Trail Braking with Yamaha Champ School

Around the Wheel with Bret Tkacs

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,