This page is deliberately short. We ride the track a lot and we keep coming across people not following these essential rules, resulting is quite a number of close calls. Crashes in recreational track cycling are rare, and we want to keep them that way!

Three questions frequently crop up around the physics of riding around track bankings:

1. What kind of G-forces do riders experience when riding though bankings at speed?
2. A low speeds a rider “leans out” in the banking as gravity pushes them down the track. A high speeds a rider leans in as the centrifugal force tends to push them up the track. There is a speed when a rider transitions between these two states, a speed when the bike is exactly orthogonal to (i.e. perpendicular to, or at 90 degrees to) the surface of the track. What is this speed?
3. What is the minimum speed you need to ride to avoid “falling off” in a banking?

The material that follows is based on two excellent posts on the subject: