Better Riding Advice: avoiding common mistakes

At the risk of focusing on the doom and gloom let’s start by planting these statistics: according to research from the European Transport Safety Council, 50% of motorcycle crashes are single-vehicle incidents, with 65% of those occurring on curves and 85% lacking any braking evidence. Yes, 85% of single-motorcycle incidents show NO braking evidence. Why?

We, as riders, need to understand grip and just how effective our brakes can be.

This Better Riding advice series is made up of articles and videos with a goal of making all of our riding safer and smoother. We’re here to help you get more out of your motorcycling with this series brought to you with Honda Motorcycles UK because safety is one of their key business pillars and their quest for safety inspires their innovations in products, technology and education. In this episode we highlight the two most common motorcycling mistakes and learn how to eradicate them from our riding.

Better Riding – how to avoid the most common mistake

Understanding motorcycle grip and brakes to improve muscle memory WILL reduce accidents.

Practice your braking

To paraphrase the video, modern motorcycles are the results of years of research and development by leading manufacturers using premium components such as Bosch, many of which will be the culmination of pain-staking investigations and studies.

ABS (Anti-lock Braking System) and TC (Traction Control) are two of the most common and have been for over 25 years now. These relatively fundamental systems are continuously being updated as each model year passes, particularly with the evolution of the 6-axis IMU – the motorbike’s ‘brain’ – which receives information on the directional changes and implements safety protocols to the electronic rider aids equipped to the bike such as cornering ABS and cornering TC. This technology can be key to preventing an accident. 

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: when was the last time you practised an emergency stop? How do you know how effective your bike’s brakes are? How do you know how effective you are at braking? If you’re ever in a situation where grabbing a handful of front lever and squeezing as hard as possible could be the difference between reaching your destination or never walking again, you’ll be glad of the practice to develop your reaction time and trust in the bike, which in turn will become muscle memory. So, in that split second, it’ll be your own brain implementing its own safety protocols.

By the way, as well as other articles from this Better Riding series, we also have plenty of advice on what to do if you come across an accident, and what to do if you’ve crashed your bike.

Having never seen the corner before, what’s this rider doing wrong?

What are the leading causes of motorcycle accidents?

From junction collisions or surface conditions to cornering too quickly or loss of control, the most common single-vehicle accidents on a motorcycle are a failure to negotiate left-hand bends safely. Whether the rider apexes too early, too late or simply enters the corner too quickly, the deviation off-course into oncoming traffic or the field/ditch/building opposite is all too often the result.

The blame for an accident might lie elsewhere but the outcome won’t change, so equip yourself with the best defence: 

• Control your speed - we’re not here to curb your enjoyment of riding but if you’re approaching an unfamiliar corner, it’s blind, and you’ve no idea if there’s stationary traffic, oncoming vehicles, how tight it is, or even if there’s roadkill, a pothole, or loose gravel midway around it. Why risk barrelling in?

• Use your eyes – if you're approaching an unfamiliar corner then look for clues as to its radius. It might the direction of treeline, telegraph poles, road signs, other traffic. It’s easy to forget to look ahead when you’re on new territory.

• Understand grip – as we’ve said above and in previous episodes, equipping yourself with more information about how tyres work could give you such an advantage, particularly when they’re put under stress when fighting braking, suspension and lean angle forces. Gaining confidence in the bike’s ability and stability can take some time but with knowledge comes cornering advantages, and while we won’t achieve Mr Marquez’s 60-degree lean angle on the B660 while staying attached to the road, modern day tyre can outperform what most of think they can achieve.

• Trust in motorcycle technology – ABS, TC, power modes, automatically adjustable suspension, engine braking, and so on. There’s a plethora of rider aids on today’s bikes, most of which are reactive. Learn how they work and trust them. They’re all there to help you. So trust them, but they won’t perform at their optimum level unless your inputs are suitable.

In an earlier article, BikeSocial Boss, Steve Rose, wrote, “To achieve the Highway Code stopping distance of 14 metres from 30mph, a rider needs to brake at a G-force of around 0.7G. Most modern bikes are capable of hitting 1G, but only if the rider loads the suspension properly to allow sufficient force through the tyre without locking the wheel. Mark's data shows even some police riders don't hit 0.5G in an emergency stop.” 

Half a second at 30mph is 30 per cent of the total time it takes to stop. Just think about that. 

Ultimately practice the skills that will eventually lead to the correct reactions become intuitive. After all, it’s no use the bike being equipped with ABS if the rider isn’t squeezing the lever hard enough to trigger it. And even less use if you’ve squeezed it too late.

A short lever might not allow maximum pressure

Check your brake lever

In the video example, we see a powerful sporty naked bike fitted with an aftermarket ‘stubby’ front brake lever which hinders the quality of the braking power the bike is equipped with. Why? The rider’s preferred braking style is to use two-fingers – nothing wrong with that - but because of the length of the lever they’re not able to apply the maximum brake pressure given the distance between master cylinder, pivot point. It doesn’t matter whether you prefer to cover the front (or rear) brake lever, use two finger, three or four, just so long as it works and you squeeze it hard enough if the time comes.

Equally most modern bikes have span adjustable levers, meaning that if you have long fingers or short, the brake lever can be easily adjusted to suit reach. Just make sure that it doesn't come all the way back to the handlebar.

Figure of 8, swerve avoidance, and cornering avoidance drills

What skills should you practice and how

Our professional Motorbike Coach is Mark McVeigh – an experienced rider coach, an ex-MotoGP engineer, a riding academy owner for over 20 years and the inventor of motoDNA rider training tech. Mark’s got several drills to develop your understanding of grip: 

• Brake and swerve: in this drill, find an unused car park and drop a couple of small cones or sweatshirts (anything that’s not going to cause damage to you if you run over them, and that’s not going to blow away) about two metres apart. That’s the width of the rear of a car. Now ride towards it at 15mph and imagine they’ve just performed an emergency stop. Your task is to swerve to one side and come to a stop alongside the ‘car’. Try it again but swerving the other side. As you continue to practice try decreasing your braking distance to the ‘car’ or increasing the speed.

• Cornering brake and swerve: as above but pretend you’re now committed to a cornering line when you have to brake and swerve. You can see the example in the video above.

• Figure Eight: use the guide in our Guide to Understanding Counter Steering to lay out the cones in a particular manner, but use the opportunity to learn how much grip there is from your tyres. The exercise needn’t be performed too quickly so build up slowly.

How do we know if we’re good at riding? Is it a god-given right just because we’ve not fallen off? We’ve talked about it before where survival equals competence, also known as unconscious incompetence. But arm yourself with the right skills plus faith in the machine, and the muscle memory you develop could save you one day.

 Additional Better Riding Advice: In other episodes we’ve helped demonstrate how to improve cornering on a motorcycle by learning about counter steering, as well as how to improve you cornering confidence, what the safety bubble is, and why it’s important to be on the right line, every time. Afterall, there’s always something new to learn about riding and if we put the hours in to actively learn and practice the correct techniques then we can all become better and more confident riders.

We all want to be better at the passions we spend our time and money on, so how about becoming a Better Rider?

If you’d like to chat about this article or anything else biking related, join us and thousands of other riders at the Bennetts BikeSocial Facebook page, or why not join our own new online community known as BikeSocial BikeClub.