I'm finding it difficult in left-right switches, it feels pretty slow going from full lean one side to the other. I think I'm gradually adjusting the more I have to do it, but is there a specific knack to it?
I know I'm getting faster, plenty of new tracks to learn and I've settled on a buttong mapping now. Right stick for throttle/front brake. R2 for rear brake, R1 for shift up and L1 for shift down.
The steering is odd. Remember that you are not providing raw steering input to the game - that would confuse most players, including those who understand the physics inside-out. After all, you don't really learn to ride a bike by description and instruction, rather by a purely intuitive / trial and error process involving being able to feel what the bike is doing.
Anyway, it comes down to the way the game interprets the control inputs and feeds the physics engine via a kind-of AI.
The handlebar angle inputs that result from the player's inputs are therefore heavily filtered, and require a lot of forward planning and internal (mental) modeling of both the physical situation in the game, and of how the controls work in order to thread the needle through the apex from way back before the braking point - a.k.a. practice.
Notice when just rolling along how turning right on the stick makes the rider quickly turn left first, then right - when you let go, the rider turns more to the right, then centers the bars. This is good old "counter-steering" in action, first to make the bike fall into the turn, then to balance it round and finally to pick it up again. This is the fundamental limitation of steering / turning on a bike, it will simply fall over if it is not at the right angle (bank / lean) for the corner radius and speed (steering angle) desired, assuming you actually have the grip to pull it off!
By controlling the steering input, the game will generally not allow the bike to over or under lean for a corner (because you'd be falling over all the time), except in order to reach more or less lean angle, according to your inputs - it otherwise tries to keep the bike stable most of the time.
The key, as in real life, is to learn to control your lean angle with the steering inputs. The faster you go, the quicker the bike can bank over with steering alone, which implies good trail braking skills with the bike leaned over. That is, bang it over at speed, then brake and add fine control to the apex ("threading the needle"). Specifically for chicanes, there are a number of ways to take them, but the two extremes for a two-apex left-right or right-left are "fast then slow" or "slow then fast" - to me, the issue with rate of lean being speed dependent (given the filtered controls) implies that "fast then slow" is preferable more of the time. And it does feel that way. It's a bit unrealistically banzai, but it is fun.
By contrast, patience is also important - sometimes you just have to wait for the bike to turn, almost insane lengths of time if you are used to cars, but this is how it is with bikes (due to maximum lean angle limitation, and the balance vs. speed / corner radius). For the heavier, more powerful bikes, you quickly learn to avoid this situation by adopting a point-and-squirt approach: get it stopped and turned, then gas it.
Aside from that, you can improve the steering response by improving the bike's response itself - making this something of a settings issue as well.
A quick and dirty hack is to add a couple of clicks of stiffness to the rear and back off a couple on the front. You can only go so far with this, but it helps transitions, possibly at the expense of total grip and so mid-corner speed.
What it is effectively doing is raising the rear end and steepening the steering geometry for "quicker steering". You're also, via the static weight distribution, increasing the load on the front wheel and therefore biasing the grip situation towards oversteer, which also helps at high speed (the AI keeps things from getting too hairy). There is usually a wheelbase difference involved as well, which the game should model - a shorter wheelbase will turn faster, and this is actually quite a sensitive adjustment, meaning small differences have a large effect. In real life you could play with tyre shape (width / profile / manufacturer) as well.
Damping changes can also help, realising that the bike rides lower in its stroke when cornering (the springs bear more of the centrifugal tendency as you lean more), so changing direction quickly causes the bike to spring up, then recompress again. Fork rebound in particular would be a good place to look, I think - it's a bit beyond me, really. It's relatively easy to figure out the steady state stuff (e.g. constant corner radius and speed), but the dynamics (like damping) always get me.
What you can do with the inputs themselves is to "over steer" to bring the bike up quicker at corner exits etc. (i.e. turn hard left at the exit of a right-hander), but it's easy to overshoot and wobble on down the road, or off into the gravel.
Maximum steering input is generally what you do anyway at chicanes etc., but with practice it is useful elsewhere. Also try just letting go of the steering altogether and seeing what the bike does, I experimented with it in the first game and found it useful, but don't remember what it actually did. The controls are different in Ride 2, though, so I might have unlearned it...
I use the same control scheme as you, as recommended by
@Wolfe!