I need advice...

[ifox]

I raced today. And I sucked :(

This was Watsonville, CA crit. Short course, about .75 mile, with several turns. There was one hard (for me) corner, where a rider had to turn about 120-130 degrees. In that corner I sucked. It started with loosing 4-5 places on the first lap with the problem getting bigger and bigger with every single lap. And this is not a specific problem of this course, this is the problem.

It's clear that I cannot corner efficiently. I'm braking before the corner, I'm braking in the corner and I'm not accelerating well out of the corner. I know braking inside the corner is bad, but I'm just scared of making fast turn and being slingshot out of the corner.

I need advice: how to overcome this fear? How to find this point when I can corner fast and don't crash?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[DanielS]

Find a GOOD wheel to follow around the corner(s). Pick out some experienced looking person in the bunch and get on their wheel (if you can). Follow their line and do just as they do. Pedal when they pedal. Match their speed. If they can make it around, you should be able to as well! Good luck.

[urbanknight]

Start with these. http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/?pg=fullstory&id=5614

And as mentioned above, pick a good wheel and follow it. Be smooth. Any time you are braking, you are wasting the energy you spent to get to that speed.

[Vanthel]

Start with these. http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/?pg=fullstory&id=5614

And as mentioned above, pick a good wheel and follow it. Be smooth. Any time you are braking, you are wasting the energy you spent to get to that speed.

nice article :)

[gsteinb]

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Mass-Delusion-Neurobiology11jan05.gif

[carpediemracing]

Cornering fear can be conquered by a combination of proper set up, practice, and exceeding perceived limits in a controlled fashion.

Acute turns are very interesting since in such turns there is a natural cornering limit that most racers attain within a lap or two, and they come close to the limit on every lap after that. Regular corners are not as hard so racers don't regularly hit their cornering limits. You can hide in a regular turn because you're almost always well within your comfort zone no matter how poorly you corner.

Because acute turns allow a racer to consistently corner at their limit, such turns will expose a racer's technical, cornering, handling, and tactical weaknesses.

Some additional tips on doing acute turns:

- Proper tire pressure helps. Too much and your tires skitter across the pavement. Too little and the tires just wash out. The range is quite wide but I find that below 105 psi and above 140 psi doesn't work for me (at 170-180 lbs). When I was lighter (135-145) I rarely went over 120 psi and my minimum was 95 psi.
- Proper tire width helps a lot too. A slightly wider tire will get you some better traction in a turn. I say this but I rarely go beyond a 21-22 mm (tubular) or 23 mm (clincher) tire. However, after learning the hard way, I'd avoid 17-19 mm tires (tubular or clincher), even though such light tires will accelerate quickly (which will seem important every time you have to accelerate out of an acute turn).
- Weight the front wheel a LOT. A rear slide can be saved easily. A front slide will almost always dump you. I emphasize front wheel weight so much that I've compromised my position for doing long switchback descents (since I rarely hit them).
- Along those lines, if you have different width tires, put the wider one in front.
- Experiment with different lines through the turn. If you're not having success on the inside (an instinctive line), try the outside. Try the middle too. Because everyone instinctively rides more inside, going outside might help. Also experiment with late apexes (if you're in the back) for early acceleration, late apexes (if you're in the front) to force an even more extreme accordion effect and to protect your position.

Remember - there is no such thing as a standard ideal line - "ideal lines" change with tactical and physical needs!!

- Use the pack to your advantage. You know that everyone has to slow and turn - if this is the case, and you're struggling to maintain position in the field, save some energy. Go to the back (drift back there, don't just brake and sit up). Before the 120 degree turn start coasting - like 100-150 meters away. Don't brake, just coast. Even if you're technically off the back you'll find yourself coasting into the back of the field. In a few laps you'll feel pretty fresh.
- Ease off the braking in the turn. You're compromising your bike's cornering ability since your tire can only do so much work (cornering and braking/accelerating combined). If you're not about to slam into someone go easy on the brakes.
- Use the drops. You have the most leverage from this position. You also have the best bike control, brake control, and it weights the front wheel the best. This should be your default bar position when dealing with acute turns.
- Use your shifters. Use a low enough gear that you're not struggling to turn it over when you accelerate out of the turn. Don't under gear - you don't want to come out of the turn spinning at 100 rpm either. Then, as you accelerate, shift when you start spinning uncomfortably fast. You should be able to shift under 100% acceleration comfortably and fluently, without disrupting your pedaling or your bike handling, and also without compromising your braking reactions. If you cannot you are lacking a crucial racing/riding skill (and/or your bike may be set up improperly).
- Accelerating to 30 mph out of a sharp 15-17 mph turn should take approximately 4-5 pedal strokes (good jump) to about 7-8 pedal strokes (poor jump).

When I first learned about left foot braking in front wheel drive cars (basically equivalent to pulling the e-brake as you enter a turn but without taking your hands off the wheel), I went to a local school parking lot after a huge snow storm and drove for a couple hours around a teardrop shaped loop. The sharp turn (top of tear drop) had about 200-300 feet of pavement beyond it so if I screwed up I wouldn't break anything. The first lap I totally screwed up and spun endlessly out of control. By the end of the couple hours I was comfortably diving into the turn sideways, second gear, opposite lock, and rarely strayed more than 20-25 feet from the curb on the inside.

For cycling you can do the same thing. Find a loop where you end up doing a u-turn. For example find a parking lot with a curb (I like having solid inside markers, not paint or cones). Go up one row, make the u-turn around to the next row over, but do it at a spot where there is a lot of run off if you have to bail (maybe at the end of the parking lot where there might be more pavement to the outside). If you want to be particular you should sweep the corner with a broom or leaf blower first.

Do this solo first, to get an idea of what you feel comfortable doing, and then find friends, teammates, racers, etc to do some group cornering.

hope this helps,
cdr

[pjcampbell]

I suck at cornering also. I am afraid of going down :cry: It's interesting you say to weigh the front, I would have thought the rear.

What does it take to lose it on a 90 degree turn. Should I just try start going into them harder and faster. I also find if I start pedaling too quickly out of a turn my rear end hops. When do you know to start pedaling again... and shift before the turn?

[carpediemracing]

I suck at cornering also. I am afraid of going down :cry: It's interesting you say to weigh the front, I would have thought the rear.

What does it take to lose it on a 90 degree turn. Should I just try start going into them harder and faster. I also find if I start pedaling too quickly out of a turn my rear end hops. When do you know to start pedaling again... and shift before the turn?

I learned the hard way:
http://sprinterdellacasa.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-to-learning-to-corner-when-youre.html
I wouldn't recommend this for anyone, but I try and share what I learned so others don't have to repeat my less-than-ideal procedure.

Rear end hopping when starting to pedal could be a couple things:
1. If you're digging your pedal, that's obvious.
2. If you're pedaling too fast you may be bouncing your body. Smooth out your pedal stroke and use a higher gear. The higher gear will work immediately, the smooth pedal stroke will take more time.
3. If you don't have an unusually narrow or low/high pressure rear tire and 1 & 2 don't apply to you then you're at about the limit.

Paulo Salvodelli, a known descender, apparently skips out his rear wheel on purpose to tighten up his cornering line. I have a hard time believing it but GP motorcycle racers regularly slide their rear tire out at top speeds, so it might be true. I don't know though.

In ideal conditions (dry clean pavement) it's very difficult to exceed limits in a 90 degree turn. It depends on how things are set up but you can probably go into a standard 2 lane wide road turn at 35-40 mph with very little problem, i.e. you might be able to pedal even. For me 45+ mph it gets a bit sketchy, but that's probably due as much to deep profile rims (they require steering, not just leaning) as it does to pure speed. I go into turns this fast on downhills, I haven't been that fast on a flat road in forever.

In the wet I'm a total wimp now. I don't want to fall over and in the rain I'm not willing to push limits anymore.

Another way to learn cornering is to ride mountain bikes fast. It's amazing how fast you can go on loose surfaces without putting a foot down (or even unclipping a foot). I didn't discover mountain biking until 88 or 89 though so it was past my "learning how to corner" thing.

cdr

[ifox]

CDR,

Thank you! This is very helpful.
One more question about front wheel: are you saying that by adding weight to front wheel you are "substituting" effect that happens when we applying brakes to front wheel (effectively loading front wheel at this time)?

[MONGO!]

In case you don't know already, keep your inside pedal up and your weight on the outside pedal.

[BigSean]

I raced today. And I sucked :(

This was Watsonville, CA crit. Short course, about .75 mile, with several turns. There was one hard (for me) corner, where a rider had to turn about 120-130 degrees. In that corner I sucked. It started with loosing 4-5 places on the first lap with the problem getting bigger and bigger with every single lap. And this is not a specific problem of this course, this is the problem.

It's clear that I cannot corner efficiently. I'm braking before the corner, I'm braking in the corner and I'm not accelerating well out of the corner. I know braking inside the corner is bad, but I'm just scared of making fast turn and being slingshot out of the corner.

I need advice: how to overcome this fear? How to find this point when I can corner fast and don't crash?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

I did this race too. Cat 5. Toughest race I have done. First of all the leading groups were sandbaggers. Second I was pumping out huge wattage trying to hang on. The 170deg left gave me fits all day. With all the corners it was a brake hard accelerate hard and destroy yourself. If you were not up front it was gonna be a long day. I got 7th at Coyote and had no problem hangin in at all, this course was very tough. I ended off the back with aboout 2 to go. I also did the 35+ open. I didnt stay in long, 4 laps. But I learned the lines to take, and was much easier(the surges were less) although it was much faster.

For a .7 mile course and having 8 turns and a hill, this was a tough coourse. I actually found the hill to be the easier part of the course. Wish it was a longer climb.

[BigSean]

By the way, I learned more in the 4 laps in the 35+ open then I have all year racing cat 5. I was fast, I suffered, and got dropped. But those 4 laps following the cat 1's and 2's was very helpful. Plus its good training chasing those guys around.:thumb:

[DrWJODonnell]

CD covered it quite well. The only thing I may add is lean the body, not the bike. Lends itself to much better traction. If you get good at it, you never have to stop pedaling and you can make people behind you miserable.

Not that I know anything about that.

[BananaTugger]

In case you don't know already, keep your inside pedal up and your weight on the outside pedal.

Inside pedal? Not up, but back.

In order to handle a tight course efficiently, you'll want to be in a position to get the power down as soon as possible.

Having the inside pedal up won't allow you to get as much power down as having it back, and the outside pedal forward.

This gives you a half a pedal stoke to get things moving again, and you can get a lot more juice out of your relatively unstressed outside leg than the inside leg, which you will surely be tentative with when bringing it down while you are still leaning the bike.

[OCshark]

I found this to be a good article on cornering (it's a little technical, but give it a read):

http://coachcarl.com/training_articles/cornering.htm

[DannoXYZ]

There's two aspects to getting better at riding in a pack race.

The first is pure physics and technique. Learn to corner at the limits yourself first. Do it in parking lots. Put on some elbow padding and studded motorcycle gloves. Learn to take sharp inside lines, learn to take wide outside lines. Learn to adjust lines mid-corner. Learn where the ABSOLUTE lean-angles are that you can corner at.

This is where the crit-racer's lean-the-body/keep-the-bike-upright technique comes in handy. You can go around a corner damn fast when you keep the bike as vertical as possible to keep the contact patch flat on the ground. It also lets you pedal deeper into the corner and start pedaling as early as possible to maintain as much speed as possible through the corners. You can actually tighten up your line on the inside and start pedaling and passing 2-3 guys up on the inside who are coasting and drifting to the outside. Easy way to pick up position without too much work.

Then learn the 2nd aspect of the mental tactics of following a wheel. This requires paying attention to the rider in front and having fast reflexes. If they can go around X-corner at Y-speed on Z-line, so can you! If you entre the turn 2-feet behind them, stay 2-feet behind them no matter what! If they brake, you brake. If they zig left, you zig left. If they zag right, you go right. If they accelerate, you accelerate within a single pedal-stroke; do not wait! You are their shadow, you're the sweat on their back! Stay on target!


BTW, the above is the most critical factor in my results. I finished mid/rear-pack in my 1st cat-4 race and won my last 3 races with the exact same fitness (my TT times were about the same). The only difference was I learned how to maneuver in a pack and how to follow the wheels of the guys who would finish in the top-5.

[urbanknight]

I suck at cornering also. I am afraid of going down :cry: It's interesting you say to weigh the front, I would have thought the rear.

What does it take to lose it on a 90 degree turn. Should I just try start going into them harder and faster. I also find if I start pedaling too quickly out of a turn my rear end hops. When do you know to start pedaling again... and shift before the turn?
If you're afraid of going down, that's going to make you stiffen up and lose it more easily.

I have never gone down in a 90 degree turn, and I have seen people hit dips in the road causing a slight skid that they recovered, so it takes quite a bit to dump in a 90 degree turn. I can pedal all the way around most corners in a crit with proper technique (Cat 4 speeds) but you have to be smooth and you have to know how to keep your bike from leaning too far over without losing traction.

[carpediemracing]

CDR,
Thank you! This is very helpful.
One more question about front wheel: are you saying that by adding weight to front wheel you are "substituting" effect that happens when we applying brakes to front wheel (effectively loading front wheel at this time)?

No problem, and I hope that your next race there is more successful.

As far as weighting the front wheel I actually slide forward on the saddle and sort of "choke" (like baseball bats) the drops to get me further forward. I love the solid feeling of having the front tire digging tenaciously into the pavement. I give very little thought to the rear wheel and don't mind it skipping a bit. As long as the front wheel is in total control it's hard to lose it due to a rear wheel slide/skid/hop.

Choking the bars also gives me very good reach to both upshift and downshift (I use Campy Ergo levers) as well as brakes, slightly better than my normal drop position. It also gives me excellent control if something unexpected happens - body slam, shoulder shove, grass surfing, drainage ditch slam, curb hop, snow fence sliding.

I've experimented a lot with body vs bike leaning. I don't think there is any one ideal way to turn, just like there are no ideal cornering lines. "Ideal" depends on situation, and different situations demand different "ideal" responses.

Body > Bike
I lean my body more than my bike in sketchy situations, wet or sandy turns. I have a delusion that a vertical tire will have more traction than a tire that is way over on its side.
Advantage: feels safer (no proof it is), better pedal clearance (but I rarely pedal in this situation because pedaling will upset equilibrium), able to pull bike in quickly if in high traction situation (i.e. suddenly you notice a fallen rider to the outside, it's easy to lean the bike hard and move it inwards a touch).
Disadvantage: Limits top speed of corner (no proof of this but personally I can't go as fast), cannot move outside quickly (i.e. you can't shift your weight over the bike to clear something to the inside like a big stack up).

Bike > Body
I do this if I need to initiate a turn extremely quickly, like if I sprinted into a 170 degree turn at the front. I experimented with this after watching Davis Phinney do this in crits.
Advantage: in dry weather traction usually not an issue, easy to initiate a radical turn, easy to let bars come up to widen turn (to avoid something to the inside).
Disadvantage: tire is at high lean angle and traction is limited if in iffy conditions (no proof of this), hard to tighten turn if you've already leaned the bike all the way over, can't pedal in turn.

Bike = Body
This is how I corner by default. Easy to get into a nice "rail", able to sit up front, very flexible position.
Advantage: easily tighten turn (drop bars down), easily widen turn (pull bars up), fastest high speed turns (for example 50-60 mph sweepers, but those I'd be in a tuck, not holding the drops), smoothest as far as stability and equilibrium, easy to pedal.
Disadvantage: don't feel as good in iffy conditions, can't initiate turn quite as quickly as a Bike>Body lean.

cdr

[San Rensho]

Inside pedal? Not up, but back.

In order to handle a tight course efficiently, you'll want to be in a position to get the power down as soon as possible.

Having the inside pedal up won't allow you to get as much power down as having it back, and the outside pedal forward.

This gives you a half a pedal stoke to get things moving again, and you can get a lot more juice out of your relatively unstressed outside leg than the inside leg, which you will surely be tentative with when bringing it down while you are still leaning the bike.

NO, NO,NO NO NO!

All your weight goes on the outside pedal. This makes all your weight bear at a point that is a couple of inches above the ground, which is very stable. You can go over almost anything this way and the bike will squirm, but you will stay up.

Right before you tip into the corner, consciously push down with your outside foot so that your butt starts to come off the seat.

[San Rensho]

The other skill to master is countersteeering, the only way to quickly and cleanly turn is to countersteer. We all do it unconsciously (otherwise we couldn't turn), but doing it consciously, along with completely weighting your outside foot gives you lightning fast "power steering."

[MDcatV]

there's alot of good info in here, but you need to start off simple and build up to most of these tips or you're going to be an absolute mess.

first principles to remember and practice:

1 - weight (all of it) on your outside pedal - you should be "floating" just above your saddle
2 - light grip on the bars, hands in the drops (always in the drops)
3 - slight weight on your inside hand, I like to "straighten" my inside arm a bit

start with these, then work up as you become more comfortable.

on youtube there is a video of slipstream guys practicing cornering, I dont have the link but it's good to watch. find a corner in a neighborhood or industrial park where there's little to no traffic and you can see in all directions and practice going faster and faster each time.

also - bananna tugger, I've never heard anyone at any level, or observed anyone at any level cornering that way. might be good for turns you can pedal through, but in a real technical corner, I just dont see how that advice can possible result in anything but a very sketchy arc.

[BananaTugger]

there's alot of good info in here, but you need to start off simple and build up to most of these tips or you're going to be an absolute mess.

first principles to remember and practice:

1 - weight (all of it) on your outside pedal - you should be "floating" just above your saddle
2 - light grip on the bars, hands in the drops (always in the drops)
3 - slight weight on your inside hand, I like to "straighten" my inside arm a bit

start with these, then work up as you become more comfortable.

on youtube there is a video of slipstream guys practicing cornering, I dont have the link but it's good to watch. find a corner in a neighborhood or industrial park where there's little to no traffic and you can see in all directions and practice going faster and faster each time.

also - bananna tugger, I've never heard anyone at any level, or observed anyone at any level cornering that way. might be good for turns you can pedal through, but in a real technical corner, I just dont see how that advice can possible result in anything but a very sketchy arc.

Works for me.

[mkadam68]

This is where the crit-racer's lean-the-body/keep-the-bike-upright technique comes in handy. You can go around a corner damn fast when you keep the bike as vertical as possible to keep the contact patch flat on the ground. It also lets you pedal deeper into the corner and start pedaling as early as possible to maintain as much speed as possible through the corners. You can actually tighten up your line on the inside and start pedaling and passing 2-3 guys up on the inside who are coasting and drifting to the outside. Easy way to pick up position without too much work.

Shhh...this is my secret :D Actually, I routinely do this. It's gotten to the point where, in longer courses, I can go from 20-spots back to 5 back through just 3 corners. It's nice.

As for the OP...keep at it. My first crit, I sucked in corners too and was soon at the back of the field. So I learned quickly. An now, 1-year later, I do farely well in the corners. Now the sprint for the line...I'm working on that :D

[UmneyDurak]

Weighting vs un-weighting the front wheel, what is the opinion? I heard it's best to slide back a bit on a saddle and un-weight the front wheel for better traction.

Thanks.
UD

[San Rensho]

Weighting vs un-weighting the front wheel, what is the opinion? I heard it's best to slide back a bit on a saddle and un-weight the front wheel for better traction.

Thanks.
UD

I don't concsiously weight the front. What I strive for in a corner is putting my entire weight on my outside foot, so that my body is balanced so there is essentially no weight at all on my arms. I know there is no weight on my arms when my arms a slightly bent and my hands are almost floating on the bars.

In this position, if I hit something, my arms are loose and I just let the front end do what it wants to. A two wheeled vehicle is instantenously self correcting in a slide as long as YOU DON"T PUT ANY INPUT INTO THE BARS. If you are weighting the front, you will be putting an input into the bars and be more likely to crash.

Also, with loose arms going into a corner, someone can hit your arms and it won't upset your line.

Weighting the front in a turn is essential in motorcycle racing, but since there is essentially no braking before or in turns in bicycle racing, it has no real use.

[Brian Ratliff]

Also, eyes up and look around the corner. Follow the wheel ahead of you, but don't stare at it.

[carpediemracing]

I'd have to respectfully disagree with the "no weight on bars" thing.

I always thought I had very little or no weight on my bars (I even told people this) but I found that to be distinctly untrue. The test is to remove your hands while in the dropped position and put them anywhere but near the bar. Due to some physiological "rules" you can't help but pedal pretty hard to maintain the low torso position when riding no handed. The "attack" by Gilbert Duclos Lasalle in the Tour du Pont with his hands behind his back comes to mind (although I wouldn't put my hands all the way back there). Basically everyone was goofing around and Duclos Lasalle put his hands behind his back, crossed, sort of like if he were posing for a team picture. But he was leaned over and actually rode off the front of the field, sort of.

The reason Duclos-Lasalle Sr "attacked" is that if you unweight your hands while bent over a bit, the effort required to keep your torso from flopping onto your stem will automatically increase your pedaling pressure. There is no other way to keep your torso up because your hips have no traction to keep from tilting forward (unless you have extremely tight shorts and velcro on your saddle, or something like that).

So, although my arms are loose and able to take significant impact (and they have), I'm almost always weighting my arms/bars. That doesn't mean I'll be putting input into them, especially in a turn. I guess I knew instinctively that bikes will want to go straight given their freedom - the clips of post-crash rider-less motorcycles 'driving themselves into the pits' come to mind. But that will happen if you don't consciously try to move the bars also. I've often skittered the rear wheel out in a hard turn, never even stopped pedaling (for example with 300 meters to go in a race), and the bike comes back every time.

The feeling I get when I weight the front end is that of sliding forward on the seat, weight sort of centered just behind the headtube. It's probably centered much further back in reality but that's the feeling I get when I feel very secure in my cornering.

I definitely weight the front consciously. My experiments with weighting the rear have been less successful. I try to try everything I can think of, and for about 10 years of racing I didn't mind wiping out on pavement or dirt to complete an experiment. To be honest though most of the time I weighted the rear is when I'm scared of a turn and I'm trying to push back on the bike a bit. I've definitely lost it by weighting the rear too much (i.e. not centered). I've slid back on the seat for comfort or to brake hard (and then just cornered without sliding forward again) and then had the front wheel come out from under me.

I've also watched a lot of people crash from front wheels sliding out. Rear slides don't crash as easily, if ever, so based on my observations I've decided that sliding the rear is much better than sliding the front.

Finally, going very hot into a sketchy turn (think last turn in a crit, 5 wide in a 3 wide turn) will sometimes result in the need to either substantially brake and/or correct your line, if for example someone wipes out in front of you. Having your weight forward will help you make these corrections.

The exception to this (and I think I pointed this out earlier) is on steep downhill turns like switchbacks. My bike, set up to weight the front pretty heavily, is not ideal for downhills. I'd slide my seat back and down a bit (it's maxed forward on the rails and it's an Arione on a no setback post) and do an low 80 degree stem (not a flat 73 degree one). I found that descending for long periods of time, 30+ minutes off of Palomar, was extremely hard on my body. For regular descents my bike set up is fine, and for normal corners I consider it ideal.

If anyone has any experience to the contrary I'd welcome some sharing. I've been cornering like this for about 15-20 years and if I missed something in my experiments, reading about cornering (bikes and motorcycles), and the school of hard knocks, I want to know.

cdr

[kudude]

I've wanted to post this pic for awhile, and never had any reason to. This is from the 5s field of a crit course I raced 4s in. This kid is CRAZY. a young cdr?

http://i153.photobucket.com/albums/s240/jnoffsinger/b.jpg

[Brian Ratliff]

I've wanted to post this pic for awhile, and never had any reason to. This is from the 5s field of a crit course I raced 4s in. This kid is CRAZY. a young cdr?

http://i153.photobucket.com/albums/s240/jnoffsinger/b.jpg

That kid looks like he carried some speed into the corner and passed the blue shirt and A&B riders for free and is about ready to latch onto crew socks' wheel.

[grolby]

Inside pedal? Not up, but back.

In order to handle a tight course efficiently, you'll want to be in a position to get the power down as soon as possible.

Having the inside pedal up won't allow you to get as much power down as having it back, and the outside pedal forward.

This gives you a half a pedal stoke to get things moving again, and you can get a lot more juice out of your relatively unstressed outside leg than the inside leg, which you will surely be tentative with when bringing it down while you are still leaning the bike.

If you need to rely that much on getting the power down right away out of the turn, something else is very wrong with your cornering technique. I've said this before: good cornering, in spite of pronouncements to the contrary by riders from amateur to professional, has nothing to do with pedaling out of the turns and everything to do with what you do immediately before and into the apex of the turn.

My favorite YouTube video demonstrating my point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KELC9VZxEw

Watch Vino and Botero take that turn at about 0:22. Vino absolutely hammers as he comes out of the turn, but he's doing it because he lost ground due to much better cornering by Botero (who had made up a 45 second deficit on the descent of the Galibier). Botero, by contrast, comes out of the saddle for a couple of pedal strokes, then settles smoothly back in.

This is just one corner, not course with several corners, but the point is that good cornering is about proper positioning for the geometry of the turn. Relying on acceleration out of corners is not efficient, it is the opposite of efficient. It wastes energy that would be better used at a critical moment of the race, like an attack, bridge or final sprint.

If keeping your pedals horizontal doesn't compromise your stability in a corner, go for it, but choosing the best line possible under the circumstances is the most efficient way to handle corners on a race course, not hammering out of every turn. I happen to corner better with the outside pedal down, at least in sharp turns on my road bike, but I don't suppose you're doing any harm if this isn't the case for you. Otherwise, I would recommend sacrificing speed (honestly, I don't think your pedal position matters when it comes accelerating as soon as possible anyway, but whatever) for stability and faster cornering.