Ok so this is my first technical write up. I am also new to NICO so I’ll try and make this as good as possible.
Ok well as the title says I want to talk brakes. My goal is to explain what I know about brakes and get some feedback from people and hopefully we can all learn something.
So the first things we need to talk about in brakes are Tires! I feel I need to explain traction and its effects on braking. So to maximize traction you have to keep the wheels rolling on the road. If you lock up the tires then you have less traction than when the tires were rolling with the road. (This is why we have ABS) same thing goes in the opposite direction if you spin tires when you accelerate you won’t accelerate as fast as if you hook up. Ok. The reason this is is because friction is grater between 2 objects when they are not moving in relation to each other.( “hooked up”) And it is less when they are moving in relation to each other.(wheels spinning, or locked up).
Now the other important thing about tires is traction is proportional to weight on the tire. Basically more weight = more traction. Now there is so much more to tires and traction that I’m leaving out but this is the basic you need to know for this discussion.
This should show how important tires (traction) is for braking. It is the most important part and will give you more braking performance than anything else.
Wow ok now on to the actual brakes.
So when upgrading brakes you are trying to upgrade ether braking distance, brake fade, brake feel, or looks.
I guess I’ll start with brake fade although these will probably overlap. Ok so brake fade is when your brakes over heat and you’re stopping distance increases. And it gets worse and worse as you brake harder and longer. It can get even get to where your brakes stop working! Now some solutions to this are cooler brakes. Drilled rotors, bigger rotors, brake ducting (air ducts to cool brakes), brake pads are all things. The main thing to do here is cool the brakes drilled rotors provide more surface area to help cool faster bigger rotors have more mass so they can hold more heat during heavy braking and dissipate it later when you let off the brake, brake ducts more air = more cooling it also helps to get open wheels and remove dust shield ete., now high performance brake pads are designed to work at higher tempters.
All of these just fix the mechanical heat issues but your brake fluid also get’s heated and can boil if this happens your brakes are gone. The solution is generally high temp brake fluid with a higher wet boiling point. And that's about all the average racer can do so I won’t get into any of the crazier solutions. Ok well now that i have more time i will explain some more options for brake fluid cooling. the most populare is brake fluid reserculation. It is where the brake fluid is circulated from the caliper back up to the BMC. To do this it has a valve that at low brake presser (the first milliseconds the brake is pushed) some fluid travels back up a second set of lines and it goes back to the BMC so you always have fresh fluid at the brake pistons where you need it most. Pretty cool.
Now on to the braking distance. To decrees braking distance the key is to maximize braking force at all wheels. Now I’m going to speak in general terms. If your brakes can lock up your wheels on demand meaning that at like 60 mph you slam on the brakes (without abs) and your tires lock up then you have all the braking force you can use. So all other things being equal calipers with more pistons or drilled rotors won’t make you stop any faster. Now let’s say you upgrade your tires and now your wheels won’t lock up then you need more braking force to stop faster.
Ok the next problem is when people upgrade just the front brakes to huge front rotors calipers and high performance pads. And do nothing to the rear. This creates the problem of the front wheels locking up even earlier than the rear. Now I have to explain something for this to make sense. So let’s say that on a hypothetical car 60% of the braking is done on the front and 40% rear. In any car the front wheels usually lock up first so let’s say you slam on the brakes and you hold it just before the wheels lock up and you use all 60% of the front braking power but since the rear brakes are getting less pressure they are only using let’s say 30% so you are leaving 10%. But if you upgrade just you front as I said earlier your wheels will lock up with less pedal effort so you stomp on the brakes agene and still use all 60% of the front brakes power but since you aren’t pushing as much pressure to the rear brakes they are only using 20% so now you have left 20% of your total braking power. Agene these are general numbers mint to prove a point and explained in a very simple way.
So what I’m saying is that to get the best braking performance you need to focus on braking balance. You need to improve parts at both ends and understand that traction is the biggest difference in braking power.
Unless you have 12in wide wheels up front with R compound tires you probably don’t need 3 foot front rotors and 10 piston calipers.
I would love to discuss this I’m sure people will disagree with some of what I have said. And would like to get different views and experience to add to it also.
ok so i'm tired and will go in to more detail later.
