w I thought the article raised a lot of good questions. I don't have the bandwidth to go through all of the numbers again, but it's great to see people thinking these issues through! Slapping the cheapest kit available on the car always appears to be a reasonable option in the short-term, particularly to someone who is working with incomplete information (which frankly, is most people since we can't all be experts on everything). Since you're going to own your car for a number of years however, it makes a whole lot of sense to carefully choose where you'll invest a couple grand of your hard-earned money.
One of the OP's quote in the article really made me think about the idea that someone may not know what they're really getting until they have it:
Quote:
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I recently supervised/held my beer while a buddy replaced friction rings on his Wilwood 6R. I have quite a few more track days than him, so I’m not sure why his needed to be done already.
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We (Essex/AP Racing) stand by our choices/options for FT86 brake applications. We did the math. We did our testing. We found that unless you have some fairly drastic modifications on your car (huge rear downforce), any significant bias shift either frontwards OR rearwards is inappropriate and will hurt your overall brake performance. That could come in the form of longer stopping distances, shorter pad and disc life on one or both ends of the car, or pad or fluid fade. Unfortunately some of those effects are hard to recognize if you have no baseline for comparison. That means you may be leaving a lot on the table and not even knowing it.
Our Essex Sprint and Endurance Kits are now running on many hundreds of BRZ's, FRS's, and GT86's all over the globe. Our incidence of problems or issues is
incredibly low. Most of our customers tell us that our brake kit was the single best modification they've done for track use, and that it has saved them tremendously on their lap times, consumable costs, and wrenching time. Many of those customers have also had their kits on their car for four years now, and are still on the first set of discs! Finally, keep in mind that ALL of those customers are running OEM rear brakes with upgraded pads and lines...NOT a complete rear brake kit.
So was it worth a few hundred bucks more initially to get the best front brake system available? We think so, unless you're just looking for those extra 'hard parking points' mentioned in the article which come with a rear BBK. I saw a great quote the other day that I think is extremely applicable to the brake kit market. "Buy the best and you'll only cry once."
