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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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A normal stable turn requires a lean in the same direction. If you turn the bars to the left but don't lean to the left, you will topple over to the right.

Countersteering is purposefully turning to the left and NOT leaning to the left, causing you to begin to topple over to the right...but then you quickly save it by turning the bars to the right. Now you are turning and leaning to the right.

At speeds faster than parking lot speeds, that is incorrect. You purposely push the left bar away from you to turn left. That's all you do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljywO-B_yew

Check it out.

You're totally right. But I believe the explanation still basically holds, at the end instead it's the bike turning itself to save itself due to its inherent stability.

This 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.

> 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.

This! 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.

You're countersteering at all speeds. It's just not as obvious.

I think an easy way to at least prove to yourself that it is happening is to ride a bicycle with just one finger of one hand in a straight line, then very slightly push the bar with that finger. Pushing to the right (ie with your left index finger) will initiate a left lean and turn. It’s more obvious that way than with a normal grip.

The simplest way to understand it is to consider that if the bike did not do this, it would be unrideable. The bike tends to return to center. If turning the wheel right initiated a right turn, the bike would just fall over.

Torque clockwise to lean more toward the left. Torque counter-clockwise to lean more toward the right. The bike follows a radius proportional to its lean angle.

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