Gravity Sports are much like Motorsport, only without an engine. As in Motorsport, cornering is important, it affects your speed, how easy you are to overtake and your ability to overtake others. The Racing Line is the best route through a corner, or series of corners.

A corner can be broken down into three parts. The Entry is the beginning of the corners, where you start turning. The Apex is the mid-point of the turn on the inside of the corner. The Exit is where you stop cornering and are going straight again.

The important thing with taking a corner, or series of corners, is Exit speed, not always your speed into or through it. The faster you leave a corner the faster your speed for the following straight. This is particularly important in Gravity Sports, as you cannot accelerate afterwards if you get things wrong.

Obviously, you can go faster when you are going straight and the tighter the corner the slower you have to go to be able to make it round. Therefore the fastest route through a corner is the straightest, that with the greatest radius, NOT necessarily the shortest.

The picture right depicts a traditional 90-degree corner and three possible routes through it. Compared to the other options the Green route has an earlier Entry, a later Exit and uses the width of the road, moving from outside, inside to the Apex and back out again. As a result it has maximised the radius and made the turn as straight as possible.

As mentioned above "The important thing with taking a corner, or series of corners, is Exit speed," this means that the most important corner in a series of corners is the last one. In many cases you will have to sacrifice the perfect Racing Line through the first corners in a series in order to achieve the best route through the final on, thus increasing your speed for the following straight. This is also known as prioritisation. In the "Slow" diagram, left, you can see how by taking the Racing Line through corner 1 puts you in completely the wrong position for corner 2. In the "Fast" diagram we can see how by slowing for corner 1, cutting in late and staying on the inside sets you up perfectly for corner 2.

While 90-degree corners, as depicted above, are good for illustrating Racing Lines they are, in fact, very rare. In reality most corners you will encounter will vary: in their angle, how quickly they turn in, how quickly they turn out, how wide they are at various points, how steep they are at various points and the track surface conditions. Each of these factors will affect the Racing Line and the best route through the corner. The more corners you ride the more experience you will gain and the better you will become at spotting the Racing Line.

One final variable to throw into the mix are the other riders. As gravity racing is often close fought over relatively short distances you will often find that you are entering a corner in close proximity to another rider. Often they will be just in front of you and will have the Racing Line, preventing you from being able to also use it. As with multiple corners you may have to sacrifice the Racing Line in order to overtake and block the racing line on the exit, or just to stay on the track (if you crash you are almost certain to loose, if you stay on there is always a chance). On the flip side, you could have the lead, but may decide to sacrifice the Racing Line in order to prevent another rider from doing the same to you. Again, it is in these instances that through experience you will learn how to deal with these circumstances.

Now it is time to go and start practising and gaining experience. You can do this as you are driving, imagine you are on your Luge, Bike, Skateboard or in your Soapbox. As you drive along think about where you would be on the road and how you would take the corners (don't actually do it, you are in a car and there are other people about). To begin with you will start by breaking down each corner, then series of corners until after a while you will start to think of the course as a whole. You will plan your line for your entire run, you will plan alternative routs, you will think about where other riders would be and how to deal with them.

Corners are where most mistakes are made, don't be the one making them. Being able to take a corner well can result in gaining on, or pulling away from another rider and it will give you more overtaking opportunities. An understanding of cornering is vital for success in gravity racing; it can be the difference between winning and losing.

Joel

Further Reading:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/r.g.bower/PoM/pom/node20.htm