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TRAIL BRAKING WITH YAMAHA CHAMPIONS RIDING SCHOOL
Guest: Chip Spalding, business development manager and instructor at the nation's premier motorcycle riding school: Yamaha Champions Riding School.Episode Summary:Get ready to master the art of trail braking as I am joined by the business development manager for Yamaha Champions Riding School, Chip Spalding. Listen in as we debunk the misperception that riders should never touch the brakes in the corner and learn how trail braking is an essential part of riding technique. Chip elaborates on the critical role of trail braking in their curriculum and how 70-80% of their students are street riders.Moving forward, we turn our attention to how skills learned on the track can be transferred to the street. Engage with us as we dissect the variables of apexes, the slowest point of the corner, and the decision point. We further compare the benefits of Yamaha Champ School's two-day program and the one-day program for street riders.As we conclude, we encourage all listeners to invest in formal education to become safer, more confident riders.

0:00:15 - Bret TkacsWelcome back to Around the Wheel with Bret Tkacs, and we have a special guest today: Chip, from a school down in California. I'll let him introduce himself, but this is a topic that's extremely near and dear to myself. I've talked about it before, I'll talk about it again because I think it's that important, and that’s talking about trail braking, and I'm not going to talk in dirt, I'm talking about the street, I’m not racing, because that's where we spend so much time as adventure riders, as street riders, and I just think it's an extremely misunderstood and… it's just one of those skills that we need to know, should know, and is just so noticeably absent in rider education. Hey, Chip, why don't you introduce yourself?
0:00:56 - Chip SpaldingHi Bret, my name is Chip Spalding and I am the business development manager for Yamaha Champions Riding School, and I'm also one of the partners. We're based on the West Coast in Indy Motorsports Ranch in Arizona and on the East Coast at NC Bike in North Carolina, but we operate at schools all over the country and online with our online curriculum Champ U.
0:01:19 - Bret TkacsThat's fantastic. I'm going to start off with the… so, people may have heard of Nick Ienatsch; he did a bunch of riding and he's one of the primary members of that school, or founding member. He wrote a book way back in 2003 called Sport Riding Techniques. I still think it's a really solid reference for riders who are on the street or track riders. There's a quote in this book where he talks about trail braking. It's called ‘Setting the Speed Precisely’, and I'm just going to read this because I really want to give people an idea for all you that are listening and I did what we're going with this and it goes:
“Trail braking’s bottom line is safety.” Hey guys, this is really the truth and this is why I think it should be an all rider training. “The ability to trail brake allows you to set your cornering speed closer to the apex, which is the slowest point of the corner. Those who use their brakes in a straight line and then let go of them to steer their bike are deciding very early in the corner what speed they need. If you always ride the same road, this technique works okay as long as there are no mid-corner surprises”. And this is just part of what he's talking about in this book, and that's one of the things I stress so highly when I talk about trail braking to street riders is that - look, the idea that somehow you're going to dive into a corner and then brake hard to make up for errors is completely a misnomer.
To me, what I think, trail braking is the key to never overrunning a corner, ever, ever, ever again. And as riders we've all done that. And I know when you're down at your school, you guys do a lot of track - the skills and obviously you help racers, club racers and others get much, much better. But your school has a really high emphasis now on bringing street riders in and you have a couple different programs. How does trail braking incorporate into those programs at your school?
0:03:12 - Chip SpaldingExcuse me, I would say that at this point, 70 to 80% of our customers, our students, have no intention of being racers, being track days folks, riding on a track when they come into the school. Now a whole lot of people leave the school and go oh man, I got to do this some more. They have such a good time. But the intention coming in is not to go racing, it's just to be a safer, more confident rider. Trail braking is just a massive part of our curriculum. It's foundational.
0:03:46 - Bret TkacsFrom my experience - and I've done a lot of different track schools. I've been in the industry for 27 years and one of my things is I take classes every year, usually more than one. There's no school in the country that I know of that has such a strong emphasis on trail braking. I mean you guys, in my mind, you are the trail braking school, so obviously you firmly believe in this technique.
0:04:10 - Chip SpaldingYes, I wouldn't want to say that we're the trail braking school, because we do talk a lot about all the other stuff a motorcycle does, but it is a fundamental part of our curriculum for sure, because the brake lever is the most important control on the motorcycle. You use it to control speed, control direction and set chassis geometry. You can't do any of the other cool stuff a motorcycle does without doing that first.
0:04:37 - Bret TkacsSo as riders… and I hear this all the time with instructors who are talking to me… obviously MSF is the larger curricula that we know, but whether it's Team Oregon or the curriculum used in Washington or any others, I so often hear street instructors who are training new riders and they always say “well, don't ever touch the brake in the corner”. And actually, the other thing that's interesting about this, by the way, Chip, is I did a bunch of research on this when I was looking into the whole four-finger myth and even those they do specify that when you talk to them in person, it was intended for first line riders in a parking lot learning the basic skills, but they just don't seem to understand what trail braking is. And if you have the chance to fill a room full of these instructors who teach riders that they shouldn't be using the brakes in a corner, that they should release and set their speed all before, what would you tell those instructors? I mean, how do you convince them? If you can convince them, you convince the riding public.
0:05:41 - Chip SpaldingWe all trail brake naturally. You trail brake in your car every time you turn in your driveway. You don't get all your braking done in the straight line and then jump off the brakes and pitch it into the driveway. It's not how anybody drives. You stay on the brakes until you're happy with speed and direction. You do the same thing with a motorcycle.
The theory behind not teaching new riders how to trail brake is that they're not competent enough to use the brakes and steer at the same time, and we just simply don't believe that a new rider should be taught anything differently than a veteran rider. How do you know as a new rider, that you need to start using the correct technique? Well, when you fall down, we'd rather them just not fall down. So let's use the correct technique from the start.
0:06:29 - Bret TkacsI would actually argue… I'm going to be upfront. I mean, I'm not an unbiased host here. I'm a trail braking fan. I actually incorporated it into the new rider training that Washington has been using for several years now. Our incident rates have gone down with that curriculum. There's some other elements that were incorporated into the development of that to help with greater success and everything else.
But certainly from my perspective and, by the way, the argument that I think some of the instructors are going to have is again so well, yeah, you're talking about cars, but cars don't follow over; bikes do, and we can certainly dive into why those dynamics still not only apply to motorcycles but actually apply in many ways. I think even more so why this is so important. But trail braking is... I almost think that when you tell people you cannot brake in a corner, that we potentially could be causing more accidents than we're helping. Because when a student - and I'm the same way, when I take a class, I want to be a good student. I'm going to leave the things I know behind. I'm going to listen to and try whatever that school is teaching me, whatever that instructor is teaching me in it, and then I'm going to filter out those things that work for me or those things that work into other processes or techniques that I've been taught over the years.
But the idea that you go into the corner and you want to be a good student and then when you get in and you've misread the corner and you've made an error, you realize this corner is tighter than you expected, or it's a normally greater than 90 degrees and you were expecting 90 degrees, and you're going faster than you're comfortable in that corner, because most of the time it's not really attraction limit, it's our brain shuts down before we actually run out of traction; were the ones that cause ourselves crash. But being a good student, you just hear that thought in your head. The instructor told me don't use my brakes in the corner, and so you wait and you wait, and you wait until you get to a point of panic and then you dynamite the brakes. Because they're teaching press and pray, right? When you go into a corner too fast, then you just need to push harder and pray that you make it. And well, let's face it, my brain is shut down. I'm already terrified in the corner, so I'm not going to do that.