eli5: Leaning in to physics

Question

I recently started riding a motorcycle. Why does “leaning in” while turning allow sharper turns at higher speed?

In: 0

Answer 1

The way bikes work is something that you can easily do from muscle memory but doesn’t work the way that you think it does. When you are turning on a bike, you point the front wheel in the opposite direction then you want to turn in which tips the bike moving the center of mass. Once it is tipped, you then correct the wheel resulting in you turning and the center of mass returning to the center line of the bike. Bigger turns means bigger offsets which means bigger leans.