Emergency braking on the road: brakes first, clutch later

When a car pulls out in front of you, you do whatever you have practised. Kamil Kozieł, a riding coach who writes the Polish blog MotoMentor, says many riders learned one move for the licence test: clutch, front brake and rear brake all at once, as hard as possible. It passes the exam.

Why the clutch can wait

Pulling the clutch straight away stops the rear wheel locking from engine braking, but you lose that engine braking, and the bike behaves as if it were in neutral. Often you are not stopping completely. You slow down and then ride on, and with the clutch already in you have to let it out again to get drive back. Kozieł also says that riders trained this way end up pulling the clutch every time they brake, even gently, and the habit then has to be unlearned. His advice is to brake first and pull the clutch later in the stop.

The sequence

• Use both brakes and squeeze progressively. The front does most of the work. Some riders touch the rear a fraction earlier so the bike settles. Using both at the same moment is fine too. Do not grab the lever, even with ABS. Kozieł notes the system needs about a quarter of a second to build pressure, and a sudden grab can unsettle the fork.
• Push down on the footpegs and grip the tank with your thighs. Your lower body holds you in place, so your hands do not have to.
• Lean your upper body back using your back muscles, without pushing on the bars.
• Keep your elbows slightly bent. Straight arms turn a pothole or bump into a steering input.
• Pull the clutch later in the stop, so you keep engine braking and do not stall.
• Look far ahead. If you fix your eyes on the car, you tend to steer towards it. There is no need to drop your eyes to the clocks, or to the road just in front of the wheel, though many riders do that in a hard stop.
• Release the brakes smoothly at the end, so the fork does not spring back.

The drill

Start without the bike. Run through the steps in your head a dozen times, hands up as if on the bars. Then find an empty car park or a quiet stretch of road with a clean, dry surface, ideally with a friend there.

Add one step at a time. Begin by braking harder and harder, then add the footpegs, then the thigh grip, and keep going through the rest of the sequence until the whole routine is automatic. Try it from 40, 50 and 60 km/h. Do some stops with only the front brake, some with only the rear and some with both, and compare how much the stopping distance changes. Sometimes brake to a full stop, sometimes slow down and ride on.

Two road habits

Cover the front brake with two fingers near junctions, schools and in heavy traffic. At 100 km/h you cover about 27 metres every second, and every second of reaction uses that much road before the brakes are on. After a real scare, pull over for a few minutes and let your pulse come down before you ride on.