JRA
New Member
I'm a firm believer that yes you should. This topic has been covered before and there are theories for and against. I'm only bring this up again because of all the SED talk recently and because I ran across this picture of me and Ken Fisher in Turn 5 from Barber last weekend.
If you look closely you can see that both of us are on the brakes hard and the forks on both of our bikes are very compressed (right click "view image" for larger pic). This should give an indication of hard hard you can actually brake while leaned over. Trail braking has two big benefits...it allows you to continue adjusting your speed all the way to the apex of the turn, and it helps you steer the bike. Extended forks raise the front end making it much harder to steer the bike to the apex, while compressed forks lower the front, changing the geometry, and allowing you to steer more precisely.
Can you crash on the brakes? Sure, but you can crash off the brakes too. This is a requirement for going faster and something that gets talked about quite a bit and demonstrated at our SED's.
Discuss.
If you look closely you can see that both of us are on the brakes hard and the forks on both of our bikes are very compressed (right click "view image" for larger pic). This should give an indication of hard hard you can actually brake while leaned over. Trail braking has two big benefits...it allows you to continue adjusting your speed all the way to the apex of the turn, and it helps you steer the bike. Extended forks raise the front end making it much harder to steer the bike to the apex, while compressed forks lower the front, changing the geometry, and allowing you to steer more precisely.
Can you crash on the brakes? Sure, but you can crash off the brakes too. This is a requirement for going faster and something that gets talked about quite a bit and demonstrated at our SED's.
Discuss.