Why do road cyclists take flat corners differently than MTBs?

Not at all. In fact I covered that in my previous reply if you scroll up slightly.

Are you suggesting that the inside leg contributes more of a shift in centre of mass to the inside of the corner than the torso and head do in the opposite direction?

Happy to listen to your analysis if you can do so within the relevant context of cycling and not moto gp

So I went off and looked into the whole cornering like a motogp rider thing…. at length. Its super interesting (I thought, my wife didnt)

as I understand it now, moving your center of gravity into the turn (not down, but towards the center of the turning circle) effectively makes the turning radius smaller, allowing you to lean the bike less. However it doesn’t do anything else ie. it doesn’t increase traction or anything. If you can lean the bike more that will have just the same effect as leaning your CoG in, the same relative forces will be acting on the tire and so the same amount of traction will be required.

https://www.edbargy.net/informative-articles/body-position-basics

So why would you not want to lean the bike less? Maybe your contact point is in danger of moving onto the tire wall, but I think traction is going to give up before that on a road bike, I don’t know because Ive never cornered that aggressively? The other reason would be that you cant lean the bike over anymore because somethings going to hit the ground and again that’s not going to happen on a road bike because traction is going to give up first, but it appears to be the primary reason motogp riders lean in, they cant lean the bike anymore for fear of something hitting the ground (although apparently you can still get all the way to 66 degrees :astonished: MotoGP: Marquez at 66 degrees 'not because I like it, I need to' | MotoGP | News )

As for off road bikes

I didn’t look into this much but this article by Lee McCormack talks about leaning the bike for cornering (but keeping your body upright) is why your weight is “on top” of a mountain bike, basically you can push bicycles around so your taking advantage of that to allow you to quickly switch the bike from one turn to another. Also off road tires usually have much more aggressive knobs higher towards the sidewall, and your actually looking to engage those in corners (so you want to lean the bike more) I think?

I couldn’t find anything definitive about weighting on top bringing more traction?

What’s also interesting though is that in Lees last picture he is leaning his upper body off and into the turn, he might have just been overemphasizing ‘looking where you want to go’, but if I understand this now, hes actually tightening up his corner too….huh.

Some more links
Everything you ever wanted to know about contact patches, lean angles and body position

https://www.edbargy.net/informative-articles

the science of “hanging off”

if you understand maths (I don’t)

forces on a turning motorcycle

if you really understand maths heres people agreeing that hanging off is the last thing to worry about (I didn’t understand any of this :wink:)

https://forums.superbikeschool.com/topic/3324-hanging-off-mathematically-quantified/page/2/

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If anybody wants a more easily understandable yet scientific breakdown of lean vs. counter lean and when each makes sense.

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