Pointing it skywards…its just physics

Everybody wants to, at some stage or another after playing with a dirt-scoot, learn how to wheelie! That’s cool, and I’ll tell you what I know….. I have been known to keep my front tire much fresher than my back tire, if you get my drift. But before I do that, I’d like to share a couple of tips with you on how to make your wheelie work for you on the trail. Yes I know chicks dig it, but there are some other uses too.

The most common and most excellent thing you would use a wheelie for and, please believe me, you will find it excellent, is going through water. I’m not talking about crossing a river, although I know a couple of dudes who’ll give gas through a river anyway. I mean a small, shallowish stream, a fair sized puddle, or mud. When you go through any of these, you’ll find that the faster you try get through it, the wetter you get. The reason for this is quite obvious, your front wheel is displacing the water and you are sitting behind your front wheel! If you go through these on your back wheel, your back wheel displaces the water and, well, your buddy is behind your back wheel. And it looks cool. How high you lift your front wheel is irrelevant, as long as it’s out of the water. Bear in mind though, that any of these obstacles is exactly that, an obstacle, therefore creating more friction and slowing you down. Because of this, your front wheel will naturally be coming down sooner. It’s a physics thing. Anyway, in order to successfully wheelie through rivers, puddles or mud, you need to get some practice under your belt in order to get a feel for how you judge how high you want to lift your wheel and how fast you want to do it depending on the length and/or depth of the obstacle in question.

The next place you want to go vertical is over ditches. It is not unusual to come across a narrow, deep ditch in the middle of the trail. Sometimes the width is almost as wide as the bike is long, and very often it is definitely wider than your front wheel. Well, when presented with this little obstacle, you can do one of three things:

1)  You don’t see it until it’s too late and you go across the ditch at full-tilt. Gravity does its thing (yeah, yeah, it’s a physics thing again) and your front wheel dips. What happens next is pretty painful, usually at the cost of a collar-bone (been there, done that). Your front wheel is lower than lip of the other side and you ride, at pace, into the wall on the other side of the ditch. Because of the speed you’re at, your front wheel stops dead, your front forks compress, and your back wheel continues, in a cartwheel-like fashion, over your front wheel. You get to feel like the unfortunate rock in an ancient roman catapult as you rapidly watch your handlebars and front fender disappear beneath and behind you as you are hurtled over them into the ground on the other side of the ditch.

2)  You do see it in time, but all you can do is grab all the brakes you can find and deal with manhandling your scoot over the ditch when, hopefully, you have stopped in time to prevent injury or damages.

3)  You can get your front wheel up and carry on styling over the ditch like it didn’t matter! The trick is to gauge the height of your wheelie so that front wheel stays up long enough to get over the far wall of the ditch. It doesn’t matter how high or low, as long as it clears the lip. The next thing that happens is your back wheel hits the lip of the wall of the side your front wheel has just cleared. This action will bring your front wheel down to ground really fast…yes, you got it, physics!! Beware of the potential kick up at the back.

You will get to that point on a ride one day where you are confronted with a very steep, if not vertical, pretty high drop off. Sure if you hit it at pace the momentum will keep your bike horizontal enough that, even though you may get to the ground front wheel first, the angle will be negligible and you’ll be ok. But if you have stopped to check it out, which is the smart thing to do if you’re new to this game, you don’t have that momentum any more. So what do you do? Well you can backtrack enough to build up enough speed to come off at pace, you can try ride off and hope it’s not steep enough or high enough that you end up eye-to-eye with mother earth, or you can get that front wheel up again. A little pop-up and you’re down on the ground with your back wheel first. Your cushy back shocks taking the hit for you and it all feels good. Even if you come off the top with some pace, getting the front wheel higher than the back on a drop off is always a much more comfortable landing.

As you practice and get used to wheeling and popping, you’ll find more and more uses. Getting over a fallen tree – you need to get that front wheel up and over. Negotiating up rocky steps. Finding how a low wheelie, with your front wheel only dabbing every now and then, is great for riding rocks. But I digress; you all want the answer to the burning question – how?

Ok, my technique may not be the best for everybody. But I’ll share with you what I know and try and relate some insight on how to learn. First off, there are three different wheelies: just popping the front wheel up, a power wheelie, and a balance wheelie.

Popping the wheel up. Used mostly for clearing the rock step, the fallen log, or getting the front wheel up for a drop off. You can achieve this by getting the bike in a low gear, leaning back and cranking the throttle open just at the beginning of your power band. Or you can rev it up a bit and “pop” the clutch. The bike can stand up very quickly and very steeply, beware. I actually used this technique to learn to wheelie when I was a youngster. I used do what they called (or call??) moonwalking From a dead standstill, with your feet on the ground, you rev the bike up in first gear and pop the clutch. The bike stands straight up and you literally walk with the bike. Watch out for damage to the back fender when doing this – too far up and you’re dragging it with you on the ground.

Power wheelie. This is my firm favourite and I spend a lot of time doing these whether sitting or standing. By the very nature of its name, you need to assess the power of your own bike to know which gear to try and bring your bike up in. On my KTM 300 EXC, for a sitting wheelie, I am able to quite easily power it up in first, second or third gears. For a standing wheelie I’m good to go in first, second, third or fourth. The idea is to find the “sweet spot”. For me the sweet spot is the angle where my front wheel is high enough that gravity is not pulling it down too much but not that high that I am flipping over backward (it’s still pretty high though – finding this place is the scariest part of learning to wheelie). In a sitting wheelie, I shift my weight to the back of the bike and crank the throttle open at the start of the power band. Mother nature, the power of my scoot and, of course, physics, do their thing and my scoot stands up. On my way to, or just before, the sweet spot I often change up a gear. This has the effect of slowing down the climb to vertical a bit and providing longer legs to play in the sweet spot. I usually get pretty comfortable here and shift gears at my leisure. Be careful, if your wheel is pointing too far up and you gear down, you’re probably going to flip over backwards with the sudden rush of power to the back wheel. If you gear up, you are going to gain speed, careful when you put your front down – its fast! A standing wheelie is pretty similar – weight back, grip with your knees, crank it up at the start of the band with a bit of bounce and pull to help her up. Find the sweet spot and cruise. All excellent fun – when you get it, you’ll love it. It is nothing shy of absolute exhilaration to cruise on your back wheel. And…..it looks cool!

Do not, I repeat, do not try and race your buddies while in a wheelie. You get too comfortable, think you’re king of the world, your buddy flies past you, you crank her up, and…..you flip over backwards!

Balance wheelie. Enter into the realm of the expert. This is where you get your bike up really high and keep it there regardless of speed, usually much slower actually. This is a delicate choreography of throttle and back brake. The more you throttle, the more the front will stand up. Touch the back brake and the front will come down. I know the science, I haven’t got this one right yet, but I will. Wang Gang Gang’s Garth “Vertical” Smitherim is gonna teach me!

Finally, some golden rules:

1)  Wheelies are dangerous, its not if you’ll flip, it’s when you’ll flip. Never play on the back wheel without wearing, at the very least, your helmet and your gloves.

2) The back brake is your friend. The back brake is your friend. The back brake is your friend. Just the smallest dab on the back brake will bring your front wheel down to earth very quickly – excellent clench-factor remedy.

3)  Strange as it may seem, a slightly faster wheelie is much easier than a slow wheelie. Because you have more spin on your front wheel, you have a gyroscopic effect assisting you, the very reason we can balance on two wheels in motion in the first place……physics my friends, physics. A slow wheelie relies far more on balance and skill.

4)  It is far easier to wheelie on a hard surface like tar. The traction helps your power transfer between the drive mechanism and the back wheel act on your bike instead of the ground, therefore getting you airborne quicker. Yep, physics. But, when you flip, it’s much harder, much more painful, and much more expensive to repair. That one isn’t physics, that’s just common sense – stoopid hurts.

Hope you get it right, it’s worth it. See you in the dirt.

Keep the shiny side up and ride it like you stole it.

Steve “Tombstone” Lauter