vinzclortho
New member
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2008
So, we raced last weekend in Lemons Southern Discomfort 2011 at Carolina Motorsports Park. Halfway through Saturday, thing were going well.. about 5 hours in we were in 9th place (out of 50) after a driver change and the car was running great. All of a sudden Hoggster comes in and says that he has no brakes. I take the front driver wheel off and see a small fire coming from the caliper... awesome. I spray it w/ a fire bottle and it goes out, mostly.. and we see that there is a small amount of brake fluid leaking from the calipers because the pads are totally gone and the backing plates are red-hot and melted to the pistons. So, we try to pull the pads out to replace them and the pistons come out welded to the backing plates, followed by all of the brake fluid in the reservoir, which promptly lights on fire.
This picture is just after the fire got put out :
The pads & pistons:
Other side of that pad :
Luckily we managed to find another caliper about 30 mins away, but it still ruined the rest of the day of racing and put us back about 20 places. So we need better brake pads.
We've been using PBR MetalMasters/XPGs in previous races and haven't really had problems with them. We usually got a whole race out of a set of front pads, but just barely. The performance of the brakes were always good.. it was one of our advantages on the track. Two things changed this race -
1) The track was a lot faster due to fewer cars, less flags, etc. The car was marginally faster, so all in all more/harder braking. Lots of other teams had similar issues this race.
2) Before the race, one of our 36mm rear calipers died and we replaced both rears with 40mm calipers. This seemed to make the pedal travel further to get the brakes to bite, which would have the effect of burning through the fronts faster.
We had a pair of PBR Ceramic pads that we tried on the track day before the race and didn't like.. we were advised against those, so we used (and burned through) 2 sets of crappy organic pads on Sunday and finished metal-to-metal again, minus the fire, by the end of the day.
We really need to find better pads that can preferably make it through a whole race. We can deal with pads that will make it through 1 day if we have to. Other teams at the race evangelize their Hawk pads, but I've been having a hard time finding Hawks for our 2-piston Girling calipers. It looks like I can find EBC pads for the Girlings, but I can't find too much info on them. Upgrading to larger rotors isn't really an option for us.. we have ~15 virgos and can't fit anything larger under them.
So, what are our options? Brakes don't count for the $500 Lemons budget, so cost is not an issue, within reason.
This picture is just after the fire got put out :
The pads & pistons:
Other side of that pad :
Luckily we managed to find another caliper about 30 mins away, but it still ruined the rest of the day of racing and put us back about 20 places. So we need better brake pads.
We've been using PBR MetalMasters/XPGs in previous races and haven't really had problems with them. We usually got a whole race out of a set of front pads, but just barely. The performance of the brakes were always good.. it was one of our advantages on the track. Two things changed this race -
1) The track was a lot faster due to fewer cars, less flags, etc. The car was marginally faster, so all in all more/harder braking. Lots of other teams had similar issues this race.
2) Before the race, one of our 36mm rear calipers died and we replaced both rears with 40mm calipers. This seemed to make the pedal travel further to get the brakes to bite, which would have the effect of burning through the fronts faster.
We had a pair of PBR Ceramic pads that we tried on the track day before the race and didn't like.. we were advised against those, so we used (and burned through) 2 sets of crappy organic pads on Sunday and finished metal-to-metal again, minus the fire, by the end of the day.
We really need to find better pads that can preferably make it through a whole race. We can deal with pads that will make it through 1 day if we have to. Other teams at the race evangelize their Hawk pads, but I've been having a hard time finding Hawks for our 2-piston Girling calipers. It looks like I can find EBC pads for the Girlings, but I can't find too much info on them. Upgrading to larger rotors isn't really an option for us.. we have ~15 virgos and can't fit anything larger under them.
So, what are our options? Brakes don't count for the $500 Lemons budget, so cost is not an issue, within reason.
