nailed by cold tires on a regular basis. The other component of these crashes in the video is stiff suspension and poor body position. These videos are almost exclusively knobs that bought more bike than they know how to ride. If you want to see what a bike can do, check out motard riding, they aren’t using magical tires… they have squishy suspension and they push the bike down lower than their body and use their legs as part of the suspension. You do that and you can drift a motorcycle at angles that would be impossible on a street bike. Same tires. Nothing magic. Every crash on that site could have been recovered with better body positioning and some pre-planning. If you’d like to learn how, come join me at AFM racing and Pacific Track Time. I’ll happily run a couple laps with anyone from hacker news. I’m #413. See you out there