Trail Braking

Full Transcript:

0:00:15 – Bret Tkacs
Welcome to Around the Wheel with Bret Tkacs. This time we’re talking with Peter Shimm, a 13-year veteran of riding and a relatively new adventure rider at two and a half years in the adventure world. He rides a 1200 GS from 2017. And we have a fantastic topic coming up today. And, Peter, why don’t I let you introduce how we got to this topic?

0:00:40 – Peter Shimm
Well, Bret, thanks for doing this. I am a huge fan boy of your videos and I am particularly very, very happy that you branched out with your new venture on YouTube. One of your recent topics was trail braking. I think it was a taped segment that you made in New Zealand or somewhere down under. It was really really good and got a very, very positive response in the comment section.

One of the things you touched on in that talk really resonated with me. You talked a little bit about blending the throttle and the brake. Blending the brake, but blending the controls, which is something that I learned from Lee Parks and his Total Control course, and it’s a technique that I just completely buy into. It’s just it’s made a huge difference in my riding. But yet, besides Lee Parks, you never, ever hear anybody talk or advocate that technique, and when you brought it up in your trail braking talk it really got my interest.

It apparently also got the interest of a lot of people who watched that video because in the comments section it just set off a firestorm of controversy. It was really really interesting some of the discussion that took place below in the comments section. I really would love to go into that specific topic deeper with you because I’ve just found it to be such a fantastic way to smooth the transition from deceleration to acceleration and the way it just smooths out your suspension and it doesn’t upset the suspension, so I’d really love for you to go into that in a deeper way.

0:02:35 – Bret Tkacs
Let’s definitely dive into that. I taught the Total Control stuff. Lee and I have known each other since before his book ever came out initially, and I also know Nick Ienatsch, and both those guys take a position on either side of me. Nick Ienatsch is far more into the separation of the braking and the throttle, which is a great way to trail brake. However, it requires a level of smoothness that often riders lack. And Lee Parks takes the other side of that. He likes very significant overlap of that braking and that blending, both that throttle and that braking. And again, also, that is a you know if you’ve done the course. I’m guessing you’ve done his level two if you’ve gotten into that. That it’s also a fairly high skillset. But one of the things both of these guys have is a background in racing. They both spend a lot of time on the racetrack and although both of them advocate street riding and they use their trail braking methods to the street, they weren’t developed from and for specifically street riders, and that’s something I do differently. The way I teach trail braking is for street riders and it was made because I track and follow riders on the street. I’ve spent 11 years training riders on road and slowly came into this process where I’ve sort of shed off Lee’s method of trail braking. I’ve shed off what Nick does and before that, if you look down through a super bike school, they’re not into trail braking at all and kind of put those away because I’ve spent time watching riders on the road and the other thing that I’ve done is I’ve spent time because I’ve had so many years of watching this, of going. Now let’s compare that skill set to the actual stats where people are dying out on the road. That’s where trail braking came in, because here’s the sweet spot about trail braking.

I mentioned this in the video and I’m gonna bring it up again to you. The key to trail braking is not about going faster through corners, which people always seem to misunderstand. You mentioned that firestorm where people just get really caught up. Nobody should ever do that. If you’re going in and you got a trail brake, you’re going too fast. You trail brake, you’re going too fast. You should do all your braking before the corner. But the reality is we can’t always see everything in the corner before we’re in the corner. It’s just not possible. Trees, you have cars, you have banked roads where you can’t see sand and gravel.

Trail braking is really about extending your braking zone and that’s, I think, what people are really lacking. This whole blending idea that you bring up, that you’ve learned with the Lee Parks stuff and I talk about in the video it has a lot to do with one is to carry that stability into the corner which you learned with Lee, where you carry that stability in that suspension, where you’re not making sudden changes and you continue to make those changes as you go into the corner. And that’s one of the certainly one of the key aspects of it. But it has so much more. I mean, it can change the way the bike turns into the corner, it can change where you are positioned in the corner so you’re not increasing lean in the middle.

And, most importantly, it all boils down to one thing and and I think you know and anybody listening to us if they spend time knows that one of my number one answers is well, that depends. Well. What bike should he get? Well, that depends. Well. How fast should I go? Well, that depends. Well. Should I trail brake? Well, that depends, because there’s always so many variables and trail braking is one of those techniques that is specifically for a that depends situation. You’re not committing to anything except the exit. After you see the exit, trail braking allows you to delay that commitment to the exit until you’re there, and that’s why I got into this and talk about it so much in that video, and especially training with people like Lee and Nick and California Superbike School and all these other places that I’ve spent so much time.

0:06:26 – Peter Shimm
One thing, specifically that I’d like to get your input on is ground clearance. For me, the idea that when you trail brake, into a corner and then you’re comfortable with your speed and direction, maybe you see the exit of the turn, maybe you don’t, but you’re comfortable with your speed and direction. Maybe you see the exit of the turn, maybe you don’t, but you’re very comfortable, and it’s time for you to get on the throttle. And the Ienatsch school (Yamaha Champions Riding School) basically says you have to let go of the brake before you apply the throttle. I suppose, if you’re a much better rider than me, or most, you can do that in such a smooth way that it doesn’t upset the suspension. But if you think about it, even the very, very best rider, when they’re off the brake, there is a millisecond or some fraction of a second between being off the brake and on the throttle.

The throttle, though, to me is the key in a turn, because when you’re applying power to the rear wheel, the suspension rises, and to me is really the key to successfully negotiating the apex of a turn. Because you are raising the suspension, you’re decreasing the chance of scraping, you’re decreasing the chance of leveraging the bike and low siding. To me, that’s the beauty of leveraging the bike and low siding. To me, that’s the beauty of blending the brake and throttle, because there isn’t that transition zone between brake and throttle and it’s just a beautiful way to sort of maintain the speed, maintain the height of the suspension and smoothly get through that turn in the safest possible way.

0:08:04 – Bret Tkacs
Most riders, especially if we’re talking about road riding. For me, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re adventure riders, we’re street riders.

0:08:12 – Peter Shimm
We’re motorcyclists.

0:08:13 – Bret Tkacs
Right, that’s where we live. We’re not on the racetrack. Some of the riders that are listening to this may be on Harleys or Cruisers or very limited ground clearance motorcycles. Most of us are probably going to be on Africa twins or 1200 GSs or something where we have a very significant amount of ground clearance. Yes, absolutely correct, when you add the throttle.

One of the greatest myths out there is when you add the throttle, the front end comes up, but when you add the throttle, the back end squats. And that’s not true and it’s called anti-squat geometry, so anybody can look that up and go. What’s anti-squat geometry? So anybody can look that up and go. What’s anti-squat geometry? Essentially, the bikes are engineered so that they don’t squat when you add throttle. Otherwise it would be disadvantageous to us to add throttle on a curve, but ground clearance is really for that limit. And on a cruiser, of course you can do that on the street, because you have so little to start with. And, frankly, if you or I are that close to limit on a 1200 GS, we’re probably doing things that are already poor choices, you know, unless we’re on a track day or something like that, where I think we’re missing. The point is, what is happening to cause that rear to rise, what has to occur to make that happen? And the throttle is key, because the throttle is so much more than go and stop. It changes stability, it changes loading. And that’s what’s going to happen here.

When I add throttle, if the back wheel is trying to push itself underneath the motorcycle and leverage the motorcycle up between the torque of the drive system and where the swing arm pivot is in relation to the rear axle, and that’s essentially what primarily creates that anti-squad geometry. It’s pushing against something to push the bike forward and to push the bike up. And traction comes from load. The more load you have, or the more pounds per square inch you have, essentially you have more traction. Of course there are extremes where this rule changes. So anybody listening I know, I know, I know, I know it’s not always true. There’s a limit on both ends.

This is why, when we apply the brakes, when we do quick stops and hard braking, we transfer load to the front. When we start, we’re riding down the road, we’re about 50-50. Front tire, back tire, should be about a 50-50 load. As soon as we apply the brake, we transfer load forward. On most modern bikes we’re talking 80% to up to 100% at some point during that braking process, and that’s because we’re moving load forward. Well, when you accelerate, you’re doing exactly the opposite. You’re putting the load to the back. So as you drive, it allows load to go to the back, which is why people sense a squat, because the front rises more than the rear. They’re being pushed back into the bike, the bike is being pushed up into the rider and it feels like it’s squatting. That’s that load transfer to the back which gives you traction. But also the tire has to push through the machine. That’s load on the ground. That’s pounds per square inch.

Now let’s take this one more step, because you love suspension. We already kind of touched on this before we started our chat. Suspension is what allows that pressure to occur in a very effective manner, what I refer to as keeping a tension in the driveline. Tension in the driveline means there’s just no slack. That means if I’m braking with the front, that’s allowing load to the front. That increases traction. If I have tension in the back and the rear wheel is pushing against the front, that puts load to the ground in the front. That puts more pounds per square inch on both ends of the bike. Now, if I put too much throttle to the rear wheel, I can overpower the front wheel and then we wipe out. So obviously there are limits within this, which is why trail braking is a polishing technique. It’s the way that we polish skills in the corners, that we don’t have to worry about that ground clearance but it’s not necessarily ground clearance. That’s your greatest advantage. It’s traction.

0:12:09 – Peter Shimm
You brought up the difference between track techniques and road techniques and a lot of people just offhand will say well, trail braking is just a track technique, it has no place in the road. But trail braking is not a track technique. Trail braking is a safety technique. I can’t overemphasize that, I don’t know. I mean also in the comment section after your video there was a lot of discussion about that and there’s the question of you know, when do you introduce the technique to trail braking to newer riders? And I know that Lee Parks has started to take over a bunch of states new rider programs and I think you had sort of mentioned also perhaps that’s going to be happening in Washington.

0:12:55 – Bret Tkacs
Actually Washington. I wrote the new program for Washington and most of the schools have adopted that, and then also Idaho is in the process of adopting the curricula that I wrote the new program for Washington and most of the schools have adopted that, and then also Idaho is in the process of adopting the curricula that I wrote.

0:13:07 – Peter Shimm
So what’s your feeling about when to introduce that technique to newer riders?

0:13:12 – Bret Tkacs
I introduced it to them at the very first class. Yeah, right out of the gate. Now I do it in a very sly way. We don’t teach trail braking to new riders, but we introduce them to situations that require it as they’re riding through the class. Towards the end of the day, we end up with a. Basically it’s a racetrack that all the new riders get to ride through and there’s a passing zone and there’s multiple curves, there’s decreasing radius curves that are all set up in this new rider format. They will end up trailing their speed as they enter a corner, which is essentially trail braking.

If you go into a corner and you apply the brakes too late, that’s oh shit, braking right. That’s when you’ve made a mistake. The way I define trail braking is a planned, deliberate deceleration before the turn point. That carries after the turn point, and most trail braking is very short. You’re on the brakes, the bike starts to tip in and you’re immediately you’re bleeding off the brakes. And the reason is trail braking is not for every corner. It’s a 3% skill. Most corners you don’t need it. You can do all braking ahead ahead of time. The problem is if you have a 3% or a 1% skill, we don’t die in most corners, we don’t crash in most corners. It’s that 1%, it’s that half a percent, it’s that percent of a percent, of a percent, of a half a percent. That’s when we need that skill, because of an error we’ve made or something else. That’s going on in that particular situation and that’s what braking is is really all about. It’s about developing a skill set so you never, ever have the possibility to run wide in a corner again.

0:14:54 – Peter Shimm
But it’s so much more than that really, and I know you agree with this because you are the champion of being a weightless rider. Yes, I am, absolutely. Trail braking changes the front end geometry. It basically compresses the front forks, it decreases the rake and trail and it makes turn in so easy that you hardly have to put an input with your hands. Again, it makes you more weightless, it makes it more effortless to turn into the turn.

0:15:27 – Bret Tkacs
I’m going to take it one step farther than that. If you have everything in the exact right place, it can require no effort at the hands.

Exactly no weightless yeah. Now, if you’re trying to do a quick turn which Lee in his program he does a lot of quick turn stuff. And if you think about from a racetrack perspective, we go deep because you want to straighten out every straightaway. Every straightaway you want straight. The longer it is, the more drive you get, the longer you can wait to brake and that’s where you make your time up on a racetrack. So if I can shorten the corner by going deeper into a corner and make it a very quick turn, even if I have to slow a lot, as soon as I complete my turn I’m full throttle and that’s a huge advantage.

On the street I’m not a huge advocate of quick turns, I like slow, I like lazy. My whole teaching style is about being lazy, about energy conservation, about we’re never in a hurry, nothing’s ever a surprise. We don’t have events, we have processes. And whether I’m teaching off-road or I’m teaching on the road or I’m teaching on the racetrack, it’s the same thing. I look for smooth and with the trail braking one of the things I look at, where you’re correct if you apply enough brake and you can compress the front end. You change the brake and trail for most motorcycles and it turns in much quicker.

But from a trail braking perspective, what I am a proponent of for the open road is you’re still doing all the braking before a corner that you think you would even if you didn’t trail brake. And that’s what I think a lot of the people miss. And that’s why, when you saw those comments on that video, people were screaming and yelling well, you should be slowing before the corner. I’m not going to disagree with them. But if I can’t see the other side of that corner, how do I set up the proper entry point? I can’t set my proper speed, I don’t have enough information. Trail braking allows me to do what I think I need to make a safe corner, but hold brakes until until I actually have all the information needed to commit to an exit. That way, if I’m going into a corner and I can just continue to slow, continue to slow, continue to slow until it opens up and then I can drive out.

And this is how people get in trouble. They drop into a corner, they find out, let’s face it. Not 90s, that’s not a problem. It’s those 180 degree curves. It’s those 360 degree curves, and they do exist. I’ve written through them. It’s the ones we don’t expect the non-typical, the decreasing radius we expect to be a constant radius. That’s the 1% skill, that’s the 3% skill, that’s why we polish these and if we don’t use them on other corners, where they’re useful but not necessary, they won’t be available to us when they’re necessary.

0:18:08 – Peter Shimm
Taking it even a step further, and this is something I’ve never heard anybody advocate, but I guess it’s something that I’ve developed. I’m almost ashamed to bring it up around other riders because this is fun.

0:18:18 – Bret Tkacs
I’m looking forward to this.

0:18:20 – Peter Shimm
Well, the key to any sort of braking. We’re talking millimeters with your one finger. We’re not talking grabbing or even a centimeter. We’re talking millimeters of pressure that you’re applying to the lever and sometimes, if I’m, say, in a decreasing radius turn. That surprises me. And I’m already on the throttle, sometimes I will, even as I’m on the throttle, just add a millimeter of brake. It just so smoothly just turns the bike a little bit more. This is a technique I swear by. I get it that people sort of like raise their eyebrows and gnash their teeth and they think oh, my God, you know you’re in the middle of a turn, you’re applying brake, but we’re not talking a lot of brake, we are talking a millimeter.

0:19:07 – Bret Tkacs
Anybody that says that is not self-reflecting. We’ve all done it. We’ve all blown a corner. We’ve all broken the middle of the corner. The question is is how consistent can we be and do we have a technique that backs up the things that we do in that particular incident or that scenario? What I’m looking for people doing is pick up the brakes before.

Your mistake is not braking in the middle of the corner. Your mistake, in my opinion, would be releasing the brakes before you got to that point. Why weren’t you still touching the brake? And when I say trail braking, I’m talking sometimes just enough to activate the taillight. I’ve already taken the slack out of the brake lever. I’m not feeling the effects of braking, but I have not given up pressure. I am still there. And if I get to the middle of the corner and find out, oh, this corner is a lot tighter than I thought it was, and all I do is increase pressure at that point to tighten up my curve. Nothing wrong with that, absolutely nothing wrong with that. The problem is when you get off the brakes, back on the throttle, and then you start coming back onto the brakes again. But the question I’m going to throw out there is. Is this actually one corner, or was this really a double apex that we’re in?

0:20:25 – Peter Shimm
It may have been I mean, I do it all the time and it probably is a double apex but it’s to the point where now it’s not like I’m even taken by surprise, I’ll do it just as part of my riding routinely and you can say well, why don’t you just countersteer a little bit more instead? And it goes back to being weightless. If I can just apply just a tiny little bit of brake and the bike just sort of very smoothly tightens its radius, either by decreasing speed because speed, you know radius is proportional to speed, by decreasing speed because speed, you know, radius is proportional to speed, or it’s basically decreasing the rake and trail just a little bit, so that, but it, but it almost just feels like a servo, you know. It’s like this very, very smooth turn in and it’s weightless.

The thing about riding I’ve found is only you know how well you are riding. No one behind you can tell how well you’re riding. You know when you’re doing a curve so well and it just it’s like this magical feeling and it’s just weightless. You’re not impressing anybody else. This is we ride for ourselves, we ride because it’s just it feels good, there’s this yeah, it’s magic.

0:21:38 – Bret Tkacs
That’s why we do it Exactly.

0:21:39 – Peter Shimm
There’s this magic that’s inside of you and for me, the technique of just trail braking well and the smooth transition brake and and throttle. You know, if I see a decreasing radius turn, it takes me by surprise to just handle it so smoothly. It’s just the best feeling in the world. That’s why I do it, because it’s, and it makes me feel like I’m still in complete control. There’s no panic, it’s just very, very smooth.

0:22:03 – Bret Tkacs
Well, you hit the nail on the head of why I teach the trail braking, what I do with my street skills one-on-one class, which is a a civilian variation of both the on-track class I teach the law enforcement and the on-road class I teach to the military and. And the concept behind that is arc equals speed, speed equals arc, which you already just brought up. The faster you go at any given lean angle, the greater the arc is. And if I’m going slower at that same exact lean angle, the arc tightens up. And if we go back to these bikes with limited ground clearance or in our situation where maybe we have limited traction rain or sand or whatever it is and we don’t want to lean anymore, or there’s nothing left, we can’t lean anymore. If we go back to what I refer to as the press and pray theory of riding, which is, you’re into the corner too far, you think you’re blowing it, you think you’re going to run wide. Just look farther through the corner and press more. The problem with that is that most people have already hit a personal limit, not necessarily a motorcycle limit. They haven’t run out of ground course, they haven’t run out of traction, they’ve run out of the will to press more and to stay relaxed. The option is to go. How do we as riders make sure that we’re in a situation where we absolutely never find ourselves over speed or running wide on a corner? And the key is that whole speed versus or arc equal speed.

If I’m into a corner and I find out that corner is I’m going too fast for the arc or too fast for me, and it’s not even the motorcycle. I’m just I’m not going to finish this arc. All I have to do is slow down. If I slow down, the arc tightens up, the bike finds its own way through and we’re safe. And that’s why I’m such a proponent of trail braking. If we go into every corner and we just don’t take our fingers off those brakes until I see an exit, I can add throttle for that. I know where I’m going. And this could be predictive cornering, which is something I teach at an advanced level or where we physically can see it where it’s the vanishing point, or the road. If I hold my brake until I get that commitment point, then I’m good to go. I’m never going to be in trouble because you cannot, absolutely without a doubt. My one of my hard and fast rules is you never ride faster than the distance you can stop. And if I’m in the middle of a corner at 360 and it says, oh well, it’s a decreasing rate, it tightened up, I was running wide, then obviously you couldn’t stop in the distance between where you were and where that corner began to tighten up, or else why you run in wide, and that’s obviously judgments. Where we crash, that’s why we primarily die. But trail braking is one of those skill sets that, if it’s used properly, if it’s taught properly, not as a high performance on road technique, but is the ultimate safety switch, the ultimate in commitment and, let’s face it, when you go through, if you go to a racetrack.

This last performance class I did was Nick Inich. He came up here to Washington and gave me a phone call and said hey, brad, I want to show you what I’m doing out here. And I said, okay, great. So I went out to the racetrack. Somebody else loaned me a sport bike because I’m out of them. My GS wasn’t quite up to the task at the time but they’re still very performance focused, even though he has probably the best trail braking program on a racetrack I know of. I really like it, I advocate it. I passed it.

He has a really neat drill he does on his second level of his class, which is he has a moving apex drill. You’re going around the track and you’d set up. You’d come down and catch this late apex and you’re trail braking to find it. During this activity he’s got people out along the track who go out and move these cones all over the track where they are a created apex. You’re supposed to apex at the tip of this cone and he doesn’t move it like six inches or four inches. You come around the corner and all of a sudden they’ve moved it nine feet.

I mean that’s a huge change and you have to use the speed adjustment in the curve, the trail braking, to get yourself to tip all the way in to pick up this apex, or they’ll move it farther out, which means, as soon as you see it, you have to drive the throttle a lot harder.

To me that’s one of the best drills I’ve ever seen on the racetrack. That relates to what we do on the street, because the apex is never the same place, because you come around the corner and now there’s a rabid squirrel standing there that you have to avoid, or there’s gravel that was dumped off, or there’s a car where they’re using part of your lane, or you’re coming in to hit the yellow line and the car is there, so now you have to hold your apex out or your line out a little bit farther so you don’t plow your face into their grill. And that’s really a great illustration of how that works and where you can learn this skill set without being out on the open road, because that’s obviously. We don’t want people learning trail braking on the public road and then crashing because they’ve never done this overlapping of controls, this blending of throttle and brake, where you’re doing them at exactly the same time.

0:27:15 – Peter Shimm
That does sound like a really really good drill. Youtube video was that when we were discussing blending controls, blending brake and throttle, is that racers, people who do track days and they’ve done a particular track, literally thousands of laps, and they know down to the very inch when they’re supposed to be off the throttle and on the brakes and vice versa, and they know exactly where that apex is. And it’s really fascinating that Nick actually is trying to brake their their their comfort zone and get them used to reading the road more. It’s sort of interesting.

On a recent sport touring trip I took a friend of mine who introduced the track to me and he’s a fantastic track rider, introduced the track to me and he’s a he’s a fantastic track rider, really great. He’s. In fact he’s an instructor. He saw some of my videos I made on my GS in the mountains and he got really excited about, uh, sport touring and adventure riding. He went out and bought a GS and came with me down into the Appalachians and you know he’s a fantastic rider on the track.

But I’ll tell you he was absolutely scared, very, very scared on the road because he was not used to. He didn’t have the skill set to read a road yet and he’s going to because he’s a great rider. You know, I’ve seen him ride on the track. He’s a great rider, but he doesn’t have the skill set to read the road. That’s the number one skill set you need as a sport tour. And that’s the beauty of trail braking is that you are reading the road and you’re basically letting the road dictate to you when to trail off the brakes and get on the throttle. And that’s really fascinating that Nick is trying to sort of incorporate that type of reading the road in his track.

0:29:03 – Bret Tkacs
Well, certainly he’s creating an opportunity where you have to make changes that are unexpected. You know, even if you come around the corner you might see that it moved and now you’re trying to make those changes where you don’t get to memorize the track. I did for quite a few years the street skills program. I do that’s now closed course training and I did for the military and I get to do, still on the track, for the police, that course. Originally, when I did it for just civilian consumption, I reversed the track. We would run the tracks in reverse and we would put up road signs and we did the same thing where we constantly tried to change it so that people didn’t ride the track. They had to ride the skillset or the activity we were developing and that braking the the way.

I teach it for street riders because I’m such an advocate of what I call predictive cornering. There are so many things that tell us what a corner is doing before we actually see what the corner is doing, and I teach things about overlapping contours, motion, parallax. There’s a wedging effect for tree lines that’ll give you basically a vanishing point in the sky. You can look through the trees and you look for shading, you look for the way the light shines through, you look at bank and angle and there’s just so many things that can tell you that will give you very accurate predictions for what the road’s going to do. But you still don’t see the road, which means you can’t commit until you know 100% that trail braking allows you that reserve. So if you misread, if you see something isn’t right, if you look through a corner and go, oh, it’s going to hook, and all of a sudden you find out, oh, that’s a road that’s entering it. It actually hooks the other way. And now I’m in a position that I wasn’t thinking I was going to be in.

And when you’re new and you’re trying to do this road reading, as you brought this person you ride with, he’s learning how to read pavement on public roads very different than a racetrack. Having that reserve, having that ability to go, I thought this was going to be a 90 degree and it’s 180, but I’m not in a bad place because all I have to do is just add a little more brake. The corner tightens up, not because I’m leaning more, but because I’m going slower, or you’re going through and you’re you think you’re braking. It opens up, it just gives you a reserve. Even if you make a mistake, it doesn’t matter, because you’re never riding faster than you can see and you’re still on the brakes and you’re just fine tuning that speed, so you’re not reacting, you’re not dynamiting your brakes in the middle of the corner. If you’re reacting, you’ve made a mistake.

0:31:33 – Peter Shimm
Right. That has to be emphasized is that what we’re talking about here are literally a millimeter on the lever of the brake at times in or out. It’s not an on-off switch, it’s just this continuum. You do have to adjust to the corner and the place that people get into problems is when they actually apply a centimeter, an inch of brake. We’re really talking very fine control.

I think you once brought it up, or you brought it up in that talk of yours the human brain. If you look at the motor cortex, which is a strip of the brain that controls all the motor function in your body, the amount of that motor cortex dedicated to your fingers is almost half of the motor cortex. That’s why what we’re talking about with trail braking, especially with the front brake, versus the rear brake, where you don’t really have that type of control with your foot we’re talking just about a millimeter. Just a tiny bit of pressure on that brake makes a huge difference in your turning radius Because, as you said, when you apply that brake you’re decreasing speed a little bit. Speed is related to the radius of the turn. You’re also changing the front end geometry, so you’re decreasing rake and trail and that also helps turn in. Very, very fine inputs make a huge difference. But it has to be fine.

0:32:59 – Bret Tkacs
Let’s jump back to the overlapping of controls or the, the blending, sometimes called blending of controls. Just to clarify for those that are listening when we’re talking about or when I’m talking about, cause I know Peter’s on point with me. I know the people that he’s trained with, I know what he’s been taught. We’re not talking about huge overlaps. We’re not trying to do 80% of the braking with 80% of the throttle. These are very fine overlaps where as one bleeds off, the other one bleeds in and in reality, most of the time, most trail braking is short duration trail braking, meaning you start the trail braking just before your tip in and before your bike ever even gets close to folding, you’ve already bled the brakes completely off and now you’ve already transitioned to positive throttle. And this means when I’m braking, I begin my braking by applying the brakes and then slowly closing the throttle up behind the brake never to fully closed, just to whatever minimum I’m going to go to. And when it’s time to accelerate, I want to make sure that when I release I don’t end up with a surge where the suspension’s upset, which, more importantly, means we get a sudden change at the traction, especially if we’re close to a limit. What that means is I’m holding the brake and I start to ease on just slightly with the throttle, so I put a little power behind the brake and I accelerate by releasing the brake because the power’s already behind it, and then that’s just a very short bleed out and that’s how I keep that tension in the driveline. That’s how I make sure that the suspension isn’t moving back and forth. The throttle itself is so misunderstood. The throttle allows you to control traction at the front and the back. It allows you to control where you’re going to ride within your suspension travel. The throttle can control acceleration, of course, and braking. It has a lot of different forces and if you’re leaned over that speed, that throttle and brake also control your position in the lane. The whole press and pray. I just want to make the corner. I’m going too fast. Push harder, look through the corner more Doesn’t work because you’ve already hit a mental block. By the time you get to that point, most riders have already hit a mental block, which means the other option is just slow. Slow down means the other option is just slow, slow down. And if you slow down, your arc is going to decrease, because arc equals speed. The faster you go at any given lean angle. The bigger the arc. The more you slow, the smaller the arc. So if I’m mid corner and I start bleeding, that brake on more, and that’s what I’m talking about. You’re talking about millimeters and I think about the ounces of pressure or the quarter ounce, or these little fractions of pressure at the lever where you don’t even see the movement.

That’s the kind of braking that we’re generally doing specifically for the street, because trail braking isn’t reactive, it’s a plan. It’s not because you screwed up, it’s because you knew there might be a change. And as soon as that road starts to tighten up, I continually slow. If it opens up, I accelerate. The distance tells me what I need to do, which is why the apex is completely irrelevant for a street rider, totally irrelevant. We don’t care about the apex at all, only the exit. And after the exit comes my turn point and whatever happens in between. If there’s an apex, all you do is you look back over your shoulder and go oh, that’s where the apex was, but it’s never part of the plan.

0:36:23 – Peter Shimm
The benefit of blending controls also is just the sheer joy that you experience of being absolutely smooth through a turn. It’s a feeling that’s even hard to describe. But I’ll tell you, no one knows how well you’re riding except you. It really doesn’t even matter if anybody knows how well you’re riding. But when you hit a turn perfectly and it’s just absolutely smooth and the suspension doesn’t move an inch between deceleration and acceleration and it feels like it’s just an automatic transmission Boy, is that a great feeling. I mean just the feeling of total control and just it’s just hard to describe. You got, you got to do it to experience it.

0:37:08 – Bret Tkacs
And trail braking is not an advanced rider’s skill set. It should be taught to beginners. Beginners will do it. We all trail brake. Every single one of us has been off the accelerator, going into a curve them to experience the fact it’s okay brake in in a corner, and we braking in in a corner activities. We stop in corners where they have stop signs. Why shouldn’t they? We teach them blending as a brand new rider, though.

What do you think clutch and throttle is? If I have to release the brake and add throttle and ease out the clutch all at the same time, I’m blending controls. The idea to blend the throttle and the front brake becomes more challenging only because it’s the same hand doing two jobs. But what I have found? The longer a rider waits to pick up any other technique or any secondary technique, the harder it is for them, the more they struggle with it. I see instructors all the time who ride like very skillful beginners or a secondary technique. The harder it is for them, the more they struggle with it. I see instructors all time who ride like very skillful beginners, and they’re often the most difficult riders to teach these other techniques too.

I always tell my riders hey look, as soon as you’re not thinking about how to use the clutch, you’re not thinking about how to use the brakes. That’s when you come. Do the Street Skills 101, which focuses on threshold braking and trail braking. That whole course, the hands-on portion, is nothing but trail braking and threshold braking. That’s it. And they should be doing that within their first year of riding, not two years in not hey, become an expert. Go to the racetrack and then come learn how to trail brake, because trail braking is a lifesaver skill. It’s that one to 3% skill set that’s going to make a difference Because, again, as I mentioned, we don’t die most of the time. We don’t need these extra skills most of the time. We need these extra skills that one time will die if we don’t have it.

0:39:12 – Peter Shimm
Right. Trail braking is is not a track technique. Trail braking is a safety technique and it absolutely saves lives. It’s not even a question to me. If you’ve been on the road long enough, you are going to miscalculate your speed going into a turn. It’s just going to happen and you have to have the tool in your toolbox to handle that situation.

0:39:36 – Bret Tkacs
And to clarify, Peter, just to throw out at that, let me reiterate it’s not about trail braking because you overshot the corner. You overshot the corner because you weren’t trail braking. Just because, when people are listening, I want them to understand. Trail braking is not the save your ass. Mid-corner braking. That mid-corner braking is, oh shit, braking. That’s all it is. We’ve all done it, as you’ve mentioned. But trail braking is about never overshooting that corner, never making that mistake to begin with.

0:40:07 – Peter Shimm
Right, but you can enter a corner and really have no idea, at the entrance of that corner, what type of radius you’re dealing with. And if you are trail braking, you have the ability to withstand anything that’s going to come your way. But if you’re not trail braking, you just don’t have that tool.

And the only way and the only way that you’re going to be effective at it is if you do it all the time. You know. You can’t just sort of say oh, I’m going to use this tool this time and not another time. You’ve got to do it, or at least be ready to do it every single turn.

0:40:42 – Bret Tkacs
If you have to think about it, it’s not something you’re ever going to be able to use when you need it. Right. This carries over to the dirt as well. Trail braking is very different when we get off-road. So if you’re talking about adventure, guys going okay, I understand the street thing. Well, how’s this work off-road? Trail braking off-road is the same concept. So we’re still talking about slowing to see the exit, slowing to see oncoming traffic.

The only difference between it is on the street we have a lot of traction, even in low traction situations. Compared to the off-road we have a lot of traction, which means I can brake fairly fairly aggressively most of the time on pavement. In the dirt we decrease lean angle. So I’m much more likely to brake by by just trailing off the throttle or having just enough brake pressure that my brake light’s on. But I’m not really hard on the brakes.

And if you think about it like you would on the road, if I threw sand on the road, how hard would you trail brake? If I had a potential of ice or something wet on the road, how hard would I trail brake? Well, I’m going to do a lot more before I get to it. I’m going to be a lot more gentle when I’m in there, and off-road is the same way. I mean, you’re just it’s a much lower, lower traction situation to begin with, but certainly using your brakes as we go into the corner is just not. It’s not a taboo, it’s not a problem. It’s something that we should use, as long as we’re using it skillfully.

0:42:02 – Peter Shimm
Well, and it allows you to enter a corner at a slightly higher speed because you still have the ability to slow down some more, Whereas if you don’t have that ability, if you’re not trail braking, you have to go at a very conservative rate into a turn. If that is your strategy basically not trail braking well then what you’re basically doing? If you looked at a graph of your speed, you’re having wide swings of velocity, which affects your suspension, and it really decreases the smoothness of your riding. It really decreases the smoothness of your riding. I do trail brake when I go off-road and it’s very subtle and, like you said, you’re in a low traction environment. I’m not talking about charging into a turn at 50 miles an hour, but, on the other hand, it allows me to enter turns off-road much faster than I would, and it also allows me to be much more smooth between deceleration and acceleration off-road.

0:43:01 – Bret Tkacs
And I have no problem with any of that, provided one thing I can always stop in the distance I can see. My assumption is something is dead stopped in the road. Just assume there’s a semi that’s crossing both lanes and if I can’t stop with ease in the distance, I can see when that appears that’s a problem Off-road. I assume that there’s a closing speed, that that vehicle is coming towards me, there’s no lines. People have a tendency to drive either towards the center or down the middle when you’re on gravel roads, and most of us are like that, which is why on the BDR group they have a big stay right campaign going on, because there’s been so many head-on impacts that they’re concerned that it’s going to jeopardize these routes. With the BDRs that are coming out on the East Coast and West Coast, always your rule. That stands above everything. I cannot ride faster than the distance I can see and stop in without doing an emergency stop.

Peter, thank you very much for coming on and chatting about this. I love this topic. I think it’s one of the most misunderstood topics. Certainly for street riders out there it’s very contentious. As you mentioned, there’s an entire firestorm of conversation when it comes up. I feel that mostly it’s misunderstanding what trail braking is for street riders and not understanding that this is not a reactive thing. This is about riding faster on the road. This is about increasing our reserves and our safety, making it more enjoyable, as you put. The enjoyment of just being more skillful and having more control over my motorcycle is really what makes this such a phenomenal technique, both on-road and off-road.

0:44:48 – Peter Shimm
Well, I think that we’re really in a golden age of motorcycling, not only because the motorcycles themselves now are just phenomenal I mean, I ride a 1200 GS which all the time I’m just smiling ear to ear how great the bike is. It does everything I wanted to, everything I asked of it but, more importantly, it’s a golden age for motorcycle information. People like you who put together YouTube channels that offer information that even 10 years ago would have been near impossible for most of us to even access, or if we did access, it would have cost us thousands and thousands of dollars. And I am just so grateful that you’ve put together the channel you have and I’ve gotten so much out of your teaching and Lee’s teaching. You know a bunch of other YouTube channel teachers. I’m just very, very grateful and that’s why I’ve supported you on Patreon, because you know I support excellence and I appreciate how much you have changed my life in motorcycling.

0:45:58 – Bret Tkacs
And thank you and I appreciate all of that and that’s the reason I do this. I do this to help people. I couldn’t do this without the Patreon support when I opened up that page and I thought I really want to keep doing this. I really want to keep helping people. I work a regular job to pay my bills. I need something that’ll pay for my camera gear, my gas, these things that allow me to keep offering this to people. Thank you, and all those of you that are listening that are Patreon supporters.

I have a lot of hope that I can keep making these for years to come, because my list is huge.

I go through every comment on the videos, certainly for a very long period of time after I first post, and when people come up and ask for different topics or they want me to expand on it, I write all those down and then I wait for the opportunity, the right weather or the right situation where I can just kind of pull that out and then answer that topic.

It’s a growing and I’m really looking forward to addressing all of these. Thank you, Peter Shimm, for coming on the channel and giving me your time and your experience. Peter, again, is a regular motorcyclist, like most of you that are listening, and that’s what makes this so exciting and so interesting and this is what this podcast is supposed to be about is talking to each of you that are educated through the books and through the courses you take, through the experiences that you have and being able to discuss this with you. It helps me expand my teaching and inspires me to do more research on my own. Thank you once again for listening to Around the Wheel with Bret Tkacs and Peter Shimm. All right, awesome.

Transcribed by https://podium.page