[gavin]

“The stock brakes on our cars suck”, “big brakes are the best way to get better performance from our cars”, etc, etc. How many times have you heard this repeated ad nauseum? Guess what?… This is absolute crap.

Its my opinion and observation that about 99.99% of the brake complaints about our cars is the direct result of crap pads, crap brake fluid, crap hardware , junk rotors and just plain substandard maintainance.

I bought the RED car with frozen rear brakes, raybestos something pads on the front and brake fluid from the paleolithic era. Didn’t stop worth a damn (Im serious about this). Id be better off opening the doors and dragging my feet. You really had to anticipate when you had to stop because it would take a long while for the car to come to a halt from speed.

“our rear brakes don’t do anything”

More crap. Replacement of the rear frozen calipers yielded a car that would now stop in an acceptable fashion. Yeah..they actually DO do something after all.

"Brake fade"…this has to be one of the better internet rumor/urban legend myths of the last decade and its taken permanent residence here on MX6.com.

I intentionally took the RED car to a track event to check this for myself. Brake fade is the result of more heat than the braking system (rotors,pads, fluid) can take. Heat has to be absorbed and released into the air before the system gets oversaturated. The heat from the rotor bleeds to the pads and then to the fluid which then boils(which is why you dont want water in the fluid) and you end up trying to slow the car by compressing water vapor instead of incompressable brake fluid.

Cooling the brake system is an easy way of reducing this possibility, venting, removal of splash shields, ducting..…. I went in the other direction on my track event, keeping the stock splash guards(or heat shields if you want to call them by another name) and using the stock monobloc wheels (which have very little ventilation). I basically made a mini brake oven that would trap as much heat as possible. I used Porterfield R4 race compound pads, ATE fluid and stock blank cheapie rotors.

I had six 20min sessions with an extra added. My instructor,s car lost a turbo manifold gasket so I offered my car to be used for his session. That had the car doing three 20min sessions back to back.

This was the result.


These were brand new pads at the beginning of that day. Oh yes, I intentionally did my worst to get them to fail. There was no fade, there was no loss of performance, there were no issues. My instructor commented on the excellent feel of the brakes and how firm they felt in his session (his normal car is a turbocharged miata, lots of suspension, race-compound tires, willwood brake kit, etc, etc)

Ive repeated this test two more times with the same result. I had a friend who had a track event but his car was in a state of disrepair and couldn’t make it. I loaned him my car so he wouldn’t miss his date. His comment about he brakes was that they were strong enough for him to outbrake a fair amount of vehicles out on track with him.

Now either my $500 car is some miracle of engineering that defies the brake fade that people say it should be having…or you’ve been fed a load of crap.

Crap pads- carbon what? Pass on the gimmicks. If it doesn’t have the same compound front AND rear, pass on it. EBCs suck, KVRs are like glazed donuts (there I said it and Ill say it again). Street pads are not autocross pads. Autocross pads are not racing pads. Street pads on a racecourse is dangerous and borderline retarded.
Crap fluid- the minimum id use for a “performance” fluid is valvoline syn-power. Its pretty decent and on every parts shelf in the northern hemisphere. Its not even expensive. Whats the excuse for less? Anything above that is a bonus.
Crap hardware- torn piston boots? Leaky calipers? Stock brake lines? Sticking slider pins?…Are you kidding me??? Replace that stuff.
Crap maintainance- fluid brown? 1mm of pad left? 19mm of rotor thickness left(minimum allowance is 20mm for those checking)? You changed the fluid in the resevoir but didn’t flush the lines? Yeah….good job.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that.

Next…the future of the car?

Gavin