Brakes and the art of going faster

Jeremy Clarkson as part of the utterly brilliant Top Gear did a challenge a couple of years ago where he attempted to race a Honda NSX around the Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca circuit with the same lap time a he could achieve in Gran Turismo 4.
He couldn't, reasoning that at the back of his mind is imagination and the thought "what if a wheel falls off now?" or "what if I press the brake pedal and nothing happens?". It was the "what ifs" that preventing him going all out and it was racing drivers without this imagination that could achieve the best times.

I often have a similar issue in that whilst I love bombing some of the local single tracks, with lovely tight bends, in the back of my mind is always the thought of what if just round this next corner is a walker, or a child, or a dog!??! Funnily enough, its not usually my own safety that bothers me, its that of other, innocent people.

As posted previously, I received in the post a set of Alpine Brake System brakes, customised to fit directly onto the noSno. I rode the new set up for the first time last night and so far, I am very, very impressed. The build quality is superb and the brakes very responsive without the feeling that I was going to lock up and end up arse over tit (to borrow a beautiful phrase from the English language).  I do want to ride with it some more before writing more about it and could do a comparison with both the MBS V-Brake and noSno disk brakes, so if either manufacturer are feeling generous?! : D

Anyway, the strange thing was though that although I had access to a brake, I very rarely applied it and found myself riding faster than I would do normally.  The knowledge that if I absolutely needed to slow down, then I could do allowed me to ride sections faster and scrubbing speed with greater flair.  Additionally, whilst there are a couple of trails that run one after the other nicely in theory, there's absolutely no way you'd want to start the lower section at the kind of pace that you would hitting it straight from the top; the brake allows me to ride both consecutively.

So now I can attempt longer runs at a faster pace.  As someone wise once said on the forums, "Brake? They should rename it 'the go faster device!'" Yee Haa!