This is a spin-off [sic] from the back wheel slide thread.
I hear dissenting voices
It's allowed but I'll try to lay out my position on this logically. Part of the problem is that I've talked about P&S so many times here that I take short cuts when answering... sigh...
First up, this forum is about road riding and about road riders.
I'm not a track instructor and I'm not offering up track techniques, but what I'm doing is suggesting a subset of skills that I think makes sense on the road to the majority of riders.
Many of the riders who read this forum are NOT expert riders with years of experience or hours of riding tuition, but riders who simply want to get from A-B in as much safety as they can, and at the same time enjoy themselves. They don't want to start pushing and IMO nor should they be encouraged to push the limits of machine control in the same way that someone doing a track school would.
Road riding is about knowing what causes accidents and identifying what's under our control and what isn't. We control 'where' and 'when' we put the bike in a particular space and we also control our speed. What we don't control are the road itself or other people.
So we have to plan our riding to give ourselves the best chance of dealing with what we can't control by changing our own plan. This is what the riding systems are there for, to give you TIME to prevent an accident by recognising the situation that is developing in time. IMO if you had enough time to Look Access Decide, Search Predict Act or any of the other systems we've talked about here, then you wouldn't make the mistake that leads to the accident.
Spot the hazard early enough and we should simply glide through. Quiet efficiency it might be called.
But in reality we don't get everything spot on all the time and situations on the road are rarely capable of simple solutions. So we may need more dramatic machine inputs to get out of trouble. Not perfect, but if it succeeds, it's good enough. If a car pulls out in front of us, it's vital we learn to use the brakes effectively. A bend tightens unexpectedly, we must learn to steer properly, it's usually a better way out of trouble than braking in the turn. The surface turns slippery, we need to relax and try to avoid provoking a slide first and foremost, but ride the slide out if we can't avoid it.
So we need two things:
- enough time to pay attention to those important details - we must see the car or bend early enough to deal with it
- well-refined braking/steering skills and ability and confidence to use the throttle correctly
Having the machine control skills ON THEIR OWN is no guarantee that they'll kick in when you need them - as Keith Code points out in his theory of Survival Reactions, what sets off the panic instinct that usually cause a failure of machine control through inappropriate or inadquate responses to the hazard, is not having the time and attention to deal with whatever part of your riding system is about to go wrong.
So this is my rationale for P&S.
A) why not give yourself more time? There's a limit to the amount of information you can process.
Think about this. On a racetrack corner that you know well, you can concentrate 100% on just a few things - getting your speed right on the approach, hitting your turn in point just so, steering the bike the right amount, and using the right amount of throttle to maximise your speed around the turn and away down the following straight. After all that's what racing is all about. On the track, a crash may be the price you pay for discovering exactly how hard you can push - after all, if you're racing or even doing a trackday, it's you vs the rest of the riders or even just yourself.
But for most of us, the goal of road riding is to stay shiny side up and out of hospital. We neither want nor NEED to push so hard that we're on that ragged edge or even close to it. Even in slippery conditions, there is little occasion to NEED to push.
Rather, safe riding on the road demands that you ride with attention to spare. On the road, you rarely have this luxury of racetrack predictability - even a bend you know well is likely to be complicated at very least by other vehicles and often changes in the road surface (mud, diesel, grit, damp patches etc).
Now think about a corner you don't know. You have to process the information that gives you the approximate lie of the road, work out how much speed you want to shed, where you want to steer, how much lean, where you are going to send the bike........... and deal with unseen hazards along the way. That takes up one heck of a lot of mental processing power.
So what can we do to give ourselves an edge here and give over as much of our attention to dealing with that information as we can?
Well, we can simplify the machine control aspects of our riding. The closer you push towards the edge of control and the more complex interactions of machine control you use, the more attention you must focus on controlling the bike and simply staying upright. On a track this doesn't matter, but on the road you're eating into the attention you have to spare for dealing with line and hazards. The more you concentrate on "just so" machine control, the less likely you are to spot that hard-to-see entrance, the tightening corner or that bit of overbanding. We can sacrifice perfection in machine control to maximise processing power available to deal with the hazards of road riding.
B) Why not ride in a way that gives you an easier time? The simpler you keep the machine inputs, the more you stay relaxed and the less likely you are to tense up and head down the road towards KC's Survival Reactions.
Few people would argue that hard braking as you turn in IS possible in road riding, but they would also acknowledge that it pushes you nearer the edge as far as grip is concerned and if things go wrong, they'll go wrong pretty damn quickly. Doesn't the same apply about using hard acceleration? If the rear gets away from you, isn't it going to be rather tough to recover?
And if you're worried about the bike getting away from you, aren't you setting yourself up for a fit of panic?
Do your hard braking and hard acceleration in a straight line and the consequences of errors are less worrying.
C) why not give the bike an easier time? Suspension and tyres all work best if only loaded on one direction at a time.
TimD is absolutely right that good throttle control is important - I certainly don't dismiss that, neither am I advocating coasting round a corner on a neutral throttle, I'm looking for positive drive around a corner, which demands some throttle.
But what I'm suggest is that you try to avoid mixing and matching cornering forces with hard braking and trying to pick up speed in the turn.
The idea of P&S is that you seperate forces which work in one plane (braking and accelerating) as much as you can from the cornering forces that work whilst the bike is leant over.
D) And a final point. Prioritising what you need to work on, given that we are not all expert riders, do not have access to closed roads or expert instruction. The problem with finding out how to do something by getting it wrong is the consequences you inflict on yourself. Braking hard in a straight line is relatively fool-proof. Likewise straightline acceleration. But just like braking in a bend, accelerating in a bend could bit hard if you get it wrong. So how essential is the skill of accelerating through the corner? Well, how often do we really HAVE to twist the throttle harder in a bend? Are you ever FORCED to accelerate to avoid a problem mid-turn? Not to say it doesn't happen, I can think of a few situations such as having misjudged your getaway from a side turning or onto a roundabout, but it's not nearly as common having to hit the brakes hard. In the majority of cases, how much we choose to twist the throttle is entirely our own decision, under our own control.
I'd say we often NEED to be able to brake as hard as we can, and we sometimes NEED to use near-max lean angles, but we rarely NEED to try to accelerate so hard in the turn we are worried about rear end grip.
I'd say every time that if you want to work on your machine control ON THE ROAD sort out:
- braking
- steering
- accelerating
in that order.
So... conclusion.
Offering a subset of skills implies there's more to come, and in no way suggests there is no more to learn. Keeping things simple is nearly always a sensible option when riding on the road. Prioritising your needs is completely different from dismissing good throttle control or saying that it's not something that a rider should seek to improve.
