| Stang70Fastback |
06-21-2017 06:24 PM |
Quick Review of AP Racing Factory BBK from Essex Parts Services
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Full Disclosure: Essex Parts Services offered me a friendly discount on this AP Racing Big Brake kit in exchange for the promise of a thorough review of my experience with the product. They wanted an unbiased review, and that’s what this is. (Also, a huge shoutout to @JRitt for dealing with all of my annoying questions!)
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Big brakes. Everyone loves big brakes. Everyone wants big brakes. It seems even the OEMs are fascinated with big brakes these days. The horsepower wars have been raging for several years now, and cars such as the Mustang GT350, the Challenger Hellcat, and the Camaro ZL1 are setting the power and speed bar ever higher. With these big (and in the case of the Hellcat, heavy) vehicles capable of reaching obscene speeds in hilariously short periods of time, brakes have had to evolve too… mainly by getting bigger. All of the previously mentioned vehicles have ~15.5″ diameter front brakes, which is huge!
So how does my tiny little BRZ sports car stack up? Well, moving up from a 17″ to an 18″ wheel didn’t do my brakes any favors from a visual standpoint. Unlike those other muscle cars, whose brakes fill virtually the entire wheel, mine don’t even come close. The Series.Blue came with red-painted brake calipers for that “sporty” look, but they were the exact same brakes as the other trims, and if anything that just made it look like they were trying too hard, because they might have been red, but they were still small. In my mind, you don’t call attention to small brakes with bright colors.
This isn’t really a fair comparison, though. The BRZ is a budget-minded, low-horsepower, light-weight car, and all three of those criteria mean it isn’t going to come with massive brakes from the factory. The stock front brakes on all of our cars are 11.6″ diameter disks. (New for 2017 is an optional Brembo Big Brake kit which bumps that up to 12.8″ diameter front rotors.) They might be smaller, but they are adequately-sized for the task they need to perform. A Hellcat traveling at its 200 MPH top speed has more than twice the momentum of a BRZ traveling at its 140 MPH top speed. So why, then, upgrade my brakes at all? Well let’s discuss a few of the benefits of a Big Brake Kit:
- Thermal Capacity: Many people mistakenly assume that the primary function of a Big Brake Kit (BBK) is to improve (reduce) your braking distance. This is incorrect. The primary function of a BBK, above all else, is to provide increased thermal capacity. The bigger your brakes are, the more heat they can absorb and distribute, and the more quickly they can radiate that heat out. Remember, brakes function by essentially converting your car’s momentum directly into heat through friction. Continued, repeated braking dumps more and more heat into your rotors, pads, calipers, and fluid. Push your brakes hard enough (on a track, for example) and eventually you will reach a point where something gives. Your stock brake fluid might boil, or your pads might glaze over. In either case, you’re going to have a bad time. By increasing the size of your brakes, you’re providing a larger heatsink with which to absorb and distribute that heat. You’re also providing a larger surface area with which to radiate that heat out to the environment. Factory cars (by and large) come with brakes that are really only designed for daily driving (light braking) and maybe one or two panic stops. Even more performance-oriented cars don’t come, from the factory, with brakes designed to be hammered around a track. Do I hammer my car around a track? Well, I haven’t participated in a track day yet, but it’s on the list of things I want to start doing in the long run, and while the OEM brakes should be sufficient so long as I have the proper fluids and pads (designed to cope with higher temperatures), a good BBK up front will provide me with the added peace of mind to know that I don’t have to worry about cooking anything on the track. Oh, and even though autocross only has me hammering on the brakes for 60 seconds at a time, I’ve still managed to dump enough heat into them in those short periods to turn the rotors blue. That’s not an immediate issue, but eventually those heat cycles will take their toll on those rotors and they will need to be replaced. Larger rotors deal with heat better, and will last longer because the heat cycles won’t be as extreme.
- Weight Savings: It might sound counter-intuitive, but BBKs often save weight. Two-piece rotors with aluminum hats can be larger, but still weigh less than smaller, one-piece, steel rotors. A better-designed caliper can also weigh less than the mass-produced factory design. A few pounds might not sound like much, but this is also un-sprung mass (and in the case of the rotors, rotating un-sprung mass), which more significantly impacts handling. At the end of the day, any weight you can save is a good thing, so being able to shave 10 or 15 lb off of the front of your car doesn’t hurt (especially when the BRZ already has a front-heavy weight distribution.)
- Convenience: One of the benefits to a BBK is that they are easier to work with. First of all, a BBK will require less maintenance than the stock brakes, simply as a result of being better-suited to the job. They aren’t pushed as hard, relative to their size, and therefore components last longer. Additionally, most BBKs (at least the ones I’ve looked at) offer the convenience of a greatly simplified method of swapping brake pads. This means I could show up to an autocross, or a track day, and quickly swap in the appropriate pads for the job, and then swap back again at the conclusion of the event, all without needing to half-disassemble the caliper the way you would have to with the OEM brakes.
- Style: Yes, let’s address the elephant in the room. A lot of the people reading this are only interested in a BBK for looks. Is that wrong? Certainly not. I’m a big fan of function over form, but I’m also a big fan of form that’s also functional. Unlike many other modifications you can do to your car in the name of style that negatively impact performance, this is a win-win type of modification. I’ve been lusting after a BBK for a while, and one of the main reasons was simply because my stock brakes look a bit small behind my 18″ summer wheels. Having said that, it’s certainly possible to screw everything up by installing the wrong kind of BBK on your car (my friend Mike has an entire write-up about this over on his blog.) This BBK improves performance, and looks good while doing so.
AP Racing Kits
There are quite a few Big Brake Kits on the market these days, with brands such as Wilwood, Stoptech, and AP Racing being among the most popular. I had originally honed in on AP Racing’s Competition kits. They offer two such kits: Sprint, and Endurance. The Sprint kit has a smaller rotor, and weighs less, while the Endurance kit has a larger rotor, but weighs more (both weigh less than the factory setup.) However, after a bit of back-and-forth with the folks at Essex Parts Services, I began to understand that those kits are not really meant for my use case (year-round, daily driving on salty roads.) They then pointed me to AP Racing’s Factory kits as one potential alternative. These kits are considerably more expensive than the Competition kits, but while they are more than capable of handling occasional track use, they are also designed as OEM-quality replacements that can be used year-round in all conditions. Here’s a quick comparison of the three kits’ major features...
Click here to read the rest of the review. (Unboxing, Installation, Impressions, and lots of photos!)
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