Leaderboard

katman? Where the hell has he been for the last 10+ years? Oh, that's me, back from the dead. That thread may have been on improvedtouring.com. Assuming your friend also has to run the stock drum brakes, here's how we made brakes last in an ITS car, which at the end of its development was probably as fast as any CP vintage car. I don't know what compound Carbotech has today, but back then the HT-9 was the only thing that would hold up to the heat on the front. The HT-10's that replaced them were not as good, but that was about the time that SCCA pissed me off by outlawing remote reservoir shocks so I quit thinking about Z brakes. I ran both the Nismo rear shoe, and the relined Carbotech shoe, I think. We cryo treated rotors and drums. We ran the parking brake so we could adjust the rears during the course of a race. That and having an adjustable prop valve so you can make the rears take their share of the load is critical. If you aren't turning the friction surface of the drums blue, then you ain't there yet. Scour the junk yards and find every Z drum you can find and have them turned and expect to rotate in a new set every weekend. Up front, don't fall into the trap of using a pad that maximizes the pad material, in other words instead of this | | , you want this \ /. The outer radius of the rotor runs hotter because its going faster (linearly) and wears the pad faster. Nothing worse than having to pump the brakes every corner to take up the slop from tapered front pads, maladjusted rear shoes, and expanded rear drums. We drilled holes in the backing plate on the rears for some cooling, but not much else you can do back there. Up front we ran three 3" ducts on each side, one to the hub area of the strut to cool the bearings, one to a custom "can" that blew air on either side of the rotor, and one that blew into the caliper overtop of the pads. That one was tricky to make as there isn't a lot of clearance between the caliper and a 14" wheel that we had to run. I also drilled a series of small holes around the periphery of the pistons just behind where they contact the back of the pads so air could circulate behind the pads from the aforementioned duct over the pads. PM me and I'll send you some pictures.