From: mjs@sys.uea.ac.uk (Mike Sixsmith)
Subject: Re: Countersteering, to know or not to know - what is the question?
Organization: University of East Anglia
Distribution: net
Lines: 22

lotto@husc4.harvard.edu (Jerry Lotto) writes:

>There has been a running thread on the need to understand
>countersteering.  I have seen a lot of opinion, but not much of it has
>any basis in fact or study.  The bottom line is:

>The understanding and ability to swerve was essentially absent among
>the accident-involved riders in the Hurt study.

>The "average rider" does not identify that countersteering alone
>provides the primary input to effect motorcycle lean by themselves,
>even after many years of practice.

I would agree entirely with these three paragraphs. But did the Hurt
study make any distinction between an *ability* to swerve and a *failure*
to swerve? In most of the accidents and near accidents that I've seen, riders
will almost always stand on the brakes as hard as they dare, simply because
the instinct to brake in the face of danger is so strong that it over-rides
everything else. Hard braking and swerving tend to be mutually exclusive
manouvres - did Hurt draw any conclusions on which one is generally preferable?