Many moons ago when I was a moto-x devotee I would read dirt bike test that talked about how a bike would turn or not, and how they would use the front brake to help the thing turn. I was racing scrambles at that time because my bike wasn’t good enough for moto, and we would just flick the scooter into the turn and slide it through the corner. The whole concept of using a front brake to assist the bike to turn was foreign to my sensibilities of how it reacted to braking while turning. Usually the bike would wash out and seconds later I would be on the ground grinding my knee gard into it.
That ability to use the front brake in a turn that I would read about, portrayed by the magazines as some fix all for bad handling scooters that would be used by these great test riders always bugged me in that I was never able to understand how to use it to make my bike turn better. Then I was racing at Marysville in the second moto and my front brake cable got pinched in a first turn crash. After I got going again and was pounding hard to get caught up, I got to this one turn that I was having trouble with in the first moto before the first turn calamity and the turn was completely different after the crash, the turn was now easy and no big deal, I couldn’t figure it out until after the race was over.
When I was washing the front wheel and tried to spin it, it wouldn’t turn freely, there was a slight drag on the wheel by some mysterious force. So after looking at all the players in the braking orchestration I found a small crimp in the cable. That got me a thinking about how much benefit was gained by just the slightest amount of front wheel drag. After that everything made sense to me in how to use the front brakes to help me get through a turn faster.
My next quest for the understanding of the front brake assisted turning methodology was when I used it in car racing. My dedication to the mastering of the front brake while turning took another leap. When you race motorcycles you can use body English to make the bike do your bidding versus when your in a car, your just along for the ride. That was one of the biggest things I had to get over and find some sort of way to make the car transfer weight like I could do so easily on a motorcycle. The use of the front brake while turning was what filled in the blanks.
I used to love it whey back when I would see NASCAR races on TV because they would go into detail showing split screen shots of the car and the foot peddles. I was fascinated how fluid the drivers were when they would move there feet back and forth, up and down, left and right across the peddles. The accuracy of their foot work was just head shaking and I was envious as to how they made it look so easy. It was as though they were communicating with the car using some foreign language that only the car and the driver could understand.
I knew I had to be that good or I just couldn’t go forward. I did everything I could to understand and use my left foot to brake while turning and I had a manual clutch. I would trade feet, using my right while down shifting (heel and toe) and then bring in my left foot to work through the turn while using the gas w/ my right foot. I think you can tell that I’m an advocate for left foot breaking and I am still learning to perfect the dark art.
