Jan 2019

Those who live in cities and whose daily life is a continuous jam know full well that if it is also raining, the chaos can be enormous. You have the motorbike to escape all that, but raining and riding a motorbike can be the perfect equation to have a bad day. Due to that, it’s always good to remind some advice of how to brake safely.

The first and most important is to have a braking system with the maximum guarantee, we mean some brake discs according to the motorbike cylinder capacity and with the adequate thickness, some brake pads with enough grip and above all a tyre with its drawing visible and inside the wear parametre. From there it’s the rider and the circumstances that decide.

We remind you, as if it were a mantra, the brake from the back is to contain and the front one is to stup, and with that premise we have to anticipate to the events.

If you see a water mirror in front of you, alert! The aquaplaning (sliding over the water) can make the braking inertia to increase, you have to calculate more metres for its stop besides of a balancing overexertion. A water puddle can create a water coating between the pad and the disc, crystalising the surface and decelerating the bite.

If we add the vial marks and the pedestrian crossings, whose paints use to form a non-adherent floor, the braking concept passes to the category of “imagine I will stop”. The pedestrian crossings coincide with the inclination of the motorbike when riding a curve, here it’s when we have to increase our attention and try to turn as little as possible, for that we have to confront it with the appropriate safety speed.

The braking handles with the humidity can need a certain previous pump, that sponginess can transmit us a sensation of insecurity as it delays the perception of braking, that little advance can avoid us an increase of the pulse rate.

And above all, the 5 senses to the maximum, when raining the jams multiply, drivers get impatient, rear windows fog and manoeuvres are abrupt, lane changes, sudden brakes, unmarked holes, a myriad of traps that metre per metre appear. Common sense and caution, our best advice.