How to brake

While it’s true you can accelerate out of trouble, it’s smart braking that’ll save your bacon

Braking is easy, right? Lever on the right of the handlebar does the front, foot pedal does the rear. How hard can stopping a motorcycle be?

While it’s true you can accelerate out of trouble, it’s smart braking that’ll save your bacon.

More than anything else, braking relies on having the best bike underneath you. From brake discs to pads and hoses to tyres, the bike’s braking system needs to be in tip-top condition to give you an even chance of keeping out of trouble. But there’s another braking system on your bike that helps out greatly – the drive train. Using the gearbox and clutch can greatly help set the bike up for heavy braking and ensures that the machine stays under control for longer.

WHAT IS BRAKING?

Braking takes many forms: just shutting the throttle slows the bike down, so does clicking back down the gearbox and using your upper torso to generate wind resistance. Just using those techniques will rapidly slow the bike long before you reach for the anchors. But the most essential elements in the braking food chain are your eyes, your brain and your reactions.

Here’s a simple example… In the daytime you can sprint through your house and avoid running into anything. Try that at night with the lights off and you’ll crash into the sofa, trip over the cat and look like you’ve just been mugged at the end of it, even though you’ll be twice as slow in the process. But the sofa’s in the same place and your legs haven’t let you down, so what’s changed?

The single difference is your inability to see the obstacles in the dark and therefore plan avoidance in advance. And the principle is essentially the same on your bike: failing to see things early enough will not be compensated by the best brakes in the world. So don’t ever catch yourself riding ‘in the dark’.

CUSTOM BRAKING

How you brake also depends on the bike you ride. Give a chopper a handful of front brake and you’ll risk locking the front wheel and sliding off. That’s because of many factors but the most prevalent is the lack of weight on the front tyre. It simply gets to a point where its grip is overpowered as it’s much easier to slide over the top of the road than bite into it.

Locking the front on a sports bike is much harder, even though the speeds are generally higher and the brakes fiercer. These bikes have more weight over the front (from both machine and rider), grippier tyres, more sophisticated suspension and brake discs the size of dinner plates. Now the danger is using too much front and lifting the rear wheel off the deck, thereby rendering the back brake useless and the bike less stable. That’s fun, provided you’re not trying to avoid the tractor that’s just pulled out of a paddock (or a U-turning car – see below).

Conversely, the chopper’s rear brake anchors the bike down more effectively than the one on the sports bike.

Learn your machine and get a ‘feel’ for what the tyres are telling you when braking. Understand when you’re near the limit of grip by practicing heavy braking in a controlled, empty space. If you’ve got anti-lock braking on your bike, you should know how early or late it cuts in.

GOING SLOWER TO BE FASTER

Riding on twisty roads that are new to me has always been my number one joy on a bike. It’s about the only time in my life where I can concentrate 100 per cent, as there’s so much going on. But the key to riding these roads fast and safely is anticipation. And you can’t do that without brakes.

If you take a blind bend too fast, you ultimately increase the risk of an accident and also come out the other side slower.

It’s much better, safer, smarter and smoother to knock off a bit more speed on the entry to the corner so you settle the bike in the apex and get on the gas earlier and harder on the exit. Braking too late means the front gets loaded, the rear gets light, the bike wants to stand up and you’ll miss your entry point. Get your braking over smartly and quickly before the bend so you can focus solely on getting through and out the other side like a motorcycling professor.

Smart braking beats late braking on the road, although smart braking also enables late braking – so you can have the pie and munch it too. And you should, as this is one of those exercises that keeps you sharp and improves your game plan.

ABANDON SHIP – OR NOT

If you’ve never had anyone in a car do the unimaginable to you while riding then you’re very lucky. But you’ve also missed a vital part of the education process that biking demands. Because it’s only when that blind moron performs the most illogical, illegal and murderous U-turn right in front of you that you’ll realise exactly what you’re up against out there. Until this happens you can be riding around in a bit of a bubble. Once it does, you won’t.

I had my closest call in France a few years back. Sunshine, an early Yamaha FZ1, clear road ahead with one car on it. One car carrying one dickhead behind the wheel. My motorcycle radar’s on but obviously not at maximum at this point. Without a hint of anything (no head movement, indication or braking), old Richard Le Head pulls a U-turn – straight into my path.

Then he looks, sees me, and freezes.

At the time I was a stunt rider and magazine tester – reactions took hold and the anchors went on. With the bite of the front, the rear left the deck and then the front started to slide while mid stoppie, heading towards the side-on car. Without thinking, years of practice took over and I managed to modulate the front lever enough to regain grip on the front tyre but not letting off enough to drop the back down (as the bump and subsequent weight transfer to the back of the bike would have made the front light and liable to a further lock-up). I stopped fully and could literally smell his fear from my towering vantage point less than 200mm from the car.

That was a major save and, due to my training for stunts (many lonely weeks on a disused airfield), panic was kept at bay and I could rely on my instincts, reactions and abilities to able to tell you about it many years later. But those abilities only came with training and practice. And nobody’s born with that skill set, so don’t put off making yourself, smarter and sharper on every ride. They lie and say “speed kills”, but in my experience stationary dumb drivers are far more likely to be lethal.

OTHER BRAKING FACTORS

Even with the best bike between your legs and a brain smart enough to understand how a small light bulb can push all the dark out of a room, there’s still more out there that’s now on your side. I live in inner-city Sydney, where the road workers are keen on road plates the size road trains, their lethal metal surface often above the level of the road by about 100mm. As my bike hits this edge, you can feel the front go light and then land on the metal. Fun on the long-suspended Yamaha XT660Z but not on a Harley-Davidson Sportster in the wet, where the tyre does a great impersonation of the other skaters in Steve Bradbury’s gold medal race.

Then there’s Newtown just around the corner. A more eclectic mix of people you’ll not find – tourists crossing the road looking the wrong way, hipsters too cool to use the crossing and drug-affected scary types that seem to fall from the sky and land in front of you. Riding through there is often the best reminder to expect anything and everything.

How to brake

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