The Preview Review: Brakeswap.com Brake Kit Test Preview

[Zed 2.0]

Cool. I'd love to see some real data on these: cold panic stops, 100-60-0, repeated stops. A head-to-head comparison to stock and to stock with high performance pads would be too awesome to handle.

[Xenonk]

Well it appears that I cracked at least 1 if not both rear rotors over the weekend. Big ole cracks! All 4 are glazed so the pads need to be upgraded for track events for sure.

 

I am excited to try out these 4-pots at NJMP though.

 

-mike

 

i'll try be at the last summit event for NASA as far as I know to do a simple test in the morning on just the ceramics and street tires.. the weather is getting colder and it's pretty much pointless to try to get good test results when all we will end up doing is super-heating the brakes and just asking to crack them in colder temps when we pull in for pits.

 

 

Just try and cool down the rotors more gradually (maybe a lap more? or just get brake ducts, period).. of all my braking, my rear brakes are fine through all the weather temps.. did you change a lot on your suspension setup that is asking a lot for the rear brakes to burn up harder? If you can run a wider tire, that should help out some to make your braking more effective, so you can spend a tad less time crushing the brakes. But you definitely gotta get off those HP+ as they are not going to do it for track driving at your levels. HP+ is just good enough for the entry level track driver that's still using street tires. But you and I know that by now, you are on Hoosiers or some kind of race slicks, so you will generate heat faster in a shorter distance.

 

i think if you just upgraded to way better pads, you should be ok. Glazing the pads just puts everything else worthless. If your car has some coilovers, I would look into changing the ride height some and as well as changing the compression rate of the fronts somehow to keep the rears more planted so you can gradually heat them and keep them in the nice heated range rather than locking them up and having the ABS leave all sorts of fun "hot spots" that will leave to the pads literally melt on the rotor upon contact. Remember, even the best track pads will hold its max heat temps at 1400F to 1500F for a very short period of time.. aluminum melts at 2700F and if you are getting your rotor temps anywhere around 1700 to 2000F, you WILL fade. The good range of your pads should operate is around the 1000 to 1200F for a typical race pad and rotor.. if you are going well beyond that (and talk to Ken K. at WRX Brakes for some of his rotor temp paint) and keep an eye on the rotor temps. It's REALLY easy to just kill a set of rotors if you overheat them.

 

My suggestion to you is if you can get wider rims and tires to fit (if allowed) to help you still achieve the same braking performance without needing to spend as much time on the brakes because you have the grip to slow down (F=MA and you can spread that Force over more surface area of your tires to slow down while still using the same braking pressure you always have been doing). Another thing to look into is to see where your brake balance is and see if you need to make some suspension adjustments to keep the brake duty loads more balanced over all 4 tires rather than just the front or rear pair doing more work than they ought to.

[Xenonk]

Cool. I'd love to see some real data on these: cold panic stops, 100-60-0, repeated stops. A head-to-head comparison to stock and to stock with high performance pads would be too awesome to handle.

 

 

 

that will be nearly impossible to get accurate results and to do since brake pad alone are different sizes when you are comparing stock pads to HP Ceramics or any other pad of the stock application versus the Wilwoods . There's your difference right there (that's a fact from tried and true experience as pads all have their different heat ranges, different coeff. of friction, etc).

 

Overall, if you are just looking to compare on the caliper differences, you are definitely gaining the following over stock calipers:

 

-weight savings

 

-potential of brake pad compound choices

 

-aluminum housing to help dissapate the heat fast and not retain the heat like the cast iron stock calipers

 

-improved pedal feel

 

-ease of changing pads without the need to unbolt the caliper to slide in the new pads

 

-no more brake pad wear indicators, so you get thicker brake pads for longer wear (it's a wash when it comes to the pad indicator and taking an easy peak at how much pad you have left without unbolting anything).

 

 

just to sum it up for daily street driving so far with 500 miles on them, the brake pedal input and feedback is indeed shorter, and more sensitive, but by no means it's giving me shorter stopping distances. Awhile back in the test that GrassRoots Magazine did a similar tests trying to understand what is the true hype of BBKs, and the results are summed up that they are great for repeated stopping since the size of the rotors can withstand more heat and more surface area to allow heat to dissapate. The other "cool" thing is that the plate thickness of the rotors (not just the overall span width of the rotor) makes the huge difference in stopping distances over repeated braking. They also demonstrated as you start to use brake pads that are near the track level performance, you will be losing out on the emergency cold braking peformance.

 

To really sum it up for your use in Colorado, I would use stock pads or HP Ceramics during the winter seasons (when the weather HIGHS are around 45F). I would switch to something like Carbotech Bobcats or XP8s or even XP10s brake pad equivulents for the summer use when the average temp lows are above 50F.

[FPerron]

My suggestion to you is if you can get wider rims and tires to fit (if allowed) to help you still achieve the same braking performance without needing to spend as much time on the brakes because you have the grip to slow down (F=MA and you can spread that Force over more surface area of your tires to slow down while still using the same braking pressure you always have been doing). Another thing to look into is to see where your brake balance is and see if you need to make some suspension adjustments to keep the brake duty loads more balanced over all 4 tires rather than just the front or rear pair doing more work than they ought to.

 

Sorry, but this statement doesn't make any sense to me. It seems to me that the the more friction you can generate between the tires and the track, the more heat you can put into the brakes - and vice versa. For example, if you put narrow bicycle tires on the car, you would hardly be able to touch the brakes without locking them up. Bigger, stickier tires allow you to decelerate faster and therefore convert more forward momentum into heat.

[caramall2]

REAL QUESTION - PAD SURFACE AREA

 

"The Wilwood Superlite caliper uses a brake pad that is actually smaller in surface area"

....hmm, this was a concern of mine (they looked smaller) but I thought someone said they had more surface area than stock?

 

ANOTHER REAL QUESTION - CURVED VANES

 

Curved Vane rotors: As much as I know curved vane and 2-piece rotors are more expensive, it's hard for me to believe they don't cool better (especially curved vanes). Maybe they don't. One guy with an LGT put his brakes through a fairly rigorous test (like 10 pull downs in a row...I realize that's not a half hour on a track) and they didn't fade on him...he has high quality 2-piece, curved vane rotors, high end calipers, but with just high end street pads. (I'm quite surprised any non-racing pad could do that, but...). Yes, the rotors are slightly larger than our stock.

 

I guess the big question would be "how much better do they cool" and is the price increase worth it vs brake ducting, etc.

 

THEORIZING

 

Bigger, stickier tires allow you to decelerate faster...

Though this may be true in practice (?), in theory, doesn't this not necessarily hold true? The amount of downward force x coeff frict = the total perpendicular (normal) force you get from the tires. If you just increase the area (bigger tires) but no increase in force, the total force wouldn't change--it just "spreads out the force" (lessens psi).

 

 

 

Thanks for the review--I'm planning on getting a set of the calipers.

[Paisan]

I'm not sure but, for street driving, no matter how hard you brake it's not like the track. I can push my car stage 1 AP and Pink Springs/Konis as hard as I want on the street over and over braking, and never overheat the pads or rotors. However on the track where I'm doing 30 min. sessions where I'm going from 120 down to 45-50 doing threshold braking ever 55-60 seconds, the brakes will overheat.

 

Pad material, ducts, and heat extraction via the calipers are what will help you out on track.

 

My guess, and hopefully I'll be able to verify at NJMP in Nov, is that the heat-sink abilities of the Wilwoods combined with good pads will yield a result that will not smoke up the brakes in repeated brake situations. The advantage of the 4-pots is easy of brake pad swapping for track days especially if this is going to be a Daily Driver, as mine is.

 

-mike

[Xenonk]

Sorry, but this statement doesn't make any sense to me. It seems to me that the the more friction you can generate between the tires and the track, the more heat you can put into the brakes - and vice versa. For example, if you put narrow bicycle tires on the car, you would hardly be able to touch the brakes without locking them up. Bigger, stickier tires allow you to decelerate faster and therefore convert more forward momentum into heat.

 

Let's look at the first simple scenario about your thought on heat from tires to the track. You can still generate heat from the tires and the track without using brakes (engine braking, burnouts, acceleration wheelspin through a turn, lateral g-forces, scrubbing speed going into a turn, which all of these are the opposing forces of the direction of the car's travel path). So heat transfering from the tires to the brakes is independent in this case.

 

Let's also look into the 2nd aspect of the scenario. What if you locked up the wheels? You are certainly generating A LOT of heat from the track and the tires, but if the brakes are locked up where the wheel stop spinning, that also means your rotor stop spinning as well.. so does that mean you are transfering heat to the rotors if they are not spinning? Not really (at least not by friction), since it's the brake caliper/pad and rotor aren't moving, that's just clamping force or compression force on the rotor. Sure you can generate heat through the clamping force or pressure [PV=nRT comes to mind via chemistry class days], but the heat generated by squeezing the rotor versus dragging or dealing with frictional forces is definitely different. You can certainly drag out the brakes, but that doesn't necessarily that the tires will heat up. Just imagine if your car was in the air with the tires rolling in the air and you apply the brakes, the tires are not gettting the heat transferred from the rotors because there's no opposing forces on the tires from the track. So in this case, I've isolated of where the heat is built up just on the rotors and not on the tires.

 

So stepping away from the two extreme cases, in order to get heat to the brakes, one would need to do threshold braking (prior to lock up). If you go and lock up your brakes, your tires will be dragging and flat-spotting, thus causing heat, but your rotors are not heating up. What you are trying to achieve is to have your tires transfer the opposing forces onto the rotor. That would the moment when you can efficiently brake effectively, and thus you will be generating heat at the fastest rate possible.

 

The 3rd aspect is looking at duration of your time spent on the brakes. Would a car with wider tires stop faster in terms of time and shorter distance than a car with skinny tires assuming both cars have the same brakes? If both cars have to deal with the same amount of stopping force, and the masses of each car are different due to the size of the tires (because one has larger and wider tires), then the car with the wider tires should stop sooner based on the difference of the rate of acceleration (or deceleration in this case). Generating heat is about how much of the deceleration of the the equation of mass, distance and time (see 1 Joule= 1kg x m^2/s^2 ). And since acceleration is based on time and distance and needing to compensate the difference in mass, then how much time and how far you spend on riding the brakes can determine how much heat you could generate. (I know I'm over-simplifying the equations, but the concept is still applicable since it's all mechanical diagrams and physics problems that I used to do back in my college days).

 

F=MA (force = mass x acceleration)

 

Acceleration is = distance / time^2... so as you increase your time, the greater the distance you can use to stop assuming you are keeping the same constant deceleration. (we are talking about instanteneous rate of acceleration).

 

Just to keep the numbers simple in the two scenarios to narrow down on time and distance alone.. if your rate of deceleration is 10 f/s^2, then you can see that could mean that you could be of either stopping at 10 feet in 1 second, or you can stop at 40 feet in 2 seconds. So you can see that how long you apply the brakes can play a role of how long your stopping distance can be. Your rate of deceleration can be the same, but in the real world, you have to compare of how long you plan on being on the brakes (which no driver really thinks about unless they are racers that constantly talk to their engineers and analyzers to know what is actually happening with the car at all times gathering and looking over data), especially if you dont have 40 feet of space to spare in your braking zone (so what do you do? Increase your rate of deceleration, i.e. brake harder!). Just play around with equating formulas for F=MA, and you'll see what I mean.

 

That is why it's crucial to know how damaging it is for the difference (delta) of acceleration being a big number. In other words, how you transition off the throttle, give a little bit of time for the car to stop accelerating, and THEN apply the brakes will help the brakes not build as much heat. It's all about how you time it and how much distance you have to brake. That is why endurance racing techniques and a time-trials techniques in driving are so different according to the details of each dimension and units of measurements. Even the choice in brake pads are different (Endurance race pads typically have lower coefficient of friction in favor for a longer pad life with a higher temperature range when compared to a time trials or short race pad with high coeff. of friction and wider but lower temperature range so that you can go hot after the 1st lap).

 

So all said and done, your job as a driver is knowing how much rate of deceleration that your tires can take.. I'm more than sure that we have plenty of clamping force coming from the calipers to clamp onto the rotor to the point where we can easily lock up the tires and cause the tires to heat up. Also check on what is the pro's and con's of having a brake pad with high coefficent of friction compared to a low one and why manufacturers also differ in their operating temperatures. Just imagine if you had a coeff. of friction of 1.0 for your brake pad? What would that do for your brakes? Why would it be terrible?

[Xenonk]

REAL QUESTION - PAD SURFACE AREA

 

....hmm, this was a concern of mine (they looked smaller) but I thought someone said they had more surface area than stock?

 

ANOTHER REAL QUESTION - CURVED VANES

 

Curved Vane rotors: As much as I know curved vane and 2-piece rotors are more expensive, it's hard for me to believe they don't cool better (especially curved vanes). Maybe they don't. One guy with an LGT put his brakes through a fairly rigorous test (like 10 pull downs in a row...I realize that's not a half hour on a track) and they didn't fade on him...he has high quality 2-piece, curved vane rotors, high end calipers, but with just high end street pads. (I'm quite surprised any non-racing pad could do that, but...). Yes, the rotors are slightly larger than our stock.

 

I guess the big question would be "how much better do they cool" and is the price increase worth it vs brake ducting, etc.

 

THEORIZING

 

Though this may be true in practice (?), in theory, doesn't this not necessarily hold true? The amount of downward force x coeff frict = the total perpendicular (normal) force you get from the tires. If you just increase the area (bigger tires) but no increase in force, the total force wouldn't change--it just "spreads out the force" (lessens psi).

 

 

 

Thanks for the review--I'm planning on getting a set of the calipers.

 

 

 

I should take some pics some time, but it's very minor, it's harder to compare when the stock pads actually taper to a wider footprint/contact surface area as you wear down the pad.

 

Curved Vane are indeed better for cooling, although I can't imagine installing them backwards would yield them to get any quicker to overheating than say a set of straight vane rotors. 10 pulls down the street at even 60-0 mph 10 times in a row, it should get your brakes to start smoking, but nothing to the point of glowing red on the outer surface that I have done once or twice on track. There's a big difference when driving on the street versus driving on the track. You are more likely to fade by repeated hard braking sessions without any time for the brakes cool between sessions for both cases, but the real issue is how hard you apply the brakes and for how long, in other words it's the application or style of braking.. some people love to stab the heck out of the brakes, some like to drag their brakes for long distances, and most experience racers and other high performance drivers will "squeeze" their brakes and do a lot of "smooth on/smooth off" braking pressures on the pedal.

 

Overall, I would say brake ducting is still the better choice when it comes to preparing for a track car.. even cars that already have curved vane 2-piece floating oversized rotors still can cook a set of race pads and still experience overheating simply that there's not enough air that is being pumped THROUGH the curved vanes. You need air in the first place for the curved vanes to be beneficial. It makes sense right? If there's no air in the premises of the curved vanes, then what good is it? Racecomp Engineering did a good job when it came to making their STi brake duct bracket design compared to other generic designs. Their bracket is actually designed to where the ducting is point to the center of the hub and rotor, so that the curved vanes of the rotor would pull the air out and pump through and out/away from the center of the rotor. Most generic DIY brake duct kits people just install them and point the ducting at the inner rotor surface, which creates a bias temperature difference from the inside plate versus the outside plate.

 

By increasing the tire size you are indeed correct that you are lessening the PSI, but that's what you want to do so that your tire's rubber per square inch is not overwhelmed by the force. If your tire's maximum adhesion is say 3000 pounds per square inch and you are taking full advantage of every square inch of contact area, then increasing the area would lessen the force, but the good thing is that instead of applying 3000 psi it's only experiencing 2500 psi? That means you still have another 500 psi of potential grip that you can use. Indeed that you are not increasing the force, but you are lowering 500 psi worth of heat that you used to generate. And if you are generating less heat, then it could mean you are also using shorter distance to stop OR that you are spending less time on the brakes.

[Xenonk]

I'm not sure but, for street driving, no matter how hard you brake it's not like the track. I can push my car stage 1 AP and Pink Springs/Konis as hard as I want on the street over and over braking, and never overheat the pads or rotors. However on the track where I'm doing 30 min. sessions where I'm going from 120 down to 45-50 doing threshold braking ever 55-60 seconds, the brakes will overheat.

 

Pad material, ducts, and heat extraction via the calipers are what will help you out on track.

 

My guess, and hopefully I'll be able to verify at NJMP in Nov, is that the heat-sink abilities of the Wilwoods combined with good pads will yield a result that will not smoke up the brakes in repeated brake situations. The advantage of the 4-pots is easy of brake pad swapping for track days especially if this is going to be a Daily Driver, as mine is.

 

-mike

 

 

 

Indeed, street braking is just once in a while for a few stints whereas track driving can equate to something around every 30 to 50 seconds braking from anywhere at 120+ mph down to 40mph and repeat...

 

By the time you add that up on the track in a 30 min session, you could have already done more than 60 brake zone passes, which is way more than any street driver would do in a 30 minute commute to work.

 

Can anyone imagine if your commute consist of a total of 60 120+mph pulls with hard braking down to 40mph all in a 30-minute commute? I doubt anyone does that on a daily basis unless they test or race cars for a living.

[FPerron]

Let's look at the first simple scenario about your thought on heat from tires to the track. You can still generate heat from the tires and the track without using brakes (engine braking, burnouts, acceleration wheelspin through a turn, lateral g-forces, scrubbing speed going into a turn, which all of these are the opposing forces of the direction of the car's travel path). So heat transfering from the tires to the brakes is independent in this case.

 

 

Damn! This is not exactly rocket surgery:lol:

 

All I'm saying is that sticky tires allow for faster deceleration which means that more energy has to be dissipated as heat by the brakes. Also, heat generated by the tires on the road surface is negligable compared to the heat generated by the brakes.

[ilh]

All I'm saying is that sticky tires allow for faster deceleration which means that more energy has to be dissipated as heat by the brakes.

 

The amount of energy put into the brakes is not dependent on how quickly you brake. It is simply the amount of kinetic energy lost by the car (proportional to mass*(v1^2 - v2^2)).

 

The temperature of the brakes is dependent on how quickly you brake, how quickly they dissipate heat, their mass, cooling time between brake application, etc.

[FPerron]

OK, one more time...

 

The same car, with the same brakes, driven to the limit of adhesion under braking by the same driver will generate more heat in the brakes with wide sticky tires than with narrow bicycle tires.

[Paisan]

OK, one more time...

 

The same car, with the same brakes, driven to the limit of adhesion under braking by the same driver will generate more heat in the brakes with wide sticky tires than with narrow bicycle tires.

 

Yes but only marginally more and at the cost of lap times... The question is how much extra resistance is caused by the wider stickier tires causing HOW MUCH more heat?

 

-mike

[Xenonk]

OK, one more time...

 

The same car, with the same brakes, driven to the limit of adhesion under braking by the same driver will generate more heat in the brakes with wide sticky tires than with narrow bicycle tires.

 

but you still will end up taking a way longer distance to brake with skinnier tires. In order for you to translate that shorter distance into a form of heat, that's going to factor in. That's a lot of force that you have to translate into heat to yield a shorter distance in the same amount of braking time.

 

My point is that you are dealing with is rate of acceleration multiplied by your mass which is the force that you are controlling.

 

Let's just say the force and the mass doesnt change, so the only thing that's left in the equation is time. How long you spend on the brakes is a huge factor..

 

btw, race tires start to melt around 280 degrees, and if you are saying that tires are neglible compared to braking heat, I garantee you that tires do heat up after hard braking (because they are also experiencing friction between the ground and the rubber and that few hundred of degrees is a huge difference in your braking performance). Let's just put in this scenario for race cars: what if you have the world's best brakes that never overheat? Then your weakest link will be the tires, overall, you are still dealing with the tires that need to operate in the correct temperature range, and if anything, your tires are way more sensitive to temperatures than the brakes.

 

Sure, I agree that you do generate a lot of heat from the brakes alone, but what I'm proposing that braking performance is not just about brakes, it's looking at other factors that also limit your braking performance. That goesto say that tires and suspension and even the weight of your car plays a huge role to stopping. Not all of us are willing to drop about $30,000 for Porsche Race Brake kit alone to get that kind of braking performance. I'm sure we can spend that $30,000 wisely on other areas of the car to have a better and more efficient braking performance than just buying a set of super brake rotors, pads and calipers.

[Paisan]

Let's just put in this scenario for race cars: what if you have the world's best brakes that never overheat? Then your weakest link will be the tires, overall, you are still dealing with the tires that need to operate in the correct temperature range, and if anything, your tires are way more sensitive to temperatures than the brakes.

 

Sure, I agree that you do generate a lot of heat from the brakes alone, but what I'm proposing that braking performance is not just about brakes, it's looking at other factors that also limit your braking performance. That goesto say that tires and suspension and even the weight of your car plays a huge role to stopping. Not all of us are willing to drop about $30,000 for Porsche Race Brake kit alone to get that kind of braking performance. I'm sure we can spend that $30,000 wisely on other areas of the car to have a better and more efficient braking performance than just buying a set of super brake rotors, pads and calipers.

 

This is the exact example we had with our 1994 Legacy Turbo Racecar. (NASA-NE PTE Champ 2007 by the way). We were running FHI 4-pot Calipers with DBA4000 rotors up front Hawk Blues, stock rears with Hawk Blacks. The brakes could do 3hr enduros w/o issue, in fact we ran the whole season on 1/4 to 1/2 the pads. However the issue we had was in the turns, the narrow tires at 205 or 215 depending on which R compounds we ran could not keep up with the speed we were turning and the rate at which we were braking.

 

So there is your real world example

 

-mike

[caramall2]

Xenonk -- Just wanted to say good info and thanks for the answers to my post. (Paisan...interesting about the tires.)

[Xenonk]

not a problem, hopefully I'll have another preview of the brakes on track next month. I'll try to narrow the topic to just brakes. i know in the past (and still) that I talk a lot about tires and suspension, but hopefully I can isolate the next review on just the review on the brakes without needing to go over the difference in suspension and tires setups.

[botbs]

Did I miss the cost of these kits? Are they available yet?

 

Never mind, I found it .... =P

 

$1099 intro price...

[magnetic1]

Did I miss the cost of these kits? Are they available yet?

 

Never mind, I found it .... =P

 

$1099 intro price...

 

Yup.

 

Still good for about a week I think. We have everything here except the calipers. We were told they shipped from Wilwood. We have the heat treated brackets, the lines, the rotors and the pads!

[Xenonk]

just a quick update on this brake kit after a 2000 mile drive:

 

so far the brakes have been doing well, no significant wear on the rotors since I'm using Hawk Ceramics. The brakes are actually a bit overwhelming for the 40F weather using Toyo Proxes4 all-season performance tires since they lock up so quickly and nicely. ABS does engage quicker than compared to the stock calipers and while I did gain some confidence in the brakes, don't let it fool you that you can still stop in shorter distance, the tires are the ones that dictate that more so. Overall, Im very pleased of this set up and it's defintely worthy of its performance.

 

One thing I do notice when I drove in the rain last night on the highway is that the initial bite isn't quite there (probably because of the small tolerance gap between the brake pad and the rotor surface causing the pad to hydro plane over the surface). Once you get a firm push on the brakes, the pads will make contact onto the rotor. It's just something I noticed in the rain. It's nothing bad, but just something I picked up through my driving experience with them in the cold rain.

[Scooby2.5]

One thing I do notice when I drove in the rain last night on the highway is that the initial bite isn't quite there (probably because of the small tolerance gap between the brake pad and the rotor surface causing the pad to hydro plane over the surface). Once you get a firm push on the brakes, the pads will make contact onto the rotor. It's just something I noticed in the rain. It's nothing bad, but just something I picked up through my driving experience with them in the cold rain.

 

I noticed this same thing on my outback XT when I switched to the LGT calipers with Hawk HPS pads and DBA4000 rotors.

 

I wonder what could cause this?

 

Also I am getting ready to see this week if the Wilwoods fit under the stock Outback XT wheels on my XT.

Cant wait to try them out, thanks Eric. Review pending.

[SubiGT]

One thing I do notice when I drove in the rain last night on the highway is that the initial bite isn't quite there (probably because of the small tolerance gap between the brake pad and the rotor surface causing the pad to hydro plane over the surface). Once you get a firm push on the brakes, the pads will make contact onto the rotor. It's just something I noticed in the rain. It's nothing bad, but just something I picked up through my driving experience with them in the cold rain.

Scared the $hit out of me a month ago when I was driving in mixed rain/snow up near Cleveland. Step on brakes, nothing. Ease into it again, starts biting, noise. Warm 'em up good, back to normal. But, long no-braking stretches, ie. freeway speeds for 30+min in wet/snow temps, better hope no panic stop needed.

 

DBA 4000, Hawk HPS, SS lines, good fluid.

[Xenonk]

I noticed this same thing on my outback XT when I switched to the LGT calipers with Hawk HPS pads and DBA4000 rotors.

 

I wonder what could cause this?

 

Also I am getting ready to see this week if the Wilwoods fit under the stock Outback XT wheels on my XT.

Cant wait to try them out, thanks Eric. Review pending.

 

 

 

I dont think that happen with me when I had the LGT calipers with the 4000s at all. This is noticeable with the Wilwood calipers and the new pads.. it's probably a guess that there's very little room between the pad and rotors so that the vapors and anything else has very little room to escape when the water/rain burns off.

[Xenonk]

Scared the out of me a month ago when I was driving in mixed rain/snow up near Cleveland. Step on brakes, nothing. Ease into it again, starts biting, noise. Warm 'em up good, back to normal. But, long no-braking stretches, ie. freeway speeds for 30+min in wet/snow temps, better hope no panic stop needed.

 

DBA 4000, Hawk HPS, SS lines, good fluid.

 

were you using pads that require a little warming up or needs to operate around the 100F mark? That's why I switch to street pads when I'm driving around town using either Carbotech Bobcats or Hawk Ceramics (HPS is ok if you dont get snow or if the weather doesnt drop below freezing).

[SubiGT]

were you using pads that require a little warming up or needs to operate around the 100F mark? That's why I switch to street pads when I'm driving around town using either Carbotech Bobcats or Hawk Ceramics (HPS is ok if you dont get snow or if the weather doesnt drop below freezing).

On worn HPS's right now, have Bobcats ready to go on.