Quote:
Originally Posted by Msquared
It's worth mentioning that the grippier your tires on track, the more heat the brakes will have to shed. OTOH, it's also worth mentioning that you don't have to late-brake-bonzai every corner of every lap in a non-competition HPDE event. You can extend your braking distances a bit and then make every third or fourth lap a "personal best" attempt, which helps reduce the load on the brakes during a full session.
I don't know how many continuous laps they do for those tests: if it's only maybe three before a cool-down lap, then it's not going to torture the brakes like a 20-minute session with all full-bore laps would. Still, it's important to keep in mind that even the "base" 4-piston setup is worlds better than any brakes on cars from 80s and probably even 90s. For example, a 90s-era 1LE or Corvette ZR1 still came with two-piston PBR sliding calipers, and yet somehow they managed to road race those things in sprint and endurance showroom-stock classes. We are spoiled these days.
Good questions, I just don't have the good answers. Someone would ideally run the two brake setups on otherwise-identical cars for a lapping session. If anyone has tried that, I haven't seen it. Next best would be the same car on the same track with the same driver before and after going from stock V6 brakes to the 6-piston upgrade. That driver would have a good sense of how much the upgrade improve braking capacity over a session. It would be worth searching the forum here to see if anyone ever wrote up a review like that.
|
All good points, Matt.
Since all of my cars for HPDE have been street driven and I don't have a truck and trailer, I've been using the "80% rule" for making sure I try not to keep up with faster cars and limit the car to 80% of flat out so I can get it home in one piece.
I hear ya on being spoiled by what's out there now. I thought upgrading my Fox body Mustang to SN95 Cobra brakes was the best thing in the world until I woke up and tried something else.
I guess it will come down to experimenting with things over the course of a few HPDE events. I think the V6 is a very capable setup from what everyone is saying.