breaking on the track

[OreoGaborio]

Originally Posted by was92v

I can only speak for myself, but I rarely use the rear brake even on the street unless I am in a low traction situation or have a passenger, to lessen the weight transfer and make the ride smoother. Lately I have been practicing with the rear brake and it seems to be promising, I'll have to see where that takes me. When I learned to ride (in the stone age), rear drum brakes tended to lock suddenly for no particular reason when used at all, or just didn't do anything, so I just quit using them. The rear brake on my F4i actually works pretty well.

For me, while in Hi-performance riding mode, the front brakes provides 100% of my braking. The engine provides none. while Sport riding engine braking is used some and just riding around it provides more. But, when I am really in the zone, I have very little use for the rear brake. First off, absolute control of the machine is mandatory and allowing the engine to drag the ass end around is not using my control. It takes too long to do anything, not an efficient use of time, can cause suspension agitation that you did not plan for(not your control)and can be hard on the equipment.
If you are using the engine to brake for a corner, you have lost 3-5 seconds per lap that you can't get back and it is just not precise. On the track, if you are not on the throttle
you should be on the brakes. Anything else is wasting time. Less time on the brakes+more time on the throttle=quicker lap times. Precision application of the brakes and throttle are the only way to become consistent and will give you a repeatable sequence of events. By breaking down a lap into repeatable events, you can then start drilling into each event to measure your mental performance. Actions will (or seem to)become very slow and you can try different changes to archive a kind of harmony with the bike and track that you are working your craft on. When you get it right there is no better feeling in the world. When you get it wrong, you know exactly what you did and can change it to try something else with relative safety. Oops, sorry I almost got into this too deep.

Oh, and I'm from kintucke too ya'll... But not for a while.

Well put. Some things I don't quite fully agree with 100%, but it's all semantics, dependent upon the conditions.

side note: Just to reinforce what was said in the wiki article on trail braking... "trail braking" has NOTHING to do with the rear brake. The word "Trail" simply describes what you do with the brakes as you lean the bike over... the further you lean the more you "trail off" of the brakes.

Now, to address the original question... Downshifting has ONE primary purpose and one primary purpose only... and that is to be in the proper gear for corner EXIT. Sure, downshifting helps you slow down (some bikes more than others), but you can slow down without downshifting, right? Well, you can't power out of a corner unless you're in the right gear for it. So that's the primary purpose of downshifting.




Now, to further elaborate what happens in a corner (Since it's snowing and I'm insanely bored & feel like writing a bunch of babble), here's a little break-down of how/what/when things happen:

When powering up to the next turn, quite possibly a thousand things are going on all at once. Reference Points (landmarks that YOU form for yourself and will always change as your skill increases) help you keep track of the when/where all of these things happen.

So when approaching a turn I have reference points for (in order of which they occur) where the racing line is (at all times) where to roll off the throttle and begin braking, where to downshift, when to begin your turn, when to stop braking, where you begin getting back on the throttle, where the apex is (the point at which you being exiting the turn), where you begin picking up the bike and rolling on the throttle, where you upshift and where you've exited the turn.

All that (and more) occurs in just ONE turn on the track.

Now you may have noticed that the point that I STOPPED braking comes after the point at which I begin turning. That tells you I'm trail braking. Trail braking is NOT something you want to experiment with until your knowledge & skill is up to par with the intermediate to advanced track day enthusiasts.

There's a lot of things going on in each corner and removing trail braking from the situation removes a lot of the risk. So as a general rule, try to do all of your braking done before you turn the bike in until you're skilled enough to manage that risk.