Myth busting

TWO FINGERS FOR BRAKING IS ALL YOU NEED
Oh dear, if I had a dollar for every time I've had this discussion. Lots of people believe that two fingers are sufficient to operate the front brake lever and stop the motorcycle, which is true to a degree. Once again let's look at some realities.

The first being that brake levers tend to come from the factory designed to accommodate four fingers. This is no fluke, no accident of design, no random choice based upon aesthetics. The people who design brake systems are very-very clever engineering types, with a deep and profound understanding of the engineering principles underpinning their design decisions.

As a result the braking system is designed as a whole to suit the purpose, so they don't design a system and then bung any old lever on the end. No, the length of the lever and the pressure, or load it can apply, is calculated and known, as is the amount of effort needed to move the piston within the bore inside the master cylinder. Other clever non-random design decisions relate to stuff like the size of the caliper pistons and the compound of the pads.

When a two-finger braker operates the lever they usually use the index and middle finger, which by birth and coincidence are located so that they operate the lever nearest its pivot point, known as the fulcrum. Physics 101 will tell you that the further away from the fulcrum you are, the more leverage you can apply with increasingly greater ease.

In addition, the further down the lever, the greater the control. It's true that some people operate the brake lever with the third and fourth finger, and in so doing wrap the index finger around the grip nearest the pivot. The problem with that being squeezing the lever in towards the bar is limited by the fleshy digit trapped between the lever and the grip.

Anyway, another thing to consider is that the hand moves better in response to stimuli as a unit. To test this, theory, close you eyes, hold out your hand so that the fingers are curled around an imaginary grip. Get someone to stand behind you and clap their hands. The split second you hear the clap, go for an imaginary brake lever, first with two fingers and then try again with all four. Most people find that moving four fingers is faster than two. Admittedly there's not a huge difference, but when you consider that at 100km/h you are travelling at 27m per second, a fraction of a second can be the difference between life or disaster.

There will always be those that prefer to use two fingers and justify it with stuff like "dirt riders do it" or even "racers and stunt riders only need two". Both true of course, although the thing to consider is that neither party has to perform a last ditch, stop or die emergency stop that is completely unexpected.

A last reason some people use two fingers is nothing more than fear. Whether through lack of practice or fear from a bad experience, they choose to use two fingers in order to reduce the chances of getting it wrong. Personally I favour using four fingers simply because it makes sense. Sure I know modern systems are immensely powerful and capable of staggering short stopping distances, whether with or without ABS.

But it's the unexpected that demands mastery, when instinct insists you use of all four fingers to get the very best that the designers supplied you with and you paid good money for. That will be when the difference between two and four really counts.

I LAID THE BIKE DOWN
A truly beautiful piece of self deception this one. In short this translates into "I deliberately crashed the motorcycle to avoid crashing the motorcycle". Naturally most proponents of this particular myth will tell you that they chose to separate from the machine in order to take their chances on the bitumen rather than hit a car/truck etc, thus somehow mitigating the seriousness of the injury.

Right, let's look at the logic here. In order to successfully lay a motorcycle down you first need to practice at a variety of speeds -- a hazardous enterprise that demands a ready supply of both bikes and medicinal products. Varying speeds? Well, yes, coz you never know when you might need to actually perform. What's more: what if you laid the bike down too late, or worse still too soon? Imagine sliding to a halt 10m before the hazard and realising you didn't need to do it at all. My how people would laugh.

In the practicing, you'll need to be able to apply the rear brake hard enough to lock the rear wheel, and then ride the bike down on to a chosen side until you hit the ground in unison. Once on the ground you'll need the presence of mind to ignore the sliding, bucking and tortured machine and separate from it in order to do your very own sliding, bucking and being tortured. The truth is that very few people hit the ground in an elegant slow motion slump following a long and graceful slide. No, most hit the ground in a split second slam and then do a bit of tumbling and rolling as an unguided fleshy missile.

The truth is that the "I laid the bike down" myth is more about trying to make a dumb mistake into something that sounds vaguely heroic and the product of incredible skill and foresight. In actual fact, in nearly all cases you are far better off staying with the motorcycle and using the brakes effectively. This at least reduces the speed to a point where a swerve becomes viable or minimizes the impact speed and minimizes the injury severity.