The clock trick for tighter U-turns
MotoJitsu uses four cones as a clock face to show where to look in a U-turn, and when to move your eyes on.
1 min readUnited StatesBy PitPin Desk
U-turns go wrong when your eyes are late. In a new parking-lot video, MotoJitsu puts four cones on the ground as a clock face, 12, 3, 6 and 9, to make the timing easy to remember.
Set up the clock
His example circle is large, about 25 feet across. For a left U-turn you start at 3 o'clock.
Move your eyes in two steps
Keep looking at 3 until you are about 5 to 10 feet from the point where you lean. Then turn your head and look across the circle at 9. If you look over too early, you end up looking back, and that tells you it was too soon. To train your eyes, glance at 12 first and then at 9, scanning the arc your front tyre will follow.
When you reach about 12, start looking for 6. For a full circle, keep going: before you reach 9, look back over at 3.
Look across the diameter, not at the ground in front of the wheel and not right behind you. Looking short makes you react to each cone as it arrives.
Then add momentum
Carry a little speed, enough momentum to generate lean angle.
In his words, once you get your eyes looking where you want to go, "that's probably 60% of the issues that people have. They don't know where to look or when to look there."