picture via pendolino
If you’re going to go fast, brakes are key. One popular sports-car manufacturer even goes to far as to have a policy whereby their cars must be able to stop in half the time they can accelerate. So let’s look at how we can use our brakes to help us go faster. There’s two parts to this – one is making sure the brakes aren’t holding you back; the second is to think about ways of braking that will let you go much faster for much longer.
Brakes
The first thing to do, before you even get onto the road, is to check that your brakes are up to the task that you want them to perform. If you want them to stop you at the bottom of your road, you have to be sure they’re going to do that before you start pedalling. I recently made a similar mistake when tweaking my front brakes; I mis-aligned one of the brake pads so it bit into the wheel momentarily before slipping past the braking surface and ceasing to perform as a brake should. This is one of the reasons bicycles have two sets of brakes. Don’t forget it!
With your bike in its default up-side down bike-maintenance position, spin the wheels. If the wheels spin a little and then stop suddenly, check for brake-pad contact. This is quite a high possibility, and reduces a bike’s performance considerably. It’s not the purpose of this article to address the how-to of brake adjustments, but if you’re getting a significant amount of interference from the brakes then it’s time to intervene. A future article will address the practicalities of brake adjustments in more detail. Simply put, however, you should adjust the brake arms and brake pads so that they are holding the pads a few millimetres away from the braking surface – then, once they’re set, draw them in a little with the fine-adjuster where the brake wire goes into the brake lever mechanism.
Once you’ve got your wheels spinning freely, test the brakes by pulling the brake levers. If they stop the wheels, that’s great. Now turn your bike back up on its feet and try again. Squeeze the levers hard; there should still be at least a little-finger’s width of space between the lever and the handlebar. Any less than this and you risk bottoming out and running out of braking power.
Both sets of brakes should be set so that they feel similar to each other. If this just isn’t possible, make sure you’re at least quite familiar with which brake feels like what, so that you don’t get any unwelcome surprises at that busy junction down the street.
Finally, a note on usage. Assuming you have a good set of well-set-up brakes, with a little practice you can go faster safe in the knowledge that you have a short stopping distance – which distance is worth working out in practical detail. Remember to use your brakes in conjunction with each other. Both brakes together is usually sensible for most situations, and rear-brake-only is handy for those right turns when you’re signalling with your right hand. However, hard braking is a different matter.
As you brake hard, your weight shifts forward on the bicycle. It is important to keep the arms firm. The result of the shift in weight is that there is a lot of pressure on the front wheel and not very much on the rear. If you apply the rear brake at this point, it will likely stop the wheel and you will begin to skid like you probably did when you were a kid. As you know, skidding means that the rear wheel can now go just as easily sideways as forwards. Falling off is not an inevitability, but it’s a probability. On the other hand, quite literally, is your front brake; with the pressure on the front wheel, the chances of your front tyre skidding are negligible unless you’re riding on ice. Apply this one as your primary brake and you will come to a swift stop. As a side-note, the chances of your rear wheel lifting up off the ground are quite slim unless you’re intending to. Just keep your arms firm and don’t try to stop on a sixpence. After all, a bike is still a relatively heavy object made of metal and travelling at high speed.
All in all, if you have good brakes you will be both safer and faster. If you’re not confident with messing up your own brakes, take it down to your local bike shop and ask them to do it for you.
So, happy braking.