The grip circle turns a whole session of cornering into a single picture of how you use grip. It is the same view professional data tools put at the centre of their analysis, framed so it tells you something you can act on rather than just a wall of numbers.
How to read it
Every dot is one moment from a corner, gathered across the laps you have selected.
- Left to right is cornering load — how hard you were turning at that instant. Left and right corners are overlaid, because it is the shape of how you use grip that matters, not which way you were turning.
- Up is braking load and down is drive (throttle) load. A tyre can only do so much at once, so braking and cornering — or drive and cornering — trade against each other. The cloud of dots traces that trade-off for you specifically.
The boundary is yours, not the tyre's
The dashed arc around the outside is not a theoretical tyre limit or a manufacturer number. It is the largest combined load you have actually reached in these laps — your own demonstrated envelope.
- Dots sitting out near the arc are moments where you used most of the grip you have shown you can use.
- Dots well inside it are moments with more in hand.
Real motorcycle grip circles are lopsided — often described as a "fox's face" rather than a perfect circle. That shape is normal. It reflects that bikes brake, corner, and drive with different amounts of grip, and that riders reach the braking and cornering corners of the envelope at different points in a lap.
Colours are corner phases
Each dot is coloured by the phase of the corner it came from — entry, trail-braking, apex, and drive. Reading the colours tells you where in a corner you use grip: a healthy trail-braking rider, for example, shows a smooth arc of dots sweeping from the braking corner of the plot round toward the cornering corner as they release the brakes and add lean. Gaps or hard edges in that arc are often where technique can smooth out.
The reserve ring
Some views shade a faint ring just inside the dashed arc. That ring is grip you have shown at your best but do not lean on every lap.
It is there as evidence of the control you already have — not an instruction to ride closer to the edge. Consistency within your grip is the goal; the ring simply shows that your best moments and your typical moments are not the same, which is normal and useful to see. LapBrain will never tell you to "use up" that reserve.
When you see it
The full grip circle is a detailed, information-dense view, so it appears once your riding is consistent enough for it to be useful. Before then you will see a simpler apex-grip summary, or the plot is held back entirely, so the picture never gets ahead of what the data can honestly support. This follows the same skill-band approach as the rest of your analysis — see Skill bands.