A friend has been finding he didn't trust the handbrake on his Leon. Had it checked a couple of times told it was fine. Then last week when having his brakes renewed one of the fitters showed him how to put the handbrake on "properly".

Stop as normal, apply handbrake, take out of gear, turn engine off,then put foot on footbrake and keep it pressed, and pull up on handbrake,and hey ho it comes up another three or four notches. Anyone know about this?

Well, I cant remember the last time I used the handbrake to be honest. VAG car or not. Though I've never heard of this "trick".

Forgot to mention that I tried it on my Yeti (nothing wrong with my handbrake) and it did work, another few notches without exerting any more than normal pressure.

I'm curious.

Why would he want it jammed on so hard?

My wife would never get it off again if I did that.

That's the strange thing, it isn't "jammed on" it releases as normal, it's got me baffled.

I was always taught to pull on the handbrake lever whilst pressing down on the footbrake pedal - not bothering with all of the neutral / engine off routine though.

 

Just stop using footbrake, hold and apply handbrake.

 

I suspect that it because the hydraulic foot action can apply considerably more pressure to the pads (or shoes) and the handbrake then sets to this, rather than only relying on the rather crude handbrake mechanism, with a lot of the input effort lost in the complicated cable, linkages and cam mechanism.

"Just stop,hold and apply handbrake" that's what he was doing, but why when taking your foot off the footbrake and then putting it back on again,is it possible to easily pull the handbrake up further?

If the handbrake mechanism/cable is out of a adjustment or slack, then you will be able to lift the handbrake a tad more.  The correct way of using the brakes is to have them correctly adjusted in the first place.

No, nothing wrong with the brakes,no faulty cables or out of adjustment, I even tried it on the wife's Ibiza and it worked, looks like it's got everyone stumped as there's been no positive answers.

PS. If you don't know the answer, please don't make remarks like " they should be correctly adjusted in the first place "

I like my Saab 900s feature.  It doesn't let you take key out until its in reverse, and then locks it in reverse, so you HAVE to leave it in gear to get key out the ignition.  Very cool feature or perhaps Saab knew how dodgy the 900 handbrake was?