A very nice (first person) guide to how to wheelie a supermoto, performed on DRZ400 by ktmforum, on a ‘closed course’. Stresses using only one finger on the clutch and brake. However, he doesnt use the clutch while shifting gears while the bike is up. He shows both popping the clutch and powering the bike up… through traffic.

“This is going to be my pathetic attempt at a little documentary.  I’d like to call it a tutorial but I’m not really teaching anybody.  I don’t claim to be the best that’s for sure, but I do alright sometimes.

So I’m just going to show everybody what I do.  This is the bike, it’s a ’05 Suzuki DRZ 400 SM.  It’s in great shape, hardly ever ride it actually.  Hopefully by the time this thing is done it would still be in great shape.  Let’s see if I can explain a little bit about the technique I use before we actually get moving here.

One finger, the one finger on the clutch, one finger on the break, it’s just how I ride all the time.  I’ve changed the clutch lever, you can see it’s an ASV clutch lever.  The reason I like this lever, for one it folds away.  For two, it’s adjustable.  The stock lever, you can see my gloves, I had to cut down the plastic.  I usually use the finger, pull the clutch, release the clutch.  When the plastic was on there, and the stock lever it used to hit on that and I never got enough release.  Now I get enough, and you may have the same problem.

Anyway, always remember, cover the rear break.  Give this a couple of shots, do what I do.

(Demonstration)

Like I say, with one finger, cover the rear break.  That’s a [inaudible 00:02:43], so I’ll take it easy for a little bit there.  Like I said, that was sucked into fourth gear, I clutched it to second, shift through third, shift through fourth.  Don’t use any clutch on shifts while the wheel is up.  There’s a little bit too much traffic in here, I don’t know what I’m going to do about this.  Let’s see what happens when I get down to the [inaudible 00:03:15].

Now as I said earlier I don’t really ride this bike that much.  It actually has 1,860 miles on it.  [inaudible 00:03:28].  This seems to be the one that everybody has the most questions with about on how to wheelie so that’s why I’m using this one.

(Demonstration)

I’m going on the third gear here.  Obviously you can just hammer it while I’m taking a stand up.

(Demonstration)

That was first to fifth gear.  This is the throttle, bring on to fourth, down to third.  I was pulling it up to third going to fifth.  I actually have to break there for a second.  I’m down to second just so you could see how my fingers work there.  You could see how I shift fifth and fourth and release, it’s all timing.  [inaudible 00:05:42] is they don’t understand that all you’re doing is releasing the clutch – or maybe I should say pulling the clutch in or whatever.  Let’s the RPMs go so the motor gets into its power range and pump the clutch.  What you’re not doing is pulling the clutch and then releasing.

Alright, we’re coming up to a nice section of road here, it’s up road, it’s pretty sweet, up roads are easy.

(Demonstration)

As I was saying, I’m pulling the clutch, throttle, let the clutch out, it’s all in one motion – if you understanding what I’m saying.  This is my favorite section of the road.  I’m giving traffic a little time to clear out here.  It’s nice and straight with really nothing on the sides of it.  I’ve always said cover your rear break.  Once you bring down the clutch, first gear, second gear, kind of like [inaudible 00:07:46].

(Demonstration)

Third gear, and fourth gear, fifth gear.  Just by listening to how the motion is, how the engine sounds, you’ll be able to realize how the timing goes.

(Demonstration)

What you’ll notice once you become more comfortable around the bike.  A lot of times when I’m doing this and I’m on my street bikes, I notice what the odometer says, sometimes I’ll see the speedometer.  It’s easy to look at it on the video, but when you’re doing it on real time it’s really different.

The truth is there’s a hundred things I’ve missed.  But if you pay attention to the sounds, the speed, of the gears as I was trying to pull them out, just being observant you’ll get some ideas.  It’s always easier to pull out when you’re standing too.  I don’t really like to stand because I change shifts when I’m standing, a lot of times I always carry the gear out.”

- END -

A fairly comprehensive series of video tutorials on how to ride wheelies, by professional stunter, Jared Cummings.

Clutching up wheelies

“Hi, my name is Jared Cummings.  I’m here with Expert Village.  We’re talking about how we wheelie.

All right, now we’re going to be talking about clutching it up, or the clutch wheelie.  It’s the basic principle of the power wheelie, except we’re going to be using our clutch at the same time.  So, instead of riding up, easing off, leaning forward, and cracking it back open, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have our one finger covering the clutch and what you’re going to do is you’re going to bring it up to about seven RPMs, you’re going to just slip the clutch, and that’s basically pulling it in just enough to release the clutch.  Give it gas up to about eleven, twelve RPMs, and drop the clutch.  You’re going to let it drop back out.

So, one more time, we’re going to go through it.  You’re going to bring it up to about seven RPMs, you’re going to slip the clutch, give it gas, drop your arms, and snap back.  Now, it’s all going to be in one motion.  So it’s going to be a little bit quicker.  So you’re going to go up, slip, drop, and pull back.

One thing you want to think about – when you’re pulling it back, it’s much like a bicycle.  When you’re doing a wheelie and you’re pedalling, you’re going to pedal it real hard, give it that extra oomph, and you’re going to snap back on your handlebars and that’s what’s going to bring it up.

It’s not all just the power, because you’re relying on just the power, you’re going to run out of your RPMs before you get to your balance point.  So you’ve really got to make sure that you’re always going to snap it up, and that it makes it a little bit more consistent, too, every single time.”

Starting Out by Doing Small Wheelies

“All right, whenever we practice wheelies, we’re never just going, jumping on the bike and cracking it up and bringing it up to 12 o’clock every single time.  If we’re learning a new wheelie, we always start small.  You always work your way up.  So you’re going to start with bringing it up about two inches, three inches, four inches, and just be comfortable with it.  So, when we’re going out there to practice, we’re just going to practice nice and small, bringing it up, and bringing it back down.  Bring it up a little bit higher and bring it back down until we’re comfortable with that same motion every single time bringing it back up and back down, and then we can start bringing it up a little bit higher to where we’re more comfortable holding it up.

So we don’t want to just overpower ourselves because that could cause us to crash.  So we just want to work within our abilities, work within our comfort zone, and we’ll work from there.”

Standup Wheelies Tips

“The stand-up wheelie has a bunch of different variations.  You can go ahead and stand up on either your front two pegs, like this.  You can do one in the front and one in the back – it’s moving your left foot to the back peg here, but leaving your right foot covering the brake on this side.  So you’re going to be holding this position.

You can also do where you have both feet on the back pegs.  This one is not as safe because you’re really not covering your back brake at this point, unless you have a rear handbrake on your actual hand right here – on your left hand side.  You can mount those up there.  But we don’t have one on bike.  So, we’re going ahead and just stick with a couple of different variations where we have our back foot covered with that brake.

The other variation is where you have your one foot planted on the back of your seat, like this, and the other foot covering our rear brake like that.  There’s one more where you go ahead and put your foot in the 12-bar here, right on that 12-bar.  Then you bring it up.  Again, your foot is covering your back brake right here.”

Twelve O’clock Bar Motorcycle Wheelies

“All right, now we’re going to be talking about the twelve o’clock wheelie.  Over here, we have my bike sit up on the back end on the 12-bar.  As you can see, it’s pretty stable up here right now.  This is what it’s going to be doing when we hit the tail while we’re actually doing the wheelie.

Now, there are a couple of different variations in doing this wheelie, too.  What you can do is you can always, again, put your foot in the 12-br here, and you can have your foot covering the brake because once you’re at this point, we’re going to need to be able to hit our rear brake, because that’s the only this that’s going to bring us back down again.

Letting off our gas and engine braking is not really going to work enough to bring it back down to where we need to be.  So we’ve always got to have that foot now covering that back brake, unless, like I said before, we have that rear hand brake on our finger over here, on our left hand.

The other variation is foot in your back seat, other foot right here covering that back brake.  You can be standing up here.  You can be standing down below.  Just, however you’re comfortable doing your wheelie right there.

The other one, which we are going to see later on today, is we’re going to have our foot on our back peg over here, and we’re going to have our foot up here like this.  This allows us to keep our legs locked out and our arms locked out if we want to be back here or pull it in a little bit closer to the bike, we’ll be able to hit that back brake pretty easy.”

Proper Motorcycle’s Sprocket and Chain Set Up to pop a wheelie.

“All right, now we’re going to talk about the sprockets we’re using.  My sprocket right here is a Vortex 56527 sprocket.  The sprockets you can use vary from when you’re just riding normal to when you’re stunting or racing or zero to 60.  We have a big sprocket on here for the stunting.  It gives us the ability to go a lot slower in our wheelies with a lot more control.  This particular sprocket will take about 35 to 40 miles off the top end of my bike right here.  But I’m going to use it for racing so I’m not too worried about that.

If you want to keep a street bike and a stunt bike at the same time, and still want power, you can do the 520 conversion.  You can drop one down in the front and two up in the back, and that’ll give you a pretty good amount of power there.  But I went eleven up in the back for my stock to give me a lot more power in my lower gears there.  I’m using a 530 chain over here because my sprocket is a 527.  The stock sprocket for this bike is a 525.

The difference here is actually just the width of the sprocket itself.  So, a 525 is going to be a little bit smaller than a 527 because we have a 527 chain.  The 525 chain will work on it.  So we need to get a 530 chain, link it through here, for our new sprocket.”

Proper Motorcycle Tire Pressure for Doing Wheelies

“All right, now we’re going to go ahead and talk about air pressure in our bike.  The tire pressure that we’re going to run on our back tire is going to be a lot lower than our stock or racing pressure.  If we’re running 32 PSI on our bike, what’s going to happen is we’re going to have a very, very narrow area for us to balance on our bike.

So, when we lower our bike to about 28 it will give us a little bit more space on our actual balance point on the tire.  When we go down to about 15, it will give us that much width on our bike tire to be balancing on and that’s going to be a lot more stable when we’re going here, and it’s not going to wobble as much so we don’t have to control it.  It’ll just balance right there all the time.

The front tire we’re going to keep at about 30 PSI because we’re going to be doing some stoppies here.  Should we ever do some stoppies or anything like that, we don’t want our tire flat.  We want to keep a little bit more pressure on that front tire.  So we’re not going to lower that one down.  We’re going to keep that one about 30-32 PSI.

Right now, we’re at 31 so I’m going to lower it down to about 15 here.  That should be about perfect.  Good.  I like to keep it closer as I always ride so it’s consistent every single time. Even if it’s a couple pounds of pressure off, it can really make a difference in your riding.  So if you’re going to be riding fast or such, you’re going to want more PSI.  If you’re going to be doing second gear wheelies, third gear wheelies, high chairs or something like that, you’re going to want a little bit more pressure in that back tire.

But we’re going to be doing some slow stuff today, so we’re going to lower it to about 15.”