If your tire pressure isn't correct,
then nothing else we talk about here matters.
Whoah!
I don't know if you could see that on camera, but I just had a pretty big slide
entering that corner.
Thank you, kind driver.
You know, I just can't stop thinking.
For a lot of riders, a slip entering a corner is a huge fear.
Right?
So what can we do as riders to prevent slips?
And then what are some of the things that we can do
when we find ourselves in a situation like that.
So we all want to be able to go to the brakes or tip into a corner
and just know that our tires are going to grip right.
Tires are crazy complicated things, far more complicated
than we give them credit for.
And nothing has really enhanced the riding experience
like the insane improvements in tire technology since I was a new rider,
you know, back when we would debate about
which type of wood provided the most amount of grip.
Obviously pine for track days and oak for touring. duh.
now when it comes to tires, there's a whole lot of things
that we do have control over that can make things a whole lot worse
or a whole lot better.
So here are three things that we can do
to really enhance our confidence in our tires.
Let's get to it.
No really, I promise. This is how the garage looks every day.
so this may sound obvious, but if you want to be able to trust your tires,
you have to make sure you have tires that you can trust.
So I've been doing this for a long time and worked with a lot of riders
who've had this same struggle.
And oftentimes I'll go look at their bike and it's
no wonder they're struggling with confidence in their tires.
Their tires are just awful.
Tires are arguably the most important part of your bike.
They are the first line of defense against landing on our head.
They wear out.
They age out just by sitting.
Modern tires are still about 25%.
organic rubber from rubber trees.
So UV light, humidity, pollution and even just oxygen causes
rubber to break down crack, get hard and less grippy.
So what tires are on your bike right now?
Do they match? And how old are they?
Buy reputable name brands, buy the correct size tires for your bike.
Yeah, a 200 width tire, look sick.
Right.
But the correct size tire is determined by the width of your wheel.
When you run a narrower or wider sized tire than you should, it deforms the tire.
It'll stretch it or it'll pinch it and change the shape
which results in less grip.
Less grip means less confidence.
And make sure that your tires match.
running a hyper sport tire from one manufacturer on the rear
and a touring tire from another manufacturer on the front.
It might be fine, but it might not.
Trust isn't built on, might be.
So run matching tires.
You also want to choose tires for your application.
Despite what you may think, race tires are not softer.
They are sometimes ten times harder than street tires
because the environment they have to function in is far more abusive.
They have to be able to put up with a lot more heat than a typical road tire.
The slick tires provide an incredible level of grip.
But to do this they’re around
ten times harder than normal street tires.
So because of this, they need to be preheated to a running temperature.
They have a tire warmer.
It's like an electric blanket at grandma's house preset to 90 degrees.
Whereas on the flip side, if you try to run a touring tire
on a race track at race pace, it can no kidding, sometimes melt.
So be honest about how you ride and get a tire for your application.
There's a whole
lot to how exactly tires work and how tires are intended
for different purposes have wildly different construction.
And if you want to know more about this, you can look up hysteresis.
But suffice to say, the majority of street riders
will be happier with what's typically called a road tire.
They tend to last longer
because they oftentimes will have dual compounds in the rear, which means the
the center of the tire will be a more durable rubber, where
on the sides of the tire it will be grippier.
Look, in this light, you can totally see the two compounds.
Here's your harder compound in the center
and then a softer grippier compound on the edge.
There's actually a definitive line between the two compounds.
Now we're going to talk
quite a bit about the importance of warm tires here in a minute.
But the important part here is in order to be able to trust your tires,
you got to have tires worthy of trust.
What is the tire pressure on your bike right now?
No, not what it should be set at.
But where are your tire set, actually?
And how does that contrast with what the manual says your tire should be set at?
And why is tire pressure so important?
It's crazy how often incorrect tire pressure shows up in crash data.
If your tire pressure isn't correct,
then nothing else we talk about here matters.
the air in the tire is actually what holds your bike up.
So the amount of air that should be in your tire is very specific to your bike
and how much weight you have on it, luggage or a passenger or whatever else.
This is why just running the max PSI stamped on
the sidewall isn't always going to be the correct pressure.
Your owner's manual will give you the correct number for your bike.
Yeah, we can absolutely tweak and deviate from these numbers
based on a number of specifics, but we want to start with that number.
Despite what NoobMaster69 had to say about it on Reddit.
Hey there.
Is there a project you're working on?
I know more than you know. Alright...
Remember, your bike was developed by expert riders and professional racers.
They know more than the kind guy on the internet.
Now, we have to take a second to cover the basics of how tires work.
We all want our tires to grip, right?
Well, grip is made up of a few things.
And air pressure plays a big part in this,
The first is molecular adhesion.
This is basically the rubber is ability to deform and conform to the road.
This is sometimes called keying.
This is affected by the hardness of the rubber, often called the compound,
What's called the carcass of the tire is basically how many
and how thick the metal or nylon bands are inside the tire.
And then finally, the temperature of the rubber.
Obviously, warm rubber is more pliable than cold rubber.
Right.
The second is called Pressure by Sciencey-folks.
Now, that's not to be confused with tire pressure.
Pressure is how much weight we're putting over a tire when we
when we go to the brakes and slow down, weight goes over the front tire.
We're loading that front tire.
We're putting pressure over that front tire.
When we accelerate, we're loading the rear tire where the weights
shifting to the back of the motorcycle, putting pressure over the rear tire.
This increase in pressure or weight over a tire, it deforms it.
It makes the contact patch bigger.
It's pushing the the tire.
It's pushing the rubber into the ground,
causing the rubber to deform into the shape of the road.
Remember, remember keying.
So basically what happens is when we load a tire,
we basically have more tire on the ground.
This is part of why grip is constantly changing on the exact same bit of road.
A cold tire with no weight over it will provide a very different
amount of grip than a warm tire with weight over it.
There's a lot more to it than just this, but these are the basics.
Now, one way a tire
generates heat or gets warm is from flexing the sidewall.
Now, you've seen Formula One, guys do this.
They swerve the car side to side to flex the sidewall of their tires.
But motorcycle tires are different.
We don't really generate heat from swerving side to side.
The best way to get our tires and our sidewalls
to flex is through acceleration and braking.
So why does this matter?
Well, most street tires are designed to work between 60
and 70 degrees Celsius or about 150 degrees Fahrenheit.
Race tires are designed to work upwards of 95
to 100 degrees Celsius, over 200 freedom degrees.
So keep this in the back of your head because we're going to come back to this.
So back to the importance of tire pressure.
Too much pressure.
Can our tires flex enough to get warm We leave our driveway
and lean hard into the first turn out of the neighborhood.
Did your tires get warm in that half block of riding or was the pressure
so low that the tire feels like it's actually rolling out from underneath you?
According to Yamaha Champ School,
one of the biggest reasons riders crash is cold tires.
So next time you go for a ride, as soon as you stop, put your hand on your tire.
Is it hot to the touch or just warm or worse?
Is it cold to the touch?
Do you remember
how warm your tires should be But what else affects tire temperature?
Riding in the rain or in the cold?
Black asphalt in the sun versus white concrete in the shade,
riding at a steady speed in a straight line for a long time
doesn't hardly flex the carcass of the tire.
And if you talk to a lot of the long
distance touring guys like the guys who do the iron Butt rallies,
a lot of them have real time tire monitoring systems and they'll tell you
they can watch the tire cool down just from riding down the freeway
at a steady speed.
That pressure number is so important
not only for how the bike handles and how much weight you can carry,
but as the tire gets hot, the pressure increases
and it manages, it determines how much the sidewall will flex.
And this is all done to get the tire into the correct operating temperature.
If you want to have faith in your tires, you need this number to be set correctly.
So now that we have quality matching tires with correct pressure
and we know they're nice and warm, we can just send it, right?
I've been coaching at tracks especially for a lot of years
and it always surprises me if it's a hot day.
The middle of the summer, the track is hot and sticky.
That means conditions are just perfect for having a lot of crashes.
Like like the crash truck will be running all day long.
Now, if it's a cold day, early season
or it's overcast or whatever, we'll have almost no crashes.
What can we learn from this?
Ironically, it's when riders don't trust their tires that they tend to crash less.
So what is the solution here?
What can we do to reconcile?
I want to be able to trust my tires and no trust.
How do we how do we square these two contrarian ideas?
Trust, but verify.
You know, that time that the the empire trusted without verification
is how the rebels were able to get past that blockade.
It's an older code.,sir, but it checks out.
So how do we trust but verify that everything is going well with our tires?
We can use the first and last 5% of how we interact
with our controls to get inside that circle of trust.
If we grab the brakes and hit the throttle
we’ll blow right past that first 5%.
Diving right into blind trust before we verified.
Maybe it works 100 times in a row, but this time
we neglected to check our pressure.
The sun's out, but the road's still cold because it was.
It rained last night.
or for whatever reason, we have less grip than we did in that last corner.
Now that abruptness has caught us out the tire slips and we fall down
and we tell everyone, including ourselves, it was the crappy tires fault.
But whose fault was it really?
If there was snow on the road
or it was raining, we'd never hammer any control, Right?
We're downright delicate with how we squeeze
the brake or roll on the throttle when we know it's slippery.
Well, we need to bring a little bit of that distrust into all of our riding.
We trust but verify.
ease into the front brake.
We sneak the throttle on.
The first and last 5% of how we use a control is the most important
because it's our opportunity to verify that we have grip
it gives the tire time to adapt to what we're asking of it.
It gives the tire a chance
to let us know if something isn't right while there's still time to correct.
with the knowledge you've been given, you are now on the inside
of what I like to call the Circle of trust.
smooth linear inputs for that first and last 5% of a control is like asking
our tires a low risk question to make sure to verify that they're listening.
Look, this is the the magic-sauce about how this all comes together.
We make sure we buy good tires
and we make sure we set our pressure correctly and and we go easy.
We do are accelerating and braking
while we're straight up and down to warm up our tires.
Then we verify everything went to plan with smooth, linear,
progressive inputs for gas and brakes and even steering inputs.
we want to be able to sneak up on our available grip.
everything that we do here, everything, all the ideas that we present to you,
are all based around a strategy that gives us choices and options
to deal with things when they don't go to plan,
When we feel things start to slip, we'll feel it
because it'll feel differently
and we're going to be able to back off whatever control we're using.
Like with that slide at the beginning part of the video, I felt it start to slip.
I was able to ease off the control, The tires regained traction and I was able
to finish my corner and finish my ride with a big smile on my face.
If we're abrupt with big, fast movements will blow
right past our available traction and land on our head before we can even blink.
But when we follow these basic steps, what you're likely going to discover
is that your tires have far more grip than you may have ever realized.
Guys, thank you so much for watching.
If you like this video or if you thought I missed something,
use those little thumbs up and down buttons down below.
You can leave a comment.
I'll try to get to them.
Or you can come hang out with this over on Discord,
where you can ask us questions and tell me what I missed there.
If you like this video
and you'd like to learn more about tires, check out this other video.
Guys, thank you so much for watching.
Right on and ride. Well.