Keith Code 2003: The Epic Interview
E. Bass, © 2003 www.motorcycle.com
"Aardvark" ... That's what you'll find on page one of the Encyclopedia Britannica. On page one of the Encyclopedia of Motorcycle Cornering Knowledge though, you'll find that it begins with "Keith Code." His books, including A Twist of the Wrist Volume 1 & 2, and The Soft Science of Road racing Motorcycles, have been the bibles of motorcycle racing since they first began appearing on shelves in 1982, and have since been translated into several foreign languages, as well as produced in audio tape, DVD, and CD-ROM editions.
Since 1980 when his California Superbike School was founded, over 100,000 riders in schools on four continents have trained in Keith's techniques (including yours truly), and he has coached 15 National Superbike Champions including Doug Chandler, Sean Higby, Tommy Hayden, Eric & Ben Bostrom, have I dropped enough names yet?
Keith is a constant tinkerer as well and has developed several innovative teaching aids such as the Lean Bike, Slide Bike, No BS Bike, and Wheelie Trainer. Indisputably one of the most fascinating, and historically significant people in the sport, this rather extensive interview is being published verbatim, in its entirety, as a unique glimpse into the world of Keith Code.
EB: It would seem that devoting a lifetime to finding ways to ride a motorcycle around a track a fraction of a second faster would get old after awhile to most people. Not to mention, after hearing that you spent three days straight doing laps in 6th gear with no brakes, I was wondering what is it about motorcycle racing, and cornering specifically, that captivates you so deeply that you've made it your life's pursuit?
KC: Well, I think that the fact that I used to make mistakes with all the things that I now have figured out solutions for was really the original reason that I began to research the area of riding motorcycles. I had problems and I knew I had problems. You know, I was racing and people were faster than me. No data was available. There was simply no information, but now there is information and people kind of take it for granted but you know in the seventies there was no data.
We're talking... when I say no information, it's maybe hard to believe. There weren't for example, “how to" riding articles in magazines. They simply didn't exist. Nobody had even taken it up as a subject. The best you could get was good advice from somebody, and often times it wasn't really good advice at all, it was actually bad advice. And even the people . . . especially the people who knew how to do it were the worst sources for information. The best you could get is, "More throttle on, and less brake, and you'll get around the track faster". That was about the level of sophistication that was available in the 1970's and any time before that.
EB: Interesting. Sometimes as we watch the dominating performances of a Kenny Roberts historically, or a Valentino Rossi today, we forget that a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, they were newbie once too, and went through the same learning curve as the rest of us. They just kept going a whole lot farther than most of us. Could you go back to your formative riding years for us, and talk about the strengths and weaknesses, trials and tribulations, and perhaps any memorable moments of your early riding years. What did your learning curve look like?
KC: Well you mention Roberts, you know, Kenny told me the first time he rode a road race bike was up at Kent, Washington at Seattle International Raceway, and he crashed and didn't make a complete lap. It took him three tries to make one complete lap around Seattle International when he was riding for Yamaha! Rossi, he was a whole different guy. He started riding when he was a little kid and his Dad was a racer, so that was a nice, sweet start.
My situation was completely different. My parents knew nothing about motorcycles, didn't want to know anything about motorcycles, thought they were extremely dangerous and I would be crazy and so on if I even considered it. But I still did get myself a motorcycle when I was 12. I got a little 125cc, they used to call it Harley Hummers. There's one sitting in the office down at Cycle World. I look at it and go, "Man, I used to have one of those!"
It was like a 1953 bike and I got on the bike and I rode it. All I did was I asked the guy who I got it from where the controls were. He asked me if I'd ever ridden a motorcycle before and I said, "Sure, of course I have, just refresh my memory on where the controls are". And he looked at me kind of like, you know a 12 year old kid standing in front of him down about waist level and he told me where the controls were and I got on the thing, and I rode it down the street. I asked him to bring it to my house and then the next time I got on it, I rode it. And I rode it again the next time, and I rode it again the next time. And I just had a feel for it, and I didn't crash it or anything like that. I just rode it.
As time went on and I got more motorcycles, I still wasn't interested in learning anything, right. When I was 15, I got myself a brand new single-cylinder Ducati. It felt good. It was a real, genuine motorcycle. Certainly for those days, it was probably one of the ultimate sport bikes of the day, really. I began to get interested in racing. I mean I already had been interested in racing, and I started to pay attention to what was happening when I was riding it. And I didn't really discover much, except I did discover counter-steering. Although I was afraid of it, and I didn't want to tell anybody because I thought they'd think I was crazy!
EB: Did you discover that consciously or . . .
KC: Yes, I was going through this corner. It was three corners away from my house where I lived out in the country. It was a nice corner, a left hand corner, double-apex turn. It's still there. And I was coming into it, and I rode into the corner, and I poked the bar right, and the bike went . . . I poked the right bar and the bike went further right and I went, "Whoa, what was that!" And I did it again, and it went right and I went "Whoa! That's really weird!"
EB: So did you think you had a special bike that steered the wrong way?
KC: No, I didn't know. I had no idea. I just went, "Hmmm, Wow! That seems to work." And then I didn't really think that much about it after that. There wasn't any particular sense of discovery or anything like that. I got it, and I went, "Oh, that kinda works. Interesting." And I just continued riding.
EB: As you explored the science of riding, were there any teachers, peers, books, that you found particularly influential or effective to your process?
KC: Honestly, as I said before, there was no information. It was a vast desert. There were two paragraphs in a John Surtees book that kind of gave you the idea that there might be something to know about cornering a motorcycle. And he had been World Champion and all this stuff, right. But I hadn't even seen those. One of the things that spurred me on really was a comment that Kenny Roberts made. And I think that it was in an article in a cycle mag. We're talking 1975 or '76, something like that. And he said something about . . . I had already had the idea that you could learn something about it, but he said something like, "I could teach anybody how to do this". Well whether he could or not, it didn't really make any difference, he had the sense that he could teach anybody how to do it right, and I went, "Huh, well uh, I don't know what he means by that, and maybe he doesn't know what he means by that, but there's gotta be a technology to it." When you come down to the realization that it's not just a bunch of haphazard motion that gets you through a corner, that there are specific things that you have to do, and you pretty much have to do them in the right sequence, that there must be a technology. There's a technology for everything else. There's a more correct way to do everything else that has anything to do with machines. So that got me going. That got me interested in discovering what it was all about. That's one of the things.
EB: Let me ask you a couple of specific questions here. At that basic level, what are some of the things that a novice rider can do that you would designate as being the fundamentals of beginning to go faster than someone who just hops on a bike and is responding on intuition?
KC: Well, you can ride on intuition. And there are riders out there on the World Championship level who just mainly ride on intuition. And you can see that there are a number of things that they just don't understand. But there isn't a simple answer to it. There's a simple answer to it for one person in certain kinds of corners. So okay, you follow this guy through the corner, you see what they're doing. If they're making a technical error and you know what the tech points are, you can say this rider is making this technical error. This is an error in throttle control. This is an error if the rider isn't turning at the right place, or at the right rate. All these things we do in level one. They have no idea where they're going in the corner before they start the corner, right. Or you can see them just so tight on the bike to the point the handle bars aren't even round anymore. They're oval shaped because they're squeezin' them so hard!