One huge drill to try is to get a friend and ride in a football field and practice touching. Go about 10 mph or so and bump arms, bars and rub rear wheels. Get the feel for how to react. After some practice push and pull on each other a little harder. The counter steering sensation and wrong intuition on how to save yourself when you hit another rider or overlap a rear wheel can be changed with practice. Hands down the best drills I’ve ever done and has kept me cool in some tight places. Wear things that can get dirty and at first just wear tennis shoes. You’ll get to the point where you can lean on each other and figure out that you have to turn into your opponent to get away from your opponent. More factors than that, but after racing for 20 years I’ve hit the deck 3 times. I did daydream and go over a guard rail in training one day. Looked up and there was the ground. So all is not perfect. Fact I crashed more solo in training than in the bunch.
Another very good drill for beginners is to find a tight, vacant parking lot with some type of perimeter loop road. Ride multiple laps, slowly accelerating each lap until you reach a fairly high pace. The objective is the hold your line through the turn, and pedal through them. You will not touch pedals to pavement. You can fly through turns at 25+, pedalling, without touching . . . but hard to convince the mind of that. This drill hammers is home that you can, and makes your turns totally subconscious.
I still can’t believe people are giving beginners advice to ride in the front in a crit. Yes, Cat 5 is for newer racers, but there are many decent bike handlers in Cat 5. Stay in the back until you know you can handle the bike in a crit. Would not be cool to bring someone down cause you hammer the breaks in a turn, could not hold a line, or freaked when you got bumped.
You brake before the corner. If you’ve got the brakes on IN the corner, the bike wants to straighten up, and it makes the corner difficult to navigate, and if you have to change lines in the corner, nearly impossible. You can dive the bike pretty hard, and if conditions allow, countersteer pretty hard to change lines. So slow down before the corner, but once yo lean it over to navigate the curve, stay off the brakes.
You know, I must say you’re the first person to have clarified this point! I’ve been told ad nauseum - ‘don’t brake thru corners’. Makes WAY more sense now.
thanks.
The other aspect of braking before the corner, as opposed to in the corner, is that the later you brake in the corner, the harder you will have to accelerate out of the corner. So, by braking earlier, and carrying speed through the corner, you will have to accelerate less. I will also argue though that once you gain experience, you don’t really want to ride at the front of a crit, at least not a 4 corner, cat III or IV crit, and in some circumstances I/II. This goes back to the “don’t brake in the turns” comment earlier in the thread. An experienced, comfortable crit racer can sit at the back of a III or IV race and never brake and never be in trouble. By easing up, and gapping before the turn, you carry speed through the turn and get back on without accelerating. Hence, no accelerations until the finish. Since most III or IV crits end up in field sprints, there is no reason to be up front until you need to position yourself for the last lap. Good racers can leave this until the last lap in a IIIs race, and with fresh legs, even a non-sprinter can do well. The only skill this takes is the faith that you will not get dropped when you gap a little, and the ability to pedal through turns. Heck most III/IV races are so slow through the turns, you don’t even need to pedal to get back on. This gapping is subtle though, and distinction that is difficult for the novice to make, similar to the subtleties of smooth paceline riding. Once mastered though, a good tailgunner can clean up in the lower cats.
Great advice, thanks.