Calibrating your Brake Power
Feb 12th, 2009 by Leo
When you’re driving a car, you probably learn intuitively that cars can brake way faster than they accelerate. Even exotic supercars brake faster than they can accelerate. This experience gets drilled into our brains, so that however fast you are able to accelerate in a car, you know that you’ll be able to brake a little faster. But on a motorcycle, acceleration and braking are about the same… And for some reason this throws people off. Your brain wants to assume that you can brake faster than you actually can… But the time and space it takes for you to get a motorcycle to 60 quickly is (roughly) about the same time and space it will take you to get back down to 0. On many sportbikes it takes you a little longer to slow down because a skinnier front tire does most of the work during hard braking.
So in a car, you can zoom down most of an empty city block full throttle, and slam on the brakes a quarter of a block before an intersection… Because cars stop faster than they accelerate. With ABS that’s even more the case. But try that on a bike, even a bike with ABS and you’ll roll right through the intersection and a quarter of the way down the next block.
The rule of speed is to ride only as fast as you can see. Nick Ientesch recommends practicing emergency braking from the speeds you normally ride. Do you ride at 65? You should find a place where you can safely try emergency braking from 65mph so you can see how long it really takes, and how much distance you travel before coming to a stop. Most people are surprised! Keep in mind that hard braking is a more difficult skill to master than accelerating, so you want to find your braking limit and then give yourself some margin for error. This gives you a more realistic idea of what a “safe speed” is when you’re riding on public roads.
Have a close-call story? Post it in the comments and help a CityBiker learn from your experience. Cheers!
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