Tag: braking

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59. Straight line -vs- trail braking

The next article was written well over twenty years ago, well before the current influencer-fuelled fad for trail braking as the ‘right way’ to enter corners became popularised on social media, usually without any cautions as to what happens if the level of grip under the tyres changes whilst the rider is braking and leaning simultaneously. Traction is not just finite, it’s unpredictably variable. There lies the risk on the road.

What I could have made clearer is that I believed then (and still do now) that trail braking is an entirely valid ‘get out of trouble’ technique. When we realise we’re running into a corner too rapidly, and leaning the bike alone is not going to avoid an off-road excursion, then using both front and rear brakes to bleed off some speed and tighten the radius of the turn is likely to be our way out of trouble. I taught it on my first Performance: BENDS courses in the late ’90s and I still cover it now, so I’m not ‘anti-trail braking’ as I have sometimes been labelled. To my mind, it’s a technique to be used when needed and not as a default approach to slowing for corners..

Straight line -vs- trail braking

One of the questions that I seem to get fairly frequently is what do I think about trail braking into bends. And when I do discuss it, it’s often a bit of a biking hot potato, with supporters on the one hand and others who say it’s a dangerous race track technique with no place on the road. First of all, it’s important that we understand the difference beween the two techniques, but also how they are linked. And we also need to be aware of what is sometimes called the ‘Traction Pie’. Essentially, is explains how it’s possible that we can divide up the grip that’s needed BETWEEN braking AND cornering at the same time.

The classic braking technique on the approach to a corner is to complete all braking before we start to steer the bike. The big advantage of this technique is that it separates traction management into two phases, FIRST braking THEN cornering. By keeping them apart we allow the tyres to use ALL their grip for one task OR the other. As a result, we significantly reduce the risk of losing traction at either end of the bike.

By contrast, when using the trail-braking technique the rider carries the brakes from the upright approach into the corner, gradually reducing the pressure on the brakes while adding lean angle until the brakes are off and the bike is at the chosen lean angle.

So what’s the problem?

Essentially, because the braking forces are using up traction AT THE SAME TIME AS the leaning forces, it’s possible to exceed the total amount of traction they tyres can deliver. And if that happens, we’re in trouble.

It’s that potential for loss of grip that’s always been used to promote the traditional upright braking approach to bends – if a wheel does lock under braking, upright it’s controllable even on a bike without ABS.

Separating braking and steering is by far and away the simplest way of dealing with a bend, and there’s far less to go wrong. Not least, if we’re off the brakes, we free ourselves up mentally to look around the corner to see what comes next. If we’re on the brakes, we’re actually mentally focused on the road surface itself (think about it) and what we might hit if it all goes wrong – cars, walls and other hard objects – and that in turn leads us in the direction of target fixation.

So why bother with trail braking at all? Two reasons.

The first is simply ‘advantage’ – since we carry the brakes into the first part of the corner, it’s possible to brake a little later, which means we carry speed a little further down the preceding straight. You’ve probably realised where this would be an advantage – on the track.

You may also have heard that “the bike steers better with the forks compressed”. It’s actually written on Freddie Spencer’s site and it’s hard to argue with a racer as talented as Freddie. But I can honestly say that every road bike I’ve ridden has, to a greater or a less extent, sat up and headed for the ditch on the brakes. Maybe a race bike set up on race tyres and race geometry does steer OK on the brakes, but my thinking is that this is a misunderstanding of what’s happening – as the bike slows on the brakes, it turns on a progressively tighter line simply because the speed is dropping.

Anyway, we’re not riding on the track, we’re on the road. We’re not out-braking other riders, nor trying to squeeze half a second off our point-to-point time. In fact, attempting trail braking as a regular approach to getting round bends risks all the things that goes wrong in bends:

  • running in too fast

  • turning in too early

  • running wide later in the corner

But with an added problem – because we’re braking and steering at the same time, we’ll be edging closer to the limit of traction. And of course, we’re assuming that the surface can deliver the grip we’re asking for – but surface grip can very from metre to metre. When we deliberately trail brake into a bend and get it wrong or the surface fails to deliver, the bend will bite back – hard! Which brings us right back to the benefits of braking upright to sort out speed before we reach the bend itself. On the road, braking hard and late is rarely the key to riding quickly – it just unsettles the bike and unsettles the rider!

As it happens, Nick Ienatsch – another US racer and writer for the US mag Sport Rider who is a big fan of trail braking on the track – says in his ‘The Pace’ articles that trail braking makes steering more difficult and is out of place on the road.

So if we’re not simply trying to use trail braking to ride faster, what’s the other potential benefit?

The simple answer is that we’re not on a track, and that means the road ahead is essentially unpredictable. Not only do we misjudge corners – the bend that looked easy a moment ago suddenly starts tightening up – or we may find the road blocked just out of sight. Even if we approach the bend ‘at a speed that allows us to stop in the distance we can see to be clear’, if our forward progress reveals a couple of cows wandering around mid-corner, we’re going to have to lose some speed. We cannot throw our hands up and say “but I can only brake in a straight line”, we are almost certainly going to have to carry those brakes into the corner itself.

So now we really are talking about a technique that is of genuine use on the road. So long as we weren’t planning on enter the corner at knee-down speeds, then our modest lean angle allows for those brakes to be carried into turn.

And then we have two further options. We can keep the brakes on, and maintain our lean angle – and then, as I just mentioned, our reduction in speed will automatically make the bike turn tighter. That will deal with decreasing radius corner. Or we can use the reduction in speed to reduce our lean angle, and now as the lean angle comes up we can use the second option – brake progressively harder until the bike is upright and we’re braking at emergency levels. That will get us stopped if the road is blocked.

But in both cases we have to understand that if we haven’t already locked up the front wheel by braking in a straight line, there is ALWAYS grip to begin to steer and add some lean. It may not be much if we’re braking hard, but it’s there all the same.

We just have to lean the machine gently to start with, and remember that as we feed lean in, we feed the brakes out.

Mix and match. Slice that pie between the leaning and braking.

One final tip. Having got the speed where we want it, release the brakes smoothly and progressively – don’t suddenly ping them off. If we do, that will unload the front suspension equally suddenly, and that will give us a very nasty surprise indeed. Because we’ve added a little extra counter-steering input to fight the bike’s ‘sit-up on the brakes’ tendency, removing the braking force means that extra steering input makes it fall into the corner rather abruptly.

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53. The five most important things I learned as a courier

I might argue that this article has aged better than a few formal training courses from the same era because it is grounded in exposure to risk rather than theory. These lessons were learned in the days before traction control, cornering ABS and driver-assist systems became commonplace, but the fundamentals have not changed. Modern technology may reduce the consequences of mistakes, yet it does nothing to improve anticipation, judgement or decision-making under pressure. I still see my time as a courier as spent in an informal lab testing theory against real-world hazard management. The common thread running through all five points is not speed, but control of space, attention and stress — the same factors that still separate riders who consistently get home safely from those who rely on luck.

The five most important things I learned as a courier

Some years back, I was challenged to put some tips together based on what I’d learned back in my despatching days. It didn’t take much head-scratching to come up with the following short list:

1) Learn to use the brakes hard, then stay in practice… the last emergency stop that most riders make before they find themselves in the middle of a crisis is the one in front of the examiner. That might be ten years ago, and a very bad time to discover we’ve forgotten how is in the middle of an emergency. Practice practice practice. Practice wet and dry. If you change bike, see how it responds on hard braking. If you change tyres, find out how much grip they have. If you change pads, bed them in, test them out and discover whether they respond the same way as the last lot. There can be surprising variation between batchers.

2) Learn when not to use the brakes… we’ll all experience an “OhmigodImgoingtodie” moment. Instinct is screaming at you “STOPSTOPSTOPSTOP”. But hitting the brakes hard stands the bike upright which may take us straight into the very situation we were trying to avoid.Very often our best route out of trouble is not stopping but changing direction – bikes are pretty small, can change direction quickly and fit thru small gaps, and lean much further than most riders can cope with. But to change direction, we need to understand HOW to steer (counter-steering is the answer), then to practice adding more and more steering input to generate a quicker and quicker change of direction. Practice is the only way we’ll learn this technique and just how much we can trust that front tyre (more than you might expect)

3) Learn to search… most road safety literature – the USA’s MSF course excepted – talks about ‘observation’. The problem is observation is passive. It implies we simply swing our gaze around till something interesting catches our attention. A few moments watching most riders and you’ll see they don’t actually look for anything in particular. They’re hoping their attention is drawn to hazards – the danger is that if they don’t see them until they are a real threat, they’ll suffer SURPRISE! and then survival reactions kick in – see the target fixation tip for more on this. So what we need to do is turn passive observation into a focused and active search. We need to know WHERE to look and WHY we’re looking for it. It’s no good knowing that side turnings are a place that must bike collisions happen but hoping we spot them, we have to search for them – we need to actively seek out road signs, gaps between parked cars, breaks in the lines of house roofs, white paint at the side of the road, dropped kerbs and so on. Searching to either side of our path helps us being taken by SURPRISE!

4) Hang back to make better progress… as a courier, I always wanted to get where I was going with the minimum of delay conversant with keeping the risks down. Most riders follow far too close, and then they don’t look any further ahead than the vehicle in front – next time you’re following another rider look to see when his or her brake lights come on – if it’s a moment after the car ahead, they’re watching that vehicle. Opening up a gap not only gives us a safer following distance and opens up a better view of the road ahead, it also frees our attention to start searching beyond the car ahead. And this is how a good courier will make progress. Rather than simply looking to overtake it, the courier’s planned where they’re going next too. When filtering, the courier will know when to hang back as the impatient riders overtake into a dead end or get stuck outside traffic turning right. Hanging back gets you further ahead mentally and physically.

5) Discover that slow is fast… too many riders think that being on a bike means they should be at the head of the queue. Ever heard anyone say “if I sat in the queue I might as well be in a car”? I have, regularly. But it’s not the right approach. Because they’re in a hurry, they’re stressed and prone to mistakes. And mistakes lead to spills. That’s no good to a courier because a bent bike means no earnings. And no earnings meant no food or rent money. There’s nothing wrong with using gaps where it’s sensible to use them but I would also slip back into the queue when it got too tricky or too risky to overtake or filter. My aim as a courier was always to flow unobtrusively through traffic, neither wedging myself into impossible gaps nor forcing drivers to slow down to let me through. It might have cost me a few seconds, even minutes, but being restrained and patient minimised stress and anxiety and helped me to stay relaxed. Being relaxed meant I could ride for long hours. And that meant the tortoise nearly always overtook the hare in the end.

Summing up: None of these lessons require you to ride for a living, or to ride fast. What courier work teaches is not aggression or risk-taking, but economy: economy of effort, economy of stress, and economy of mistakes. The aim is to arrive unruffled, unhurried and upright, time after time. Riders who chase gaps, sit on bumpers and ride with a constant sense of urgency often believe they are making progress, but in reality they are burning attention and increasing risk. The courier mindset is the opposite. Control your speed, create space, stay relaxed and plan ahead, and you will usually find that you arrive sooner — and far more consistently — than riders who mistake haste for skill.

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48. Ever gone into a corner too hot and had it tighten up on you?

Over the years I’ve been a rider coach, I’ve done a lot of thinking about my riding, and I’ve realised I’m both a realist — that is, someone who accepts the world as it is, not as it should be — AND a pragmatist — someone who’s actions are based on what’s been shown to work. Running wide on blind bends remains a leading cause of serious motorcycle crashes, and no amount of technology can compensate for horribly misjudged entry speed or unseen and dramatic changes in radius. In fact, improved grip and electronic safety nets may encourage some riders to commit harder and later, increasing the risk when the road tightens unexpectedly. Superior tyres, better suspension and rider aids do not — and this is crucial — remove the geometric reality of running out of road. The solution is still the same as it has always been: conservative entry, delayed commitment, and a willingness to revise the plan mid-corner without panic.

Ever gone into a corner too hot and had it tighten up on you?

Of course you have – you’d be a very lucky rider if you hadn’t. I’m a realist. That’s why my training courses are called Survival Skills. Remember, any bend can get worse out of sight and this is a classic biking problem – the ever-tightening corner that just seems to go on and on. Unfortunately, by the time we spot the bend is tightening, it’s often too late, and we’re going to run wide. If we run wide on a right-hander (in the UK) we will run off the road. It’s a common bike crash. But if we run wide on a left-hander we’ll cross the centre line. If we’re lucky, nothing’s coming the other way and we get away with it. But if we’re unlucky, we meet a Scania coming the other way. Running wide into oncoming traffic is a major killer on roads not just in the UK but anywhere in the world. And it’s worth mentioning that when we hear about head-on collisions between a bike and a car on a bend, whilst riders often assume it must have been the car driver on the wrong side, it’s nearly always the rider who’s crossed the line.

I’ve yet to meet the rider who doesn’t make mistakes, so whilst it’s easy to say it’s a mistake we shouldn’t make and that a good rider would avoid getting sucked into a corner too fast, the fact is that it’s often not so easy to spot a decreasing radius corner until it begins to tighten.

‘Limit Point’ analysis is no use if the bend tightens out of sight – we’ll already have set our speed based on what we could see before we commenced leaning. And one technique I would advise anyone on two wheels to avoid is what’s sometimes called ‘chasing the Limit Point’. It’s normally explained with a statement such as:

“The Limit Point moves away from you, telling you that the corner is beginning to open out, so you can get back on the gas and chase the limit point out of the corner.”

‘Beginning to open out’. Think about that for a moment. What happens if we’re NOT seeing the end of the bend? What if the bend suddenly tightens up again? Now we’ve been conned into accelerating towards a second apex in a corner that’s not over yet. In fact, hardly any of our rural bends are actually smooth corners, they are nearly all complex shapes with multiple radii in a single bend. So rather than try to add speed as the bend appears to open up, ask yourself “how could this go wrong?” If we can imagine a decreasing radius, downhill, off-camber corner with a wet surface that’s covered in loose gravel lies just beyond the point where the bend appears to open out, it’s a good incentive to delay acceleration until we really can see our way out of the corner and down the next stretch of road which has completely straightened out. This will avoid the “OhMiGod the corner’s tightened up again and gone downhill and it’s off-camber and… etc” problem!

In fact, the best clues to dodgy corners are nearly always the road signs, specifically the red and white triangular warning signs. They are placed to warn us about hazards that have caught others out and are often out of sight. So the moment we spot a bend warning sign, particularly when it’s backed up with a SLOW marking, it might be a good idea to go into a corner a little slower than the Limit Point might have suggested. And if we’re lucky enough to glimpse a black and white chevrons sign, that’s almost certainly where the corner gets awkward.

It may be the Worst Case Scenario, but that’s what we have to plan for on every single blind bend. And we do that not by setting our speed to the ‘distance we can see clear and stop’, but by using the Limit Point to set our entry speed considerably lower, so we have a built-in safety margin in case the bend gets worse just out of sight. A cautious entry speed allows us to deal with a tightening bend by adding leaning angle, rather than hitting the brakes immediately. Apply the Survival Skills approach to riding once again – anticipate where things will go wrong, and don’t assume you’ve got everything right until you’re upright and accelerating away again.

But even a cautious rider, looking for trouble in bends still won’t get every bend right, and so right now we’re looking at a bend that needs some quick revisions to our line and lean. What are our options for getting out of trouble mid-corner?

Here’s our first option, which often mentioned on post-test training courses. Stand the bike up, brake in a straight line and then lay it over again. Hmm. It needs some room, even though once upright we can brake very hard indeed. And if we’re already on a wide line around the outside of the lane, we’re don’t have the space to straighten up – we’re straight off the road. So there’s a variation on the theme where we actually turn TIGHTER before we stand the bike up – this way we can maximise the straight line braking distance. But unless we absolutely have to lose a huge amount of speed – or stop – then if we have the room to lean in, pick up, brake hard, and lean in again, we probably could have made the bend in the first place. And if we don’t get the bike slowed enough…

…we’ve just guaranteed we’re going to run out of road. So although I’ve mentioned this option first, it’s really to move it to the back burner, behind some alternatives.

So are there better options? I mentioned above that we if we’re going to maximise the space for upright braking, we need to tip into the corner first. If we have this additional lean angle in hand AND we’re confident enough to use it, we could just keep the throttle open – which stabilises the bike – and keep the bigger lean angle going right through the rest of the corner. This should deal with a corner that tightens just the once, onto a sharper radius, so long as we didn’t make the mistake of turning-in too early.

But what about a corner that progressively tightens up? We can only increase the lean angle so much before we run out of ground clearance. So we may have to exploit some basic cornering physics – a motorcycle cornering at the same angle will turn on a tighter line if we reduce the speed. These are techniques we explore on the Survival Skills Performance: SPORT two-day advanced riding course.

So how do we reduce speed to turn on a tighter line?

The simplest solution is shut the throttle. The bike WILL slow, and it WILL turn tighter (provided we’re not going downhill at the same time). Don’t slam it shut as that will destabilise the bike, but roll off smoothly – this allows us to cope with the change in steering geometry. We can help out a little by applying the rear brake, but if we’re already generating engine braking, there’s often not a lot the rear brake can achieve before the rear wheel starts to lock, triggering the ABS or skidding on a non-ABS machine.

So if we need to tighten the line even more, then there’s only one way left – and that’s to apply both brakes together. The weird thing is that we see racers braking into bends all the time, yet the technique is frowned on in bike training. It’s true there’s a risk, because sudden applications of the front brake mid-corner can make the bike sit up and go straight on – which isn’t what we want particularly on a left-hander – or if we’re really hamfisted, we can even lock the front wheel.

So the point I’ll make here is that most the crashes happen as a result of a panic-grab, when the rider is surprised by events, rather than through a controlled application. Braking into bends is actually surprisingly easy just so long as we ease the front brake on to allow us to adapt to the geometry change. Here’s the big plus. With the brakes on, we’ll lose speed very rapidly – and as the speed comes down, our line tightens equally rapidly. So we rarely need to brake hard to adapt to a decreasing radius corner, just smoothly and progressively.

So to sum up, if we enter corners mentally blind to the possibility of them getting tighter out of sight, that’s when we’re most likely to arrive too fast AND to make the panic-grab at the front brake that causes all the problems. But if we are more pragmatic and anticipate that what’s out of sight could get awkward, then we’re far more likely to respond in a controlled way to a decreasing radius corner when we do get it wrong.

By admitting we can make mistakes in judging the radius of a corner, we have taken a huge step to improving our risk management and margins for error out on nice twisty roads.

Our first problem is how to read the radius – the tightness if you like – of a corner from far enough back to get our speed right. One of the techniques you may have heard about is to use the ‘Limit Point’ (sometimes called the ‘vanishing point’ or ‘distance point’ – it’s all the same thing). The idea is that we enter a bend at a speed that allows us to stop before the road vanishes around the corner.

But there are three problems:

  1. at any one moment, the Limit Point is just a single snapshot of what we can actually see. It cannot give us any clear idea how the bend ahead might change – nor can it warn us of other hazards. If we wait till we have a series of these snapshots suggesting the bend is tightening up, it’s likely we’ll react far too late to the decreasing radius.

  2. focusing too much on the Limit Point actually pulls our attention down and away from the longer view where we look BEYOND the point at which the road itself vanishes and pick up clues about the road’s future path.

  3. if the bend does tighten, we may have to brake mid-corner – something usually frowned upon, but actually an essential skill. How’s your mid-corner braking technique?

If we rely too much on the Limit Point to make an educated guess about where the road goes beyond what we can actually see, it’s a bit like making a weather forecast – the further ahead we forecast, the less accurate it’s going to be. Do we really want to commit ourselves into a corner on what is effectively a guess? I don’t think so.

To overcome this problem, advanced rider training often focuses on getting riders to pick eyes up and look further round the corner – we may see the back of the hedge on the inside of the corner, buildings, telegraph poles, trees, even the tops of approaching vehicles and the speed they enter and leave the bend. Clues are just that – they’re not definite knowledge, but they can help us make an informed guess about what’s beyond the Limit Point.

But in my experience hardly any trainers mention an obvious clue – road signs! If the council have gone to the trouble of sticking up a triangular warning sign, painting SLOW on the road and putting a black and white chevron ahead of you, don’t you think the road engineer is trying to tell you something? And that you should pay them some heed? They don’t just tell us the direction of the bend, they tell us that other people have been caught out in the past. And the more effort that’s been made, the more dramatic the change of speed or direction is likely to be.

Once we’ve realised that, then instead of trying to figure out how fast we can go into a bend, we need to recalibrate and instead think about what might make us slow down (or even stop).

OK, so all that might help us avoid running into a decreasing radius turn too fast, but I’m a realist. We don’t get every bend right, and so we need ways of getting out of trouble mid-corner. That’s why my training courses are called Survival Skills.

So how do we do this? Well, if we’ve followed the advice above, we can go in, increasing our lean angle to follow the tightening bend. But what if we’re running out of lean?

Then there’s only one solution – to lose some speed, because slowing down means the bike automatically turns tighter at the same lean angle. So how do we slow down?

If we’re lucky, we can simply ease the throttle shut in a smooth roll-off. . If we’re not so lucky we are going to have to brake. The usual suggestion is to use only the rear brake. Unfortunately, if the throttle’s already shut, then we’re not going to scrub off a lot of speed this way – try too hard and there’s a real risk locking the rear wheel. And that’s disconcerting even with ABS.

So that leaves both brakes together. So one suggestion is to pick the bike up, brake in a straight line and lay it over again. Errr, yes. Well, if you have the room that required, you could have made the bend in the first place.

Another option is to brake with the rear. Unfortunately, you can’t scrub off a lot of speed this way, you still compromise stability and there is always the risk of locking the rear, and if you aren’t careful, having the rear overtake the front.

So what about the front brake? This is where trail braking becomes important. So long as we’re not already sliding the front tyre, there’s some braking grip available. So long as we apply the brake gently and progressively, we can exploit it to add to our rate of deceleration.

But of course, it’s always better NOT to need technically-demanding techniques like this, and a better answer is not to be able to “get out of trouble” but to use an approach to riding that tends to keep us out of trouble. And that’s why the ‘slow down in, cautiously round, fast out’ approach to bends pays off. If we enter a corner with lean angle to spare, we have the option to start using it and to slow down at the same time if things turn bad later on. But if we’re cornering close to the limit, well, there’s not much of a margin for error, is there? .

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45. Eleven Essential Tips for riding in the rain

The advice is still very relevant, especially the emphasis on spotting slippery surfaces, progressive braking, careful cornering, and anticipating changes in grip. Modern bikes, tyres, and safety aids have slightly shifted the context, but the fundamentals of wet-weather remain the same, with the emphasis on spotting slippery surfaces (manhole covers, white lines, tar seams, leaves) and anticipating how those surface changes will affect traction, remaining critical.

Eleven Essential Tips for riding in the rain

Rain means wet roads, and wet surfaces means less grip than in the dry, and so we’ll have to reduce our throttle openings, lean angles and increase our braking distances accordingly. The question is “how much?”. Unless we have some idea of how much grip there is, we don’t really know how hard we can accelerate or brake, or how much lean we can use. And we can end up being excessively cautious and then we’ll be harrassed by other drivers. There is nothing wrong with taking care in the wet, but too much caution and we start causing ourselves even more problems. So let’s have a think about the issues.

HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN RAINING – this should be our first question. Prolonged rain flushes surface contaminants away and given a decent surface, wet roads usually have plenty of grip. . But if it’s only just started raining, particularly after a prolonged dry spell, expect the surface to be super-slippery. Oil dripped onto the road mixes with the worn rubber on the surface, creating a slick.

KNOW WHERE TO FIND GRIP – a wet surface that is in good repair and clean, modern tyres should have good grip – it’s a bit hard to put a figure on it, but at least 70% of dry grip should be available. And high grip ‘Shellgrip’ style surfaces give near race track levels of grip even in the rain.

AND KNOW WHAT’S SLIPPERY – but what about the road that’s not in good condition or is contaminated? Some surfaces which are fine in the dry are appallingly slippery in the wet. Now the problem is that no matter how good our tyres, they won’t grip if the road surface cannot deliver its half of the deal. And the quality of the surface has been steadily deteriorating for the last three decades and right now finding a perfect surface is now the exception rather than the rule. So be on the alert for surfaces which are slippery when wet:

metal manhole covers
cats-eyes
white lines and road markings
bitumen tar seams where tarmac is sealed
polished and worn road surfaces
oily surfaces
leaves

Here’s a clue. Most things that are shiny when wet – even leaves – are slippery! So treat any shiny patch on the road as potentially slippery and something to be avoided if possible.

KNOW WHERE IT’S SLIPPERY – and then avoid or take care in those places. A big fear for bikers is spilled diesel. Although figures published by FEMA (the European rider rights organisation) claimed that 10% of all motorcycle accidents were caused by diesel, UK figures suggest it’s less than 3%. Whatever the truth, there’s no need for us to become one of the statistics by being cautious where spills of fuel and oil are most common:

roundabouts
near industrial estates
by garages
on bends and at junctions
between the wheel tracks at traffic lights or stop signs

Treat dark shiny streaks or rainbow patterns with care, and use your nose – you will often smell diesel before you spot it. And remember petrol is JUST as slippery as diesel.

SPOT SURFACE CHANGES – as I mentioned, we may ride from a grippy surface onto a less-grippy one, so we need to spot that as early as possible. Look up the road and try to spot a change of colour. It’s almost always a change of surface. We won’t know whether it gets better or worse, but at least we’re on the alert. A visible line often warns of a change. Oblong shapes are usually road repairs. Irregular areas of a different colour could be a damp patch, a pothole or loose gravel. Streaks are often a fuel spill.

BE ALERT FOR SURFACE WATER – there aren’t too many around but on minor roads, we could come across a ford. Take it cautiously and upright and don’t brake or accelerate hard – they are often slippery with algae under the water.

After a thunderstorm, watch out for surface water beyond the norm! After prolonged or heavy rain, expect flooded surfaces. Avoid riding through puddles as a matter of course – they may conceal a pothole or debris. There’s a minor risk of aquaplaning on standing surface water but watch out deeper water which can cause a loss of control if hit at speed. Any depression is likely to be filled with deep water. Underpasses often flood to surprising depths. Look to see where the kerb disappears to get an indication of how deep it might be.

Watch out for mud, gravel or debris carried into the road. I’ve had to dodge a sizeable log before now. Streams may burst their banks and flow into the road, and we not only have to be careful about the depth of water – look at fence posts or the hedge – but there could well be a strong current. It might be wiser to find an alternative route than attempt to ford it.

KNOW WHEN TO SLOW – in wet weather, many riders will slow down unnecessarily, even when it’s safe to maintain a decent rate of progress. It’s stopping distance we mostly need to worry about, and whilst it increases with speed, if we stretch our planning and open up our following distances, then it should be OK to maintain speed to go with the flow to avoid being tailgated by impatient drivers.

AND WHEN IT’S MORE IMPORTANT TO KEEP A GAP – one of the biggest wet-weather faults I see is following the vehicle ahead too close, too fast. Braking distances increase in the wet, but it’s not just stopping distances we need to worry about. We need to understand how changes of surface affect our ability to stop and maintain control. We really don’t want to find we’re braking over a wet metal access cover that just popped out from under the car ahead.

AIM TO BE SMOOTH – what breaks traction in the wet is often a sudden application of brakes or throttle. Whilst modern bikes have ABS and traction control is becoming common too, kicking either in is not a good idea as it’s disconcerting. And without these aids, there’s a risk of a loss-of-control. Aim to be smooth, but also to be minimalist – the fewer control inputs that achieve a particular result, the better.

Aim for progressive braking. Once the suspension has compressed we can build the pressure – most riders are surprised how much grip is available if we don’t grab a big handful of brake.

Don’t make the common mistake of trying to stay off the brakes then finding you need them at the last moment. Brake early and positively rather than late and harshly – it not only improves stability but gives us options. If we brake earlier than necessary, it means we can release the brakes again if we are unable to avoid crossing a wet metal cover or a painted arrow. That takes away the fear of locking a wheel as we ride over it, and we can reapply the brakes on the other side. It’s not very difficult IF we look ahead and think about what we are doing.

Know how to corner in the wet – there’s no real difference in technique, but it’s more important we get it right. Don’t try to turn in on a closed throttle or on the brakes – if we do, we’re loading the front tyre with deceleration forces just as you want all the grip for steering and it’s easy to lose the front if we hit a slippery patch. Instead, get the braking done upright, get off the brakes in a straight line to let the suspension settle THEN turn in smoothly.

Just as in the dry, the best way to enter a corner on a wet road is back on the throttle, keeping steady power on through the turn, which means using the Point and Squirt late apex approach I teach on Survival Skills Performance Courses through the corner. The biggest steering errors are to turn in too early which guarantees we’ll run wide on the exit, then probably touch the brakes mid-corner to try to lose speed – in the wet this is even more a recipe for disaster than in the dry. In fact, mid-corner, we can probably lean over further than we might expect, which is the way to deal with a tightening bend, but try to avoid sudden or jerky motions. We don’t need to corner at walking pace but just a modest reduction in speed means we can make our direction changes a little more gentle, and use a little less lean angle mid-turn. open out your lines a little and make them smoother. Err on the side of ‘slow and smooth in, and faster out’ – it’s not that important to ride fast in the wet.

Don’t try to open out the exit to the turn by taking a wide, sweeping line. We may need to change line to keep off tar seams, access covers or white paint mid-corner. If we’re on a line that gives us no way of changing position should we need to, then we’re potentially in trouble. If we’re on a sweeping line and aiming for the extreme edge of the lane, and we do experience a slide, we’ve no room to recover. In the wet, I avoid extreme cornering lines – so I can compromise my perfect line to avoid slippery areas. I usually ride in the middle third of the lane, so I have some room for error.

If we must brake in a corner – perhaps because the road ahead is blocked – then use BOTH brakes lightly. Remember – if you’ve not already crashed, there is SOME grip at the front. As the speed comes down, our lean angle usually comes up, and so we can brake progressively harder. The important thing is not to grab at the front brake. With no ABS we’ll probably crash (I’ve bought that tee-shirt), with ABS we’ll have a moment to recover. Although it may be easier to catch a rear wheel lock-up, the rear brake alone won’t offer much braking.

Don’t try to accelerate mid-corner when the bike is still leaned over. A surprising number of crashes in autumn, when the roads are first wet and cold, happen when riders accelerate whilst still leaned over, often when turning right at a junction or a roundabout. The combination of lean and throttle breaks grip and the rear. The answer is to get the bike turned completely THEN open the throttle. Even with traction control, it’ll still make for a smoother turn.

UNDERSTAND HOW TO USE THE GEARS – don’t make the mistake of believing the old advice to ride in a high gear on a slippery surface either. Whilst that might have been effective on a low and slow-revving 50s and 60s Triumph, modern sports bikes will spin up the rear wheel the moment it breaks traction. Wheelspin in a straight line is controllable, just a gentle wag from the rear of the bike. If we’ve not got traction control and we wheelspin in the wet whilst leaned over, we may not get the throttle shut again in time to prevent a crash. Let the engine rev, but accelerate gently – don’t open the throttle so far as in the dry.

And one final piece of advice – KNOW YOUR TYRES – if you intend to ride all year round, fit sport-touring tyres for the colder months of the year. The soft compound sporty tyres really only work in warm weather, and will never get hot enough to grip effectively in cold rain. Sport-touring tyres may not have the ultimate level of grip but they’ll work better on wet roads at any time of the year, and they generally slide more predictably than the grippier tyres that just let go suddenly.

Having just listed all the problems of riding in the wet, you may be surprised to know, I actually enjoy riding in the rain. It can be a lot of fun!

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27. Cornering Problems 4 – Set up the brakes to stay out of corner trouble

Written originally before the widespread adoption of ABS and the current enthusiasm for trail braking, this piece has arguably become more relevant rather than less. Modern braking systems reduce the consequences of error, but they do not eliminate the need for judgement, preparation, or margin. In fact, on increasingly unpredictable road surfaces, relying on late or reactive braking strategies leaves the rider more exposed, not less. “In too fast” remains a dominant failure mode and has turned up in multiple recent crash studies, UK DfT KSI summaries, and police collision reconstructions. The bike is usually capable but the rider’s speed management is the failure point. Nothing in rider aids has meaningfully changed that. It’s still a knowledge gap vs skills gap issue. Braking studies have shown that most riders don’t think to brake for corners until too late.

Unfortunately, the false binary “good riders don’t brake” versus “bad riders use brakes” thinking is still present, even if it far less common than when I penned this piece. Brake preloading as an anti-surprise strategy aligns extremely closely with modern human-factors research on startle response and task switching. The principles discussed here are not about rejecting modern technology, but about using it as a safety net rather than a primary plan — and about preventing the ‘in too fast’ error before electronics are ever asked to intervene.

Cornering Problems 4 – Set up the brakes to stay out of corner trouble

Even in the years that I’ve been an advanced rider coach is the rider, I’ve seen a lot of change to motorcycle design and the technology that comes with them, and the UK’s training and testing regime has changed a lot too. Now, when accident studies look at crashes result from the ‘in too fast’ error, it’s nearly always the case that the BIKE could have made the corner. But in my time in training cornering crashes are much the same as they ever were. It’s not even a blink of the eye in terms of human evolution, and so it’s not surprising the rider always was and remains the weak link. But we can do better if we learn the appropriate skills. So given our propensity to find our way into trouble in bends, why aren’t we taught how to avoid one of the most common cornering crashes; running into a corner too hot? If getting the bike sorted for a bend really is as simple as getting back on the throttle before we try to steer, why do riders get themselves into such a muddle on corners by making the ‘in too fast’ error? Here are two answers.

The first involves the lack of time spent working on corners on basic training. As the test itself is conducted mostly on urban roads with a sprinkling of dual carriageway work, it’s unlikely that manys rider on the bike test will have to ride more than a mile or so along a reasonably twisty road. Not surprisingly, basic trainers tend to focus on the kind of roads the test will be conducted on, and whilst many will do some training on the twisties, it’s rarely ever in much depth. Even the technique of counter-steering is not guaranteed to be covered.

In my experience as a rider coach, many ‘cornering’ issues turn out to be a lack of confidence with the brakes. Why? Well, braking ahead of a bend is rarely taught on basic training for the reasons mentioned above, and how to break it’s largely left to the trainee to work out for themselves. Not having been taught how to brake before a corner, few riders ever practice braking upright before a bend. It’s a double-whammy.

But here’s a weird thing. We ALL know modern bikes can brake very hard in a straight line, most of us because our basic trainer spent hours teaching emergency stop technique. But for some reason, we never seem to appreciate that it’s the same basic ‘front first, rear second, progressively harder squeeze of the front’ approach that works wherever we need it – avoiding collisions, braking for red traffic lights or on the approach a roundabout…

…and approaching corners.

So for most riders – there are exceptions – it’s not a SKILLS gap, it’s actually a KNOWLEDGE gap perhaps because it was never made explicitly clear – no-one told them they can brake hard ahead of a corner.

But I also believe we also have problems at post-test level because riders are still being discouraged from braking for corners. Have you ever heard it said that “a good rider shouldn’t need to touch the brakes”? I have, and much too often for my liking.

I first read it back in my courier days, in articles written about the IAM test. It didn’t make a great deal of sense to me then, but when I put myself into the IAM’s hands towards the back end of my sixteen year stint as a courier, I was exposed to the thinking first-hand. Out with my observer on one of my favourite cross-country routes in Kent, it wasn’t long before I was pulled up. I was told “you are braking on the approach to corners”. Yes, I knew that so a “what’s wrong with that” debate followed. To keep it short, I was told that if I was “judging corners correctly”, I wouldn’t need to use the brakes – I could do all my deceleration with a closed throttle and judicious use of the gears. As I already knew, this was explained as ‘acceleration sense’.

The use of gears as a substitute for brakes is a topic for another day, but I turned the question-and-answer game around and got him to explain why he’d thought I wasn’t judging the corners simply because he’d seen me braking. I asked if I had gone into any of the corners with the brakes still being applied, off-line or at an inappropriate speed. He had to admit the answer to all these questions was “no, you didn’t”.

So I asked how it was, that if I wasn’t making these errors, that I was reading the road incorrectly? The answer was:

“Because you had to brake on the approach to a bend.”

You should be able to see that’s a circular argument, and totally unsupported by any logical thinking. It’s simply a repetition of a mantra: ‘acceleration sense good, brakes bad’.

The proper debate should have been about the proper timing and the relative effectiveness of the two techniques – acceleration sense or positive braking – at getting the speed sorted out in such as way as to prevent the ‘in too fast’ error.

So let’s do that by looking at the ‘in too fast’ problem. In the ideal world of advanced riding, we’d assess every stretch of road correctly. We’d read each bend perfectly. And we’d never make the ‘in too fast’ mistake.

Back in the real world, I am happy to admit that I do cock up. I am not a perfect rider, and every once in a while I do discover myself arriving too fast for the next corner. And here’s a truth none of us should ever forget. If we DO make a mistake and end up arriving too fast for the bend, we’ll be lucky if we get away with a horrible line round the corner. If we’re not so lucky, then the likelihood is we’ll run wide. On a right-hander, that’s likely to be off the road. Been there, done that. And if we happen to run wide on a left-hander, that takes us into the oncoming lane. Been there, done that too. And I don’t want to repeat it because it’s pure chance if we get away with it. The Grim Reaper could easily be driving a Scania coming the other way. Running wide on a left-hander is one of the killer crashes on UK rural roads.

So I prepare to deal with the ‘in too fast’ mistake rather than make an assumption that I got it right. And the easiest way to do this on the the approach to a bend is to roll off the throttle AND apply the brakes lightly rather than rely on engine braking alone.

Why? Quite simple. As soon as the throttle is shut, that’s the limit to our deceleration. There’s nothing left unless we start forcing the bike down through the gears.

By contrast, braking lightly at the same time as decelerating ‘sets up’ the brakes ready to use them. We can apply anything from a feather touch which barely slows the bike any more than engine braking alone, right up to a full-on emergency stop.

At this point, the critics usually pop up.

“Ah, but if you’d read the road ahead correctly you wouldn’t need to brake.” Well, most corners in the UK are blind as we enter them, and whilst I’m pretty good at asking “what if…” and preparing just in case, I’m not prescient and what I expect to happen and what actually appears isn’t always the same. I’d rather be prepared for getting it wrong than patting myself on the back for getting it right.

“But you can also brake even if you’re using acceleration sense.” Absolutely we can. But if we’re shutting the throttle with our fingers on the twist grip, we have to disengage them and reach over to the brake lever, then we have to start squeezing progressively. If we are ALREADY braking lightly, we have eliminated the delay and we can go straight into positive braking. By removing this delay, we can either stop in a shorter distance or we can brake less hard than a rider who’s had to switch from decelerating using the engine to using the brakes.

“But you’re more likely to grab the front brake if you’re dangling your fingers over it.” This one actually makes some sense but it’s a misunderstanding of just why we’re using the ‘setting up’ technique. As you’ll know from my work on ‘No Surprise? No Accident!’ the trigger for the panic reactions that cause many motorcycle crashes is the SURPRISE! that results when we’re caught out by a situation developing in a way we didn’t expect. Keeping fingers off the front brake is no guarantee we won’t give it a huge handful as soon as we panic. By contrast, the action of switching from engine braking alone to the ‘set up’ approach which pre-loads the brakes with light pressure indicates we’ve already switched to a mindset where we are anticipating we might have to brake harder. And that means we’re far less likely to suffer SURPRISE! when the bend doesn’t do what we hope.

“OK, but you’ll slow down too much.” Remember, we’re only applying a feather-touch to the brakes on the approach to the corner. That’s not going to slow us dramatically – in fact, we probably won’t be any slower into the corner because we know we can lose speed rapidly if we need to. And if nothing reveals itself? Then we simply release the brakes and roll back on the throttle to get the bike balanced before we turn in to the corner itself. And in any case, it’s much easier to regain speed in a corner if we rolled in a bit too slow than it is to shed speed mid-corner if we ran in too hot.

And once again, I’m not the only one advocating this technique. The ‘setting up’ technique is routinely taught on the approach to unpredictable hazards in Australia.

Hopefully I’ve now persuaded you the ‘setting up’ approach to a corner has some genuine benefits and no real drawbacks. This isn’t about ‘riding perfection’ but all about being pragmatic. If it can go wrong, it WILL go wrong sooner or later – that’s the assumption at the foundation of Survival Skills advanced motorcycle riding courses. So if in ANY doubt, SET UP the brakes.

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05. Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 2

In part one of this mini-series, we took a look at an accident that happened to one of my trainees on her bike test. She had just performed a perfect emergency stop in tricky, damp conditions in front of the examiner when a moment later she locked up the front brake and fell off when a car pulled out in front of her. The question we need to answer is that with all the training we did, why did she revert to instinct and grab the front brake when confronted with a real emergency? My suggestions might surprise you but they have a solid grounding in sports psychology. That’s why the concept has been part of my approach to rider training since 1997.

If you missed Part One, you can find it here.

Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 2

My trainee had — in theory — been trained to brake in an emergency. Unfortunately, as the crash demonstrated, she hadn’t. She’d simply been trained to use a hard braking technique. What she hadn’t been trained to cope with was an emergency where hard braking was her ‘get out of trouble’ card. And this is the problem — learning technical skills is only one part of the problem. We have to understand how the brain responds to a threat, and right now, that’s barely covered in rider training at any level.

There’s a simple answer. She had the skill and knowledge to perform a perfectly good emergency stop in a situation she knew and expected, but when the car pulled out it was a novel situation. There was no ‘ritual’ automatic response that involved controlled use of the brakes. The amygdala — sometimes called the brain’s “survival centre” and historically referred to as the “reptilian brain” — detected a threat and took over. It reverted to the most basic collision‑avoidance strategy and triggered the panic grab of the brakes.

In riding terms, a ‘ritual’ is simply a learned motor sequence — like changing gear — that the brain can run automatically without conscious thought when it recognises the right cue. Once learned, the amygdala can trigger these responses instantly when it recognises the right cue — for gear changing, it would be the sound of the engine revving. With just a bit of experience, we don’t need to glance at the rev counter. Quite simply, emergency stop training only teaches the amygdala half the job. It learns how to brake hard, but not when to do it. The ‘cue’ is missing.

So we have to ensure the amygdala learns the essential ‘cue’.

Experience is one possible teacher. After locking the brakes and maybe falling off a few times, we learn to appreciate the risk of personal harm. We learn that staying on the bike hurts less than sliding beside it. Although it isn’t practice in the sense that we consciously know what we were doing, it is still learning by experience. We “burn” an alternative pathway to the instinctive reaction of grabbing the brakes. Even if we’re surprised by the next car that pulls out, the amygdala now has a better ritual pathway than its basic fight‑or‑flight wiring and follows that pathway to make a controlled stop.

Thus we defeat the “brake as hard as possible” instinct by learning to moderate our braking. Been there, done that. It’s still unconscious and unplanned, but it’s no longer instinctive. It shows we do learn by experience and this alternative pathway is what enables us to beat Code’s Survival Reactions that are triggered by the half-trained amygdala.

Let’s think about my test candidate again. The cue for her emergency stop in front of the examiner was the visual “hand up” signal. We’d trained her amygdala to run through the correct ritual response: shut throttle, gently apply the front, gently apply the rear, progressively squeeze the front, clutch in, foot down.

But when the real emergency developed, the cue was missing. We hadn’t taught her to link the emergency stop ritual to the trigger of an emerging car. When the car threatened her space, she was taken by surprise. Her amygdala wasn’t programmed to use the emergency stop ritual in this event, so it fell back on its primitive job — instinctive avoidance of harm via fight‑or‑flight — and she grabbed the front brake.

OK, you’ve probably spotted the problem. How do we train ourselves to deal with emergencies without experiencing them — which implies we have to survive the emergency? As I said, after a few front‑wheel lock‑ups, I personally learned not to grab the brakes as the in-built primitive pathways get overwritten my new learned behaviour. But learning by crashing really isn’t an ideal way to learn. It’s painful, expensive and occasionally termina.

Sports psychology shows the way forward. Sportspeople often have to compete in situations they can’t practise in. Tennis players and golfers spend their lives playing in front of a few dozen people, so appearing at Wimbledon or the Open triggers stress and fear of failure. Their performance collapses — a phenomenon known as choking. Their carefully learned techniques go out the window. So they use visualisation to overcome the problem.

At its most basic, visualisation means sitting back and mentally running through the steps needed to deal with the anticipated situation. The brain can be fooled into believing this is “real” experience and burns new pathways that avoid choking and instinctive reactions. The more vivid the visualisation, the more effective the training.

And that’s how we can learn to deal with situations we’ve not yet experienced and can’t practise realistically. We can use the same technique as golfers and tennis players imagining the winning shot to fool our amygdala into thinking “I’ve been here before and I know what to do” when a car really does pull out. That’s how we avoid survival reactions taking over.

And here’s something else — why wait until the car is pulling out? Why not teach ourselves to react to the tell‑tale signs of a junction — road signs, breaks in hedgerows, white paint at the roadside? Why not get into the habit of covering the brakes and horn when we first see the car? This way, rather than waiting for the car beginning to move, we use the sight of the car as the cue that trigger a proactive response.

The more tasks we routinely leave to the amygdala, the more attention we have left for everything else. Just as a competent rider isn’t consciously changing gear, a really good rider lets the amygdala hunt for hazards too.

If visualisation techniques had been combined with real emergency stop training, my trainee would have had a far better chance of reacting appropriately to the first real emergency she faced. Visualisation would have allowed her mind to connect the practical skills she’d learned through repetition with the real‑world trigger.

Unfortunately, visualisation is still missing from rider training at all levels.