How can I gauge what angle I can safely ride at on a downhill curve? On a Strava segment featuring a 80-100m-long, 40-50m radius curve going downhill on a paved road at about 8-10%, I make generous use of my brakes out of fear of wiping out on my 23mm, fairly slick road tires. Because of this, my 30-second time is almost double that of the KOM, which seems borderline unsafe from my point of view.

I suppose this is actually two questions:


Is it likely that the KOM has some special downhill setup on his road bike?
If not, what are some best practices to quickly go down a downhill curve on a road bike without losing traction/having a wipeout/otherwise having a bad day?
Focusing on the strava bit - its a screwed up strava track.  The track shows they flew, and strava's point-grabbing routines have gone wonky.  Short answer they did not do it in 11 seconds.

They are bike rides though - just a fortuitous error on the GPS signal makes it look like they were faster, and much more direct.  I suspect there's some obstructions in the way (like a big `merkin freeway bridge thing) that are capable of interrupting and limiting GPS positional signals.  So when they get around the corner and get a better fix, it looks like they've gone really fast.   Its happened to me elsewhere.

There are no easy fixes. 


You can flag the whole ride, which is somewhat draconian.
You can go out and ride faster again (you've tried, its really hard)
They can crop that piece off the end of their rides (but its in the middle for both top riders)
They can use something like SNAP (strava needs a polish) at http://strava-tools.raceshape.com/snap/  to generate a "polished" file to re-upload and delete the original.  (image below)
You can tell strava to only show your own results in the preferences, and stop caring so much about KOMs.   Remember you're only competing with yourself, despite what strava imply, so its your own results you want to beat. I've got some KOMs, and they're not that special.  Seeing my own improvement over time, that's special.


Here's a pic of SNAP showing the sugested tweaks for the KOM holder's ride