Ready Kids › Road Badge › Badge 3 › Lesson 3.3
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Braking in a turn
Get your braking finished before the corner, look through it, and if you have to brake mid-corner, stand the machine up first.
1Watch
Halfway round
Halfway round
A rider turns into a side street carrying a bit more speed than they meant to, the machine leaned over, and the frame freezes with the corner half done and the rider's fingers closing on both brake levers.
15 secondsThat is the exact moment this lesson is about. Everything up to it was fine.
2The idea
A corner is already spending your grip
A tyre only has so much grip and a corner is already using some of it to turn you. Braking asks for more of the same grip, from the same two contact patches, at the same moment.
When the brakes go on, weight transfers forward, the back wheel unloads, and it skids. That is not a warning somebody made up. It is the specific loss-of-control mode Consumer Reports identified in the machines they tested, and it is the reason this card exists.
3The idea
So the braking happens before the turn
The order is: get the speed you want while you are still going straight, then turn in, then let it roll through. You are choosing your entry speed rather than discovering it, and the whole thing is decided before the machine is leaned over at all.
Then look through the corner to where you want to come out. Not at the front wheel, not at the kerb. Riding courses put entry speed, line and looking through the corner in the same lesson, because on a machine they are one skill.
4Look
Where the eyes are
Through the corner
A rider's view of a corner into a residential street, with the exit of the corner visible ahead and the rider's line of sight drawn to the exit rather than to the front wheel.
A rider looking at their front wheel is steering with about a metre of information. A rider looking at the exit has the whole corner to work with, and they get the speed sorted out earlier because of it.
5The idea
If you have to brake in the corner anyway
Sometimes the corner tightens or something comes out. There is a drill for it, and it is a named lesson in adult rider training: straighten the machine first, then brake. Stand it up, both brakes, weight back, and stop it in a straight line.
Yes, that uses more road. It uses the road you can still be on, rather than the grip you have already spent. If there is corner left afterwards, you turn again from a lower speed, which is easier than the corner you were in.
6Decide
You are halfway round a bend and a car noses out of a driveway ahead of you.
Pick one to carry on.
7The idea
What is lying in the corner matters more than the corner
Wet painted lines, gravel washed to the edge, wet leaves, metal grates and rail lines are all places where the grip you were counting on is not there. Small wheels are worse on irregular or wet surfaces than big ones.
A Consumer Reports tester lost the back wheel on gravel at 20 mph and was hurt doing it. Cross rails, lips and kerb edges square on, upright, with the braking already done. Everything on this card is the same rule as the last one, applied to a smaller patch of road.
8Find them
Where is the grip not what you think?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 4.
9Your turn
The corner
Entry speed
One corner, seen from above. Set the speed you go in at and drag the point where your braking finishes. Run it and watch whether the back wheel holds, and how much road is left on the way out.
Move the braking point later and later until it goes wrong. Then move it back to where it worked, and remember where that was.
10Do it
Before you leave this page
Walk to the corner you take fastest on your usual route. Stand at the point where your braking would have to be finished and mark it with a stone or a chalk line. Then walk the corner itself and find what is lying in it: gravel, a drain, painted lines, leaves.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
Brake before the turn, not in it. If you have to brake in a turn, straighten it first, then brake.
Next lesson: Slow speed, tight spaces