[RideApart] - Real Rider: The Cornerspin Motorcycle School Experience

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When Big Bob, my moto-mentor, came home from the Cornerspin motorcycle school I texted him to ask how it was. He didn’t reply for a few days. Finally he wrote, “I have been trying to figure out how to describe just how amazing it was, but I just can’t do it justice. So you should just take the class.” Big Bob is one of the most accomplished riders that I know, so this was quite the endorsement.

That’s how I decided to travel from Chicago to North Carolina to take on Cornerspin. The school advertises itself as “Road Racing in the Dirt.” While this is an accurate description of the school, it hardly covers the depth of what it truly is.*In the few weeks I’ve had to digest taking the school, I still find myself tongue tied to explain everything that I learned.

I thought it would be more adventurous to ride rather than fly down there, so I pitched the idea of a trip to a few friends. They were all for it, so we drew up an elaborate back road route from Chicago to Salisbury, North Carolina and set off on an epic adventure.

Road Trip:
I made the trek on my 2007 Kawasaki Ninja 250, my everyday rider since I started riding in 2012. Despite putting 16,000 miles on the bike since I bought it, I had some fears about riding. I got nervous about traction, particularly in a corner. When I first got my motorcycle, I dumped it in front of a group of riders when I was riding away from a guy’s garage that had a gravel road. I wasn’t even going fast; I just didn’t know what I was doing. It was completely mortifying and left me with a fear of gravel. Rain made me nervous too, because I had heard of so many motorcycle accidents in the rain.

Another fear became apparent during our ride to North Carolina. There was one particular incident that I didn’t often encounter often on the flat straight roads of the Midwest: a series of steep downhill switchbacks that I just didn’t feel like I could relax in. I actually had to pull over for a moment to tell myself to calm down and keep it smooth. I had two major hopes for attending this school: first, I hoped to feel more confident on the ride back to Chicago. *Second, I hoped that I was not going to be in over my head for this school. I was nervous that I couldn’t do it.



Despite my *mental hang-up with the downhill curves, we arrived at the Cornerspin facility in Spencer, NC, safely. For the trip down there, we mostly rode US-421 and US-321. These are great roads for motorcyclists, and we also we able to hit “The Snake” on US-421 as part of the trip.



Class In Session:
Arriving at our class on early Saturday morning, we suited up in the clean gear that Cornerspin rented us and reported around a row of dirt bikes that we’d use for the day. The bikes ranged between 100 and 150 cc bikes, most students found themselves on Honda XR100s. When I realized that every single bike was outfited with street tires and the course we’d be tackling all day was compact clay I knew I’d be conquering my traction fears head on.

Aaron Stevenson, the chief instructor and a former national champion road racer, gathered the class around,*”This weekend you will feel like I’ve opened a fire hose of information on you, and you’ll walk away with a Dixie cup of information.”



The first task of the day was to get acclimated to the environment we’d be training on. Upon my small steed, I descended onto Aaron’s dirt track. It was set up exactly like a road racetrack, only in miniature. Sweeping left and right decreasing radius turns, a straight-away, and even a corkscrew that was sectioned off for the time being. The micro-machine course made our small dirt bikes feel like they were going much faster than they actually were. In reality I couldn’t have been going more than 20mph. During my first few laps it was pretty obvious to me that I had no idea what I was doing on this course. I was continuously afraid of losing traction, never quite sure how fast to go, the combination of these two elements made turning overwhelming for me. Many of my classmates managed to get their first crashes out of the way, and it was clear that the slow speeds of the bikes would work to our benefit as we aimed to push our skills to the limit. After about 20 minutes of this, we parked our bikes and began our first lesson of the weekend.

As I said, calling Cornerspin “Road Racing in the Dirt” isn’t a complete description of the school. First and foremost, it’s a school about traction control. Aaron is a master of having small sound bites that will stick out in your head, and one of his most memorable was, “Traction control is in your right hand, not on a box in your motorcycle.” Traction is defined as the grip that your tire has on the surface you are riding on, and learning to control it means learning to be*in control*of the environment that you are in. Cornerspin has many ways of teaching you how to gain this control.

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