DIRT BIKE · Hard Enduro

WET ROOTS, OFF-CAMBER AND SLOW-SPEED BALANCE

13 min · Full library · written lesson, video in production

The point

After this lesson you can hold a line across wet roots and off-camber ground at speeds where most riders dab, control the bike at walking pace and below, and turn the bike inside its own length without putting a foot down.

Half the answer, free

The Technique

  1. Accept the physics before you argue with the terrain. A tyre on a wet root has close to no lateral grip and very little longitudinal grip, and no amount of skill changes that. What skill changes is how much grip you ask for and when. Every input you make - throttle, brake, steering, weight shift - is a request for grip, and on low traction the requests must be small, early and never simultaneous. The elite rider on wet roots is not gripping harder than you. They are asking for less, spread across more time, and they are asking for it on the ground between the roots rather than on the roots themselves. That last point is the big one: your drive happens in the dirt, and the roots are things you coast across.
  2. Throttle smoothness on wet ground is a wrist geometry problem before it is a discipline problem. If your wrist is high and your elbow is dropped, every bump in the trail rotates your hand and adds throttle you did not ask for, which is why riders get surges of wheelspin exactly when the ground gets rough. Drop the wrist so the back of your hand is roughly in line with your forearm, keep the elbow up and out, and let the bar move under a loose grip. Then work in the smallest useful gear range - usually second or third with a heavy flywheel feel - so that a given wrist movement produces less change at the tyre. Many riders on wet root sections go up a gear and use the clutch to keep the engine alive, because a taller gear makes the throttle less sensitive and the clutch gives back the control that the taller gear removed.
  3. Read roots as a pattern of gaps and cross them in the gaps where you can. In a rooty descent or traverse, the roots are rarely evenly spaced; there are pockets of soil between them, and those pockets are where every input belongs. Brake in the gap, drive in the gap, turn in the gap, and be neutral - no throttle change, no brake, light on the bars - for the moment the tyre is actually on the wood. This is a rhythm, and like all rhythms you learn it by looking further ahead than feels necessary. If you are looking at the root you are on, you are already too late to have planned for it. Look three or four roots ahead and let your hands handle the one under you from memory.
  4. Off-camber is a body position problem with one counter-intuitive answer. On a slope that falls away to your left while you traverse right, the instinct is to lean your body up the hill, away from the drop. That is wrong, and it is wrong because it lightens the tyres in the direction you need them loaded. What you want is the bike leaned into the hill, so its tyres present a flatter contact patch to the sloping ground, and your body upright and to the outside, over the downhill peg. Weight the downhill peg deliberately and firmly. The picture is a bike leaning up the hill and a rider standing straight, hips over the low side, head level with the horizon rather than with the bike. This feels exposed the first hundred times and it is the single position that keeps traction on an off-camber traverse.
Still under the glass
  • Pivot turns, stationary balance, and the feet-up rules top riders use where everyone else dabs
  • 5 more technique steps
  • The 5 mistakes that undo it, with fixes
  • The drill that builds the reflex
  • The safety non-negotiables

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