there is no margin for error. If you run on at a corner, you hit a wall – and that’s not advisable. At the North West 200 circuit in Northern Ireland, there is a first-gear corner at the bottom of one of the longest straights I have raced on, probably two miles long. You are braking at 190mph and, because it’s a road circuit, you feel as though you’re braking on manhole covers. Luckily, at that particular point the road does carry on while the riders turn off to the left. So it’s essential that a rider gives himself every chance of getting to know the circuit before the race itself to learn things just like that.
For every corner on every circuit, I picked a marker where I would brake. It might have been as I passed under a bridge, something on a board next to the track or even just a bump in the earth. Towards the end of my career, I walked, jogged or did a few laps on a scooter – depending on the length of the circuit – before tackling a new track. I learned some tracks more quickly than others; one on which I struggled was the Nurburgring. I felt lost there for a while, whereas the other guys went quickly straight away. And until then I had always thought I was a quick learner. It’s a big track with a lot of corners which all look the same, so I found it difficult to pick out which were going to be quicker than the others. When I first went to Sentul in Indonesia it was new to everyone, but within the first five minutes Doug Polen and Scott Russell had left me for dead. ‘Are you sure they haven’t been here before?’ I asked. But by the end of the first session I was quicker than they were.
Obviously, the first time you ride round any track you brake a bit earlier than you would normally have to. The next time you brake a bit later, and so on. But the faster the corner, the harder they are to learn. For instance, a chicane is pretty straightforward, whereas a third or fourth-gear corner will take a bit longer to learn. That’s because there is a bigger chance of getting hurt if you get it wrong, so you take more care. If you run wide on a slow corner you can run off and get away with it.
Another of the first decisions to make at any track is the size of discs to use, and this can be a frustrating choice during practice. The harder the track is on the brakes, such as somewhere like Donington, the bigger the discs that are needed. But bigger discs mean that the bike is harder to move around, because they are obviously heavier, and the less weight you have low down on the bike the better. In recent years there have been just two sizes, 290s and 320s, although they are testing a new 305 size for use at Daytona.
The rear axle on which the back brake disc is mounted. I have never used the back brake in all my years of racing.
The smaller the diameter of the disc, the less the gyroscopic effect. That basically means that it is easier to steer the bike with a smaller, lighter disc. But at the tracks that are harder on the brakes, like Donington, these will heat up too quickly. At Donington in 1998, one race was split into two parts because of rain, so for the second leg I tried the smaller discs. But even after just 14 laps they were knackered at the end (although I did win that second leg of the race). Had it been a full 25 laps, I would not have got away with it. Also at Donington, we used to run discs that were 6.5mm thick instead of 6mm. Again that was just to improve heat dispersion.
The brake pads are also made out of different materials. Now they are called performance friction, and are carbon-impregnated. As they wear down, they stick carbon onto the disc so that you effectively have carbon to carbon. The ones before that were sintered. They did a similar thing, but more aggressively and so didn’t wear as well. We used to be able to use carbon-fibre discs, but they were banned at the end of 1994. The view was that the privateers could not really afford to use them at £800 a disc, so it was an unfair advantage for the factory boys. I don’t see why they cannot be allowed again because the hotter the carbon-fibre discs got the better the brakes were. The opposite is the case with metal discs.
The material for the Brembo carbon-fibre discs was actually too soft for the brake pads, and we were wearing out the discs rather than the pads. I shouldn’t really admit this, but at Albacete in 1994 we only had two sets of discs and one of those was already worn out with tramlines with two sessions of practice remaining. We didn’t want to use the new set because we wanted to save them for the race, so we got the old discs and glued some emery cloth to the brake pads. Then we started the engine up so the back wheel was spinning and Slick suddenly hit the brakes. Carbon dust flew everywhere in the garage, which is not the best thing for your lungs, but at least the discs were back flat again and we could use them for practice. That’s not how the Brembo engineer saw it, though. He was freaking out.
Ideally, and particularly at tracks you know will be hard on the brakes, you want to heat them gradually. So it always made sense to go a little bit easy on them in the early stages of a race, but I have always found that difficult to do when I know there is a race to be won. My attitude has always been that I try to get to the front, and if there’s a problem later on, I’ll ride round it.
At Kyalami in 1999, I had problems with the brakes of the second bike sticking on all weekend. It was a similar problem to the one Aaron Slight had struggled with for a couple of years. We racked our brains as to why I was suddenly having this problem, which effectively meant that I only had one bike to use for the whole weekend. I kept returning to the pits, shouting, ‘It’s stuck on again! Do something about this!’ I was seriously pissed off because we were wasting half a session doing stupid things like cleaning the brake pads. I had tried going softer on the brakes and this hadn’t seemed to work. It didn’t help that it was the first meeting of the season and I desperately wanted to get going.
Whatever I was doing differently, it was heating the brake pad up so much that it was locking inside the calliper. We changed the pads from performance friction to sintered, but still had the same problem. Then we tried changing the forks and yokes – still nothing. So we had to machine the end of the brake pad to give it more clearance. Instead of 0.6 mm we made it 0.8 mm so that it was now rattling around inside the calliper. It did solve the problem, although we never really understood why it had suddenly occurred – and on just the one bike. Slick’s theory was that it was because I was using the brakes a lot harder as soon as I was coming out of the pits. After the second round, the guy from Brembo, the brakes manufacturers, found a permanent solution by increasing the pad clearance. That never used to be checked, and maybe it had changed, but it is now one of the things that is checked as a matter of course.
Another problem we had in 1995, when we were forced to ditch the carbon discs, was that the brakes were more inboard of the wheel and the mudguard came further over. That meant that the air struggled to get to the brakes to cool the calliper down. The first idea was to get more air into the standard radiators, then the team decided to cut holes in the mudguard and cover it in gauze to stop dirt getting through. Straight away, the calliper temperature dropped from 130 degrees C to 90 degrees C.
Hard on the brakes and changing down to first. My arms are almost locked and I’m pushing my body backwards, trying to stop my weight from going over the front end.
The Brembo guy would always come round to ask if everything was okay, but I never found him that useful. If things were going wrong, there never seemed to be much anyone could do about it. The problems were at their worst during my year with Honda in 1996 when I had to break in new discs at every meeting, wasting half a practice session through having to brake nice and gently. Eight times out of ten I would have to come into the garage and say, ‘The brakes are juddering again.’ It should have been someone else’s job to do something like take the bike out onto the road to run the new brakes in. I didn’t like to mess around and be constantly experimenting. Once I had found something that worked, I preferred to stick with it. And this would normally be done at a special test session, not during practice and qualifying for the races, when I wanted to concentrate on tyres and set-up.
Even
