Riding Advice Please

[Big Jock]

I have been riding my 125 now for a few months and have covered just short of 400 miles. I feel pretty good on the bike. Have no issues with slow control and never stall but there's one thing that gets me now and again.
When I'm on an A road going through a sweeping bend and a car is coming the other way I tend to look at the car to make sure its going where it should be and not at me. Doing this around town and on slow corners doesn't affect my road position but I've found that doing this on the faster A road corners is sometimes making me push out wide towards the car i'm looking at and has given me a scare once or twice.
Is this something that should improve with time and experience or am I just doing something wrong?

[Baffler186]

Both. Treat a bend as any other, look where you want to go, not at your front wheels, not at oncoming vehicles. You tend to go where you are looking so that's why you're drifting towards the centre. There's nothing that wrong with being towards the centre line, but you need to be there ebcasue that's what line you're on, not becasue you've drifted there by accident
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Current: 2009 SV650 S, 1990 Kawasaki GT550
Previous: 2009 CBF125, 1998 GSF600, 2004 FZ6 Fazer, 1978 CB400a Hondamatic

[trevor saxe-coburg-gotha]

You're doing something wrong - and it's very obvious what. You're not looking where you should be going. The bike will go where you're looking. You MUST look where you want to go. Google target fixation, google limit point view. Riding into and through a corner is all about focusing on the road ahead, and more specifically the point at which the opposite sides of the road appear to meet - i.e. where the parallel sides of the road meet in the near distance. The tighter the bend is, the nearer that convergence - i.e. limit point - will seem. So you should be prepared to lose (more) speed if this can be seen to be occurring - and it can happen very quickly if you've really cocked a tight corner up (nevertheless, you MUST keep your focus on that limit point and do NOT start looking down at curbing, shrubbery, verges, etc - because the moment you do is the moment the bike goes there and NOT towards the exit of the corner). Conversely, once the limit point appears to be receding, the bend is straightening out - and you can accelerate.

The proverbial mantra is "slow in, fast out."

But in some ways the key skill is to learn to "READ THE ROAD". It can be too late once you're actually in the bend to be assessing limit points and shite like that. You should have used signage, road markings and topographical cues (hedge lines, tree rows, "telegraph" poles, etc. - all of which tend to follow the course of the road, and thus relay important early information about where you yourself will need to head, and the amount of steering input that might be required) to read the road ahead and estimate the severity of a corner some way before you actually enter it - this'll make your ride loads smoother because you'll be able to use engine braking rather than suddenly chucking the anchor overboard once you're halfway through a bend.

As for road positioning, for now just keep central (i.e. the middle part of your side of the road) - although when approaching and indeed negotiating a right hander, there's certainly no harm in being slightly left of centre of your lane (providing you're not hitting shitty gutters full of badger corpses and whatever).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkAtWiRq8Q0
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"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent."

Mobylette Type 50 ---> Raleigh Grifter ---> Neval Minsk 125

[Big Jock]

Cheers Guys. Very Helpful.

[trevor saxe-coburg-gotha]

Read my post again please - I've made subtle but important clarifications in the latter half of it. Cheers.
____________________
"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent."

Mobylette Type 50 ---> Raleigh Grifter ---> Neval Minsk 125

[Saraya]

This is something that I’m still having a bit of trouble with and it’s only on left bends. It’s frustrating me so much, as I’m smoothing out all my other newbie issues. (Apart from dribbling petrol over my tank. Done that twice now!)

I’ve discovered that this is even more of an issue for me in the dark on unlit dual carriageways. I don’t know if it’s a sub-conscious thing of feeling safer in the middle of the road, when you can’t see round the bend- but I’m very grateful that the cars that night, had better road skills than me, as they went around me.
Left bends. Always the bloody left bends. Here’s hoping we can both master this soon, Big J.

[Alpineandy]

[NJD]

Target fixation, Inb4 spill counter thread update from OP.

Can't really blame yourself if only done CBT, I assume? I say this because the first thing that was said to me after I completed A2 was "we haven't really touched on gears or cornering do come back once you've got a big-er bike for our advanced course" <still waiting a year and six page thread latter>.

RoadcraftNottingham link above is worth a watch. If you struggle to put it into play out on the road then a ride with instructor on the roads you're encountering this issue on might help. Email school and request one on one for a couple of hours to help you out on roads you'll use to grow in comfort to then apply on other bends etc.

Practise I'd say, but lessons also if it's that much of an issue. Relevant tip, I'd say, would be just try to constantly look ahead as far as you can at all times. There's one particular bend on my return commute that at night I can encounter a similar issue with cars oncoming and then I go from looking ahead of corner to looking at car to looking ahead of corner, can be a temporary distraction but shouldn't really be looking at them for longer than a split second.

Go ride some roads you don't know for once and put yourself outside the comfort zone, soon brush up the skills.
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The do it all, T̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶r̶o̶k̶e̶n̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶,̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶i̶g̶ ̶l̶u̶m̶p̶,̶ ̶C̶h̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶N̶o̶o̶d̶l̶e̶

[Val]

[trevor saxe-coburg-gotha]

[MahatmaAndhi]

[Aceslock]

[Big Jock]

Some more great tips and info guys.
Appreciate it

[angryjonny]