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Mr.
Stanifer’s Opus;
or, Reflections from the First Corner at the Perrysburg Grand Prix
by David Teall
[Including
some thoughts on cornering]
 If you haven’t
already guessed from this shameless allusion to the popular film, Mr. Stanifer
was my high school band director. Stanifer was a visionary hired by a group of
visionaries. Bedford Township, back in nineteen ya-dee-dee-ya, was just
beginning to grow. When we first matched muscle and music with Toledo suburban
schools on fall Friday nights, our mascot, the kicking mule, seemed an
appropriate joke. So a group of parents called themselves the Athletic Boosters
and pressed the school board to get serious about football, and another group of
parents called themselves the Band Boosters and pressed the school board to get
serious about the music program.
It was Mr. Stanifer’s
job to turn this bunch of kids (count me as one) who played a cacophony as they
walked across the football field in loose formation, sometimes to the left,
sometimes to the right—sometimes even diagonally, into a real Marching Band.
He got the Band Boosters to spend thousands on a video system (this was before
Beta) so that he could tape our rehearsals, play them back to us, and critique
every step. He would also play for us tapes of Ohio State/Michigan halftime
shows, so we could see what a real marching band sounded and looked like. And,
like most good teachers do, he made analogies out of things from our everyday
lives.
The analogy I remember
best is the one where Mr. Stanifer is stuck during rush hour at Wernert’s
Corner, a busy five-way intersection in West Toledo. He notices that only five
or six cars get through on each cycle. After careful examination, he sees that
there is, after each light turns green, a delayed reaction between the
acceleration of each car in line. Sometimes a driver is not paying attention,
which holds up the flow further. "What if everyone," Mr. Stanifer
asked the band, "hit the gas at the same time the moment the light turned
green? Imagine how many would get through." This, of course, got our
attention. Then Mr. Stanifer took all of the grumbling about why it wouldn’t
work at Wernert’s Corner and showed us how a marching band in formation is not
limited by the realities of a traffic light.
This traffic-light
analogy comes back to me every now and then, as it did so last Friday at the
Perrysburg Grand Prix. Anyone watching the Citizen/5's, the 3/4's, and the
1/2's, noticed varying degrees of Stanifer’s traffic-light effect upon the
racers’ entering and exiting those very tight corners. Not surprisingly, the
Citizen/5's were all spread out, the 3/4's were much tighter, and the 1/2's flew
through in pretty much the same formation they maintained in the straightaways.
It is much the same at
our club criteriums. If you’re at the front or off the front in a small break,
the  traffic-light effect is small; if you’re at or near the back of the
peloton, the traffic-light effect is sometimes quite large. The problem with the
traffic-light effect, a. k. a., the accordion effect, in a crit is efficiency.
The pack tightens back up after each corner, and it’s a lot of extra work
sprinting out of every corner for everybody near the back. The old adage, you
want to be near the front, is a fine one, but as 40-plus starters becomes the
norm on Thursday night, maintaining prime position becomes increasingly
difficult.
Most long-time
observers of the club agree that the
speed and competitiveness of our races has
increased over the years. The numbers are up. The quality of skills throughout
the peloton, though not bad, leaves room for improvement. Whether you’re
rounding one of the four corners at WestWinds Business Center or the only one at
WoodBridge Industrial Park, you can choose to pedal or not pedal. However, since
at various points in the race the peloton will use both methods, you should be
technically sound both pedaling around a corner and not. If the riders in front
of you pedal, you’ll get gapped if you don’t pedal too.
Given a smooth, dry
surface, speed is the factor that determines whether one can pedal through a
corner. The higher the speed, the more one must lean; after a certain angle, the
inside pedal scrapes the ground. How far is that? One can measure the angle, to
be sure, but what good is that measurement out there in a race? You’ll
probably have to find it through trial and error. Touching one’s pedal, though
quite a rush, rarely ever leads to a crash. Seeing sparks fly from a pedal up
the road, sometimes a bigger rush, can also help judge where in the speed/lean
equation you should leave your pedal up. Show me a crit racer who hasn’t
ground a few grams off of the bottom of his or her pedals, and you haven’t
shown me a crit racer.
You can increase pedal
clearance if you hold the bike upright through the corner. Do so by aligning
your nose with or slightly outside the right brake hood. (I’m speaking here of
right-hand turns. Ouch, the Perrysburg Grand Prix threw left-handers at them
too.) As with any skill, you need to practice this until it becomes automatic.
It’s probably a good idea to set up this way for all pedal-through corners
regardless of the speed.
When it’s down to
the last lap at WestWinds, or most
any moderately fast lap at WoodBridge, you’ll
likely be forced to not pedal. Here the setup is the opposite: line your nose up
with the left brake hood and put as much of your weight as you feel comfortable
doing so on your left pedal. By assuming this position and weighting the left
(the outside pedal or the one that’s down) pedal you lower your center of
gravity. Weighting the outside pedal is very important. You can really carve
through a tight corner at speed. I don’t claim to understand the physics of
why this is so; I just know that it works.
Another factor that
adds to the traffic-light effect is confidence. Everyone needs to have
confidence in his or her cornering skills and confidence in everyone else’s, 
which isn’t going to happen overnight or by reading ten thousand pages on bike
handling. Mr. Stanifer was trying to convince me that I would not bowl over the
horn player in front of me with my bass drum if I took that first step with all
of the pomp and precision of Ohio State’s senior first tuba (you know, the guy
who struts out across the field and dots the i in Ohio), but his overall vision
was perfect precision from his eighty-piece marching band. Perfection in the
peloton would be a lofty goal. Especially when some of the more skilled riders
occasionally use the traffic-light effect to their advantage. They sit on the
back, start coasting before the corner and thereby leave a small gap. Then, by
not touching their brakes, they go through the corner faster than those in
front, thereby closing that gap back up without turning a pedal. Some call it
"shooting" a corner or riding "tail-gunner."
I mentioned the
B-word, brakes. I know that you’ve heard the imperative, don’t touch your
brakes in the corners. It is, however, quite easy to find yourself between a
rock and a hard place when it gets bunched up in a corner. The best way to avoid
these situations, and a general rule of riding in any peloton, is to look up 
the
road at the flow up front and anticipate how that will filter back to you. If
you see things strung out up there, you’re likely coming up on a fast corner;
if it’s all bunched up, the corner is likely to be easy. In either case, upon
entering the corner, you can back off slightly from the normal distance you
leave between yourself and the rider in front of you. (We’re not marching on a
football field; no one’s going to care whether you set up on the 45-yardline
or the 44 and 1/2. Just don’t make it the 43.) If braking is required to
maintain that distance, do it before you enter the corner. When it is absolutely
necessary to brake in the corner, feather your front brake first. Hopefully that’s
all it will take. If you have to apply more than a feather touch to the front
brake, squeeze it a little more while adding gentle pressure to the rear brake.
Mr. Stanifer never got
his perfect performance, not in my career, but the band did get markedly better,
one player at a time. It’s likely that our peloton will improve its cornering
one rider at a time as well. The skilled riders will continue to congregate at
the front, but with more skilled riders there the number of riders cornering
like the 1/2's at the Perrysburg Grand Prix gets larger. That would increase the
efficiency of the peloton and the racing could potentially get even faster and
more competitive. As for the tail-gunners, the beat goes on.
Next
12/28/09
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