If you have been looking through my content here for any appreciable amount of time, it’ll be pretty obvious to you that there are many facets to riding, each of which are going to bring you small increments of progress as you improve upon them.
Of all the different areas we can focus on, however, for less experienced riders there tends to be one that is their first port of call in their attempts to lap faster.
No, not body position. I’m talking about the process of thinking that leads riders on to pushing back their braking markers.
The thought process tends to go something like this:
“Ok, to go faster I need to take more speed into the corners. To do that, I’m going to force myself to push past my old braking marker. Not only will this save me time because I’m accelerating for longer down the straight, but I’ll be going around the corner faster too. It’s win win!”
On the face of it, it may seem like sound logic. If we can brake later and enter every corner faster, we’re going to see sizeable improvements to our lap times.
The trouble is, while there may be a few more fearless riders that can force later braking and faster corner speeds in one fell swoop, for a lot of riders it doesn’t pan out this way.
It’s important to realise that later braking DOES NOT instantly translate into higher corner entry speeds. In fact, being brave with your braking markers could end up having a negative effect on your corner speed if you aren’t working to improve your confidence in that area too.
Quite simply, by trying to brake later with no appreciable improvement in your entry speed confidence, you are effectively condensing the time you have to get down to a speed you’re comfortable with.
Not only that, but because you’ve spent more time accelerating due to your later braking, you’ll not only have less time to get down to your desired speed, but you’ll have to scrub off even more speed as a result.
As you can see the rider is now left having to lose more speed in an even shorter space of time. This would be OK if the original braking point was a very modest one, but if the rider is already pretty close to their own limit, the forced attempt to brake later isn’t going to bring about many benefits for them.
You will be saving an amount of time, yes, but when you consider that even just a few mph more can be enough to have the “in too fast” panic light setting off (thus meaning you won’t be pushing them that far back to begin with) the time saved will be minimal.
Now don’t get me wrong. We can only do so much to increase confidence and minimise unwanted panic scenarios when applying techniques on the track , but eventually there will be a time when you literally have to force yourself to perform a certain action.
Be it braking later, leaning more or driving harder, sometimes you will simply have to say “Ok, let’s turn it up and see what we find.”
However in this instance, the “force it” mentality can have negative effects because the things that come after the action of later braking haven’t been dealt with first.
By trying to scrub off more speed in less time, you have the potential to bring about all the same issues that are raised by riders with an incorrect braking structure. As a reminder they are:
As you can see this not only has the potential to affect a rider’s corner entry speed (which they were hoping to improve by braking later) but also the potential to screw up the corner as a whole.
It is for all of the above reasons that I believe a rider should first work to improve confidence in taking more speed into the corners, and once that higher speed has been achieved and your confidence level has risen, then work to decrease to amount of time it takes you to get down to that speed by pushing the braking markers back.
I see this as a better approach because:
The fear of lean and taking more speed into corners is such a huge barrier for the vast majority of riders, and placing ‘later braking’ as a secondary goal to ‘faster corner speed’ is going to put you in a better position to be able to break through that barrier.
That being said…
I’m not stupid enough to think that you should reach an uber high level of corner entry speed before you even begin working on braking later. As track riders we are naturally going to work on incrementally improving every area of our riding from session to session, day to day as we get comfortable with the forces we’re being subjected to.
All I want to convey for you here is that the braking marker itself is not a guarantee for faster corner speeds and/or lap times. As I said, trying to force it too much could even have a negative effect on entry speed.
If higher corner entry speed is something that you really struggle with, keeping the same braking markers while working on other things to increase corner entry confidence is going to be a better approach for you. Later braking can come…..later.
We need to put ourselves in the best position to be able to not only make worthwhile improvements, but also to achieve them safely. In this instance, things such as steering rate, visual skill, braking structure, along with when you release the brake are the aspects that are going to better help you do that.