The Ride Report

I’ve been riding for about 25 years now and I like to think I’m a good rider – skilled, smart, experienced, safe(ish), etc. But there’s a saying about riders with multiple years of experience under their belt, that those years don’t necessarily mean you’re a better rider. Are you a rider with 25 years of experience spent learning and improving — or are you a rider with the same one year of experience repeated 25 times? I hope I’m the former. I’d like to think I am. But I learned something new recently.

I’ve always taken it as an immutable fact of motorcycling that you don’t use your rear brake in corners. Ever. Braking in a turn is bad in the first place, but braking with the rear brake in a turn is the worst. You’ll low-side yourself right off the road if you lock up the rear tire, so you’re tempting fate if you even think about touching the rear brake pedal while cornering. I’ve always “known” that if you absolutely, positively have to brake in a turn, then you use the front brake. That’s how I ride, and I’ve taken it so far that I intentionally developed the habit of riding the twisties with my right foot on my highway peg to remove the temptation to brake with the rear brake. If I come into a corner too hot, then I counter-steer like I mean it and grab a handful of front brake if that’s not enough.

That’s been working for me so far, but I recently got into a debate about braking with the rear in corners with Steve of Motorcycle Philosophy and Joker of Harley-Davidson “Mystique”. I was adamant that rear-braking is dead wrong, they were equally adamant that I had my head up my ass. (Well, okay, to be honest, they were adamant that rear-braking is a legitimate technique, but I’m sure they were thinking I had my head up my ass.)

This was our second go-round on this topic, so I started considering the impossible: What if I was wrong? (My wife would never believe I’m capable of such introspection.)

So I started out by Googling about it, confident that I would find dozens of articles by motorcycling authorities that I could cite to prove to these guys that they had it wrong. Because, you know, everybody knows you don’t use your rear brake in a turn.

Only… Not so much.

The more I read, the more I found that my head was in fact planted firmly in my colon and that rear-braking was an accepted — even popular — cornering technique. I asked a couple of my riding buddies about it and they said they used it too. One guy even started raving about it, saying he learned it from a motor cop a few years back and that it changed his riding style.

Well, hmmm…

So I’ve been trying it. And you know what? It works. Really well, actually. And now that I’m using the rear brake, I think I prefer it. The rear helps settle the bike into the turn more, rather than trying to twist the handlebars out of your hands and the wheel out of the turn like the front does. It actually feels safer to me, something I argued adamantly against just a few weeks ago.

So has my 25 years of experience been just the same year over and over again? I don’t think so, but you’d think this little trick should have crept into my consciousness at some point before now. Maybe I’ve been repeating the same two years 12.5 times…