I recently started riding a motorcycle. Why does “leaning in” while turning allow sharper turns at higher speed?
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It’s not so much that leaning in allows sharper turns as much as it’s necessary to turn at all.
First, think about a regular car. When you turn, there’s a centripetal (center-seeking) force exerted on the car by the angle of the front tires. The reaction is centrifugal– you and the car want to keep going straight, so you are forced to the outside of the turn. A car in a sharp turn has a visible body lean making it tilt outward.
The same thing happens on a motorcycle. But without the second set of wheels for stability, the bike would just immediately fall over. There’s no mechanism for handling side-to-side forces with only two wheels except for leaning.
To get a little technical, the combined force vectors of gravity and inertia make an angle to the ground between 0 and 90 degrees. When turning, you have to lean to match that angle (or steer to match the lean) so the bike doesn’t straighten back out or fall all the way over. Thankfully it’s not quite as hard as it sounds and can be done pretty intuitively with a little practice. If you’ve ridden a regular bicycle you’ve done it there too.
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