Total Control: High Performance Street Riding Techniques
by Lee Parks
The cornering bible — decomposes riding into drills, but it's writing for the canyon, not the commute.
- Status
- Read · October 2022
- Bought
- October 19, 2022
- For
- Riders past the beginner stage who want to corner with intent · Track-day curious street riders · Anyone who likes turning a skill into named, drillable sub-skills
The one-paragraph verdict
Parks does the thing most riding advice refuses to do: he breaks cornering into ten discrete, named, practiceable inputs — vision, body position, throttle control, line — instead of hand-waving about “feel.” The track pedigree shows, and it’s the strength here; the chapters on body positioning and trail braking changed how I ride more than any amount of seat time did. The flip side is that it leans hard toward lean angle and canyon pace, and the recurring nudge toward his own Total Control clinics gets noticeable. It is also unapologetically not a beginner’s book — it assumes you can already operate the machine.
Who should read it
If you’ve got a season or two under you and you’ve plateaued, this is the book that pushes you off the plateau. Riders chasing smoother, faster, more deliberate corners will get the most out of it. Brand-new riders should not start here — you’ll drown — and pure commuters who never see a twisty road won’t get their money’s worth.
Where it earned its place
It gave me a mental model: stop treating riding as one undifferentiated skill and start debugging it as a set of inputs I can isolate and fix one at a time. That decompose-then-drill habit is just good practice, and it’s quietly the most transferable thing in the book. Mostly, though, it’s here because cornering well is one of the few things I do purely for the joy of it.
Skip it if…
You ride to get to work and back and have zero interest in lean angle, or you’re still figuring out the clutch. This book starts where that rider’s needs end.
[Total Control on Goodreads]