<cue the 1950s documentary music> Your Brakes And You
You are probably here because you want to know more about upgrading the Prelude's braking system. Before we get into upgrades, you should know how the whole system works. Attached to this post, there is a general diagram of a car braking system. There are a couple of parts you should notice:
The rotors on each hub. The hub is the part at each wheel which rotates inside the knuckle. The front hub is connected to the axles (FWD) with a big 36mm nut.
The calipers on each knuckle. The knuckle is the steel part which the suspension members bolt to. The hub spins inside it. It has pickup points for the A-arms and the lateral links, depending on front or rear.
The ABS modulator, and the hydraulic lines which connect it to the fittings on each caliper. The ABS modulator electronically controls hydraulic braking pressure to each wheel independently, based on the ABS computer.
The master cylinder (MC), which is mounted on the firewall. The MC is driven by your foot; it is a pump which drives force from the brake pedal into the hydraulic system.
The brake booster, which is the saucer-shaped round thing also mounted on your firewall. This takes vacuum created by your engine (at idle or when the accelerator is not pressed), and uses that vacuum to reduce the amount of force you need to press the brake pedal. It's a booster mechanism, which allows you to hit the brakes a little bit quicker than without it.
There are other misc. parts, but these are the large ones which you should know to read this guide.
The Golden Rules of Braking
Before we run off and spend money, we need to know our destination. It's vital to understand the most effective strategies. Behold, I give you the cardinal rules of braking:
THE BRAKES DO NOT STOP THE CAR. YOUR TIRES DO. I am dead serious about this. This is far and away the single most under-appreciated fact of braking. It makes absolutely NO sense to dump $2k on a big brake kit (BBK), and run all-season tires. Buy sticky, high performance tires before you spend a DIME on your braking system. Otherwise, you are pissing away your money.
For a certain weight/size car, up to a certain point, no amount of money can make your car stop faster. We will get to the explanation of why in a bit, but know that there is only a very small improvement you can make (~10%) to the actual stopping distance of a factory car. Beyond this point, it is simply not possible to stop any faster with more/better parts. We could improve braking without limit if we could change the car's weight or run infinitely large tires, but obviously reality puts strong limits on these things.
Brake upgrades can really only be categorized into 3 things: (1) upgrades which lower your stopping distance, (2) upgrades which manage heat more optimally, (3) upgrades which improve braking feel. The first one has surprisingly few options for it. The second is what 90% of all braking parts in the aftermarket essentially do, and the last is useful to create a better driving experience (explained later).
On a street car, you will never generate enough heat to require expensive braking parts (e.g. non-OEM calipers/rotors). The simple reason is that you don't brake often enough (and at high enough speeds) to require fancy/expensive braking upgrades. A lot of people will read this and ignore it, and go out and buy that fancy Endless BBK kit anyways, 'cause it's hella tite yo.
Upgrading your front brakes (including calipers, pads, and/or rotors) without upgrading the rear will almost certainly result in worse braking distance. The reason why is explained in the very next section: brake bias. If the bias deviates from a certain ideal number, your braking performance gets worse, no matter how good/expensive the brake kit.
The best thing to do is to figure out what you can do to lower stopping distance, since that has the most practical value for your time/money. If you auto-x or track the car, you may want to then consider heat management, but only if you compete often enough to make it worthwhile.
Tires
Before I go on, I want to put in another word about tires. The stock Prelude braking system is very good for an OEM system, and the best thing you can possibly do to improve your braking is buy quality tires. You want a high-performance summer tire for as long as it stays dry in your part of the world. Buying a sticky tire will dramatically improve your braking distance without touching the brake system. There is a reason why all the magazine brake kit reviews choose the most extreme R-compound tires they can fit; you will more often than not see Hoosiers as the test tire (that's not a coincidence).
There's a simple way to visualize this why tires are important: consider the caliper, rotor, and wheel on one corner of the car. Your stock braking system has more than enough power to lock up the rotor and the wheel. If the wheel is no longer turning, your tire will be sliding against the pavement. This is where you need friction, because that is what is actually stopping the car. This is still true for ABS, since ABS uses sophisticated computer controls to keep the tires right at the threshold of sliding; basically it keeps the wheels barely rotating enough so that the tire doesn't slide. You are still limited by the traction from your tires in these cases.
What can go wrong?
The best example I can give you guys of the perils of upgrading things without knowing what you are actually getting is a case I saw of a test done on an RSX (not a Prelude I know, but it makes a good example). There were no less than three pricey BBK setups that had worse braking distance than a stock car. You can read about it on Stoptech's website here. This is what happens when companies sell a BBK which only modifies the front brakes. It throws the bias off, and too much braking force is applied to the front. I strongly encourage you guys to make sure, if you really want a BBK (despite what I wrote here), make sure it comes as a complete kit including the rears.
Lowering Stopping Distance
Keep in mind that, even if you do everything right, you can only lower your stopping distance by about 10%. In theory you could lower it much more, but you would have to do more radical things like dump hundreds of pounds off the car, or run super-sized tires (255+ width), or basically turn it into a track car. If you want to build a track car, this guide is not for you.
The three things I can think of which would materially improve stopping distance are:
Create the ideal F-R brake bias. This is the number one most important goal. There are many ways to do this, and you have to start upgrading/replacing parts to achieve this. More explanations in a minute.
Run brake pads with a better coefficient of friction, subject to your heat conditions. Race pads are designed to work at high temperature, and street pads are designed to work at low temperature. Putting race pads on a street car is very stupid. You will understand why when we get to the section about heat. In the meantime, improving the friction between the caliper and the rotor puts more stopping force through the wheel/tire. There is a little leeway to improve, but again there is an upper limit on how effective this will be.
Use aerodynamics to create more downforce on your tires. For a street car this is pretty impractical, but it can make a small difference to do the following things:
Lower the car
Run a smooth skidplate under the front
Run a diffuser in the rear
Run a front lip with better than stock aerodynamics
Run a spoiler with greater frontal area
Keep in mind these things are only going to make a very small difference (like ~1%), so they should not be a priority unless you have done everything else.
Quick comment about braking system reviews: Most magazine numbers are the 90mph-0 number, which has the greatest potential to look good. However, for a street car, you rarely are going to be driving 90 (at least you shouldn't be on public roads). The most relevant numbers are usually the 40mph-0 and 70mph-0 numbers. The improvements are less good in these cases.
Getting The Bias Right
Here's where the magic is, and this section has a bunch of math in it. Brake bias, in a nutshell, is the amount of available braking pressure applied (through the pads) to the front half and rear half of the car, when the brakes are fully engaged. Brake bias is usually a percentage, such as 60% front and 40% rear. To do this section, we are going to use measurements taken from the stock braking system to compute the ideal and actual brake bias. Here is our data:
Stock front piston diameter: 57.2mm/2.25in
Stock rear piston diameter: 1.30in
Stock front rotor diameter: 11.1in
Stock rear rotor diameter: 10.5in
Brake pad coefficient of friction: 0.4 (good pads are around this value)
For this part, we will use TCE's Brake Bias Calculator. For anything not listed here, use the default value. Using these values, we get an OEM brake bias of nearly 75/25 (+-2%). This is very heavily front-biased. Let's see what the ideal bias is.
Ideal bias can be computed using math. The problem is that math approximates certain things, and doesn't take into account cornering loads or uneven surfaces, all of which occur in real life. However, it's a good approximation, so we can start there. Using this info, I have computed the dynamic weight bias of a Prelude under 1G of braking force. 1G is a lot, but with good tires/pads, you can duplicate this number. Here is my Google Spreadsheet which computes this dynamic bias. Using stock numbers, an extra 442 lbs is dynamically transferred from the rear of the car to the front under braking, which is bad, because the car is already nose-heavy. Braking always causes this weight shift, so ideally we want to minimize it, which I will get to in the next section. Using this stock data, we see that the ideal front brake bias for the Prelude should indeed be about 75%. In this regard, the OEM setup is quite good.
Improving the OEM Weight Distribution
However, with this setup, rear traction is very compromised. There is a lot of available traction at the rear which we can't use, because so little weight is there under braking. We want to find ways of putting more weight on the rear. By playing with the calculator, you can see that it's possible by:
Moving the static weight distribution rearward. You can do this by removing/replacing parts on the front of the car, or doing something like a battery relocation to the trunk.
Lowering the car. This is surprisingly effective.
Increasing the spring rate. This isn't shown on the chart because of simplicity, but higher spring rates keep the center of mass of the car from pitching forward so strongly under high deceleration. This keeps more of the car's mass in the back, ever so slightly.
If you play with the numbers, it's possible on a street Prelude to get a dynamic bias close to 70/30, depending on what you do. In this case, you can shorten your stopping distance by biasing the braking more towards the rear, in order to take advantage of the extra weight (force) on the rear tires. This eventually leads us to the modifications section, which is where you can choose ways of doing this.
For street cars, the intent is always to lock up the front brakes first. This happens when the total traction available by the tire is exceeded (assuming no ABS in this case). This is done for safety reasons, because locking up the rears first means the tail end gets fishy, which is much harder to control than plowing the front end. This is still true even if you are an experienced driver. So use caution when modifying the brake bias, and don't get yourself into a setup where the rears lockup first (be conservative).
Measuring Actual Bias
For those of you serious about taking action on this stuff, there are tools you can buy which allow you to tweak and measure the brake bias. I don't have links, but you can buy amateur-level force gauges to actually measure the amount of forward weight transfer under braking. If you do that, then you will know exactly what the real weight distribution is, and then you can setup your actual brake bias appropriately. If you are really sophisticated, you can even find ways of digitally logging the force over time, and even correlate that with deceleration G's. Using that info, you could come up with a dynamic weight transfer curve, and use more sophisticated methods to dynamically control brake bias. However, that's way out of the scope here.
Heat Management
So now that we know what we are shooting for, the secondary consideration is heat. Many popular forum myths are about braking heat, so it's time to shed some light on the subject. Here are some popular misconceptions:
The cooler the better. False. Brake pads are designed specifically to work in a particular heat range. Street pads are designed to operate roughly in the range 150 deg F to 350 deg F, sometimes higher if you get a good quality pad. Race pads can sometimes only start performing as specified at 650 deg F and higher, which means you need a lot of heat in your rotors before you can begin stopping fast.
Race pads are a great upgrade for the street. False. This one has the potential to actually kill you. Given the temperature info above, you absolutely don't want to run pads that require high temperatures to work, because you won't be generating that kind of heat driving on roads. Even if you could, your stock components could never take that kind of sustained heat.
Blank rotors don't stop as well as the fancy ones (drilled/slotted/voodoo/whatever). False. Blanks actually stop better, because there is more total surface area to engage the brake pad. The original motivation for stuff like drilled and slotted rotors was to manage high temperatures. This is only a consideration if you are track racing. You can buy fancy rotors, but you are definitely not going to stop any faster.
6-piston calipers are better than 2/4. False. If you use the brake bias calculator above, you will see that piston surface area affects brake bias, and also driver braking feel. The only inherent advantage to more pistons are:
Possibly improved pad wear.
Better compatibilty with large rotors.
This one is hard to quantify, but the summary is that using more pistons doesn't automatically buy you anything.
Problem Areas
Now that some of the myths are busted, let's get to the heart of the problem: heat. Brakes generate heat, because they dissipate force into heat (energy). That heat has to go somewhere. Ideally we want it transferred into the environment (air), and nowhere mechanical. However, braking heat will immediately affect:
The rotor.
The pads.
The caliper.
The brake fluid pushing on the caliper pistons.
Some of these are worse than others. Heat in the caliper and brake fluid are the most problematic, since the caliper can actually start to deform when it gets hot. Brake fluid has a definite problem with heat, because it can boil. If it boils, it no longer provides braking pressure since some part of it is no longer in fluid form. This means that nothing happens when you step on the brakes.
Many Solutions
There is a lot of info online about improving heat capacity of the braking system, so I encourage a lot of Googling since I don't have room to explain all of it here. The summary however is that you can reduce temperature in each component by using the following solutions:
Rotor: Use larger diameter rotors, or especially thicker ones. You can also get them with vanes fanning out in the center, which expels hot air from the interior of the rotor to the outside air when it spins. Rotors are made from high grade steel in order to survive the high braking temperatures, so don't use other materials (such as aluminum) to save weight.
Calipers: Aluminum calipers transfer heat better than steel (plus are lighter). High quality ones have vents or open spaces, to allow the most amount of air to get between the two caliper halves.
Pads: They are supposed to get hot, so no real issues here. However, if you can find them, you can run titanium shims between the pads and the caliper pistons. Titanium is an insulator, which prevents pad heat from transferring to the pistons, and then the brake fluid.
Fluid: Here is an easy way to improve heat performance. DOT 5 brake fluid should be used to give you a very high boiling point, and also resists the absorption of water from the air. Water dilutes the fluid, making it perform worse. The tendancy of fluid to absorb water is called hygroscopy. Having a low hygroscopic fluid is key to long-term performance and maintenance. Bleeding the brakes often also helps, especially if you are tracking the car. Here is a great comparison of commercial DOT5 fluids for you to pick from. Stoptech also has a good writeup on the different fluids you can buy.
There is a lot you can improve if you want to reduce heat. Most serious racers use thermometers mounted on the knuckle in order to measure caliper heat, or even rotor heat. Once you measure it, you can get a feel for how much heat you are generating, which tells you how far you need to go to get below an acceptable threshold. This threshold is different for every car, and I don't have data yet for the Prelude. I will enhance this section once I do.
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Pedal Feel (Driver Experience)
The 3rd dimension to this is the driver's experience of braking. A good example of this is to compare different cars. Sometimes, you can step on the pedal of a car and feel like it's complete mush. However, this doesn't mean the car's brakes suck; most production cars have pretty decent braking out of the box. Indeed, you can take two cars of comparable weight, and brake test both of them. Once could have a crappy pedal feel, and the other could feel like a go-kart. It's possible that both have the same braking distance. How does this happen? It happens when the hydraulic system is designed differently between the two.
The biggest factor of pedal feel is the "mechanical advantage" of the brakes. Factors which contribute to mechanical advantage are:
Size and number of the caliper pistons.
Diameter of the rotor. Larger rotors mean the caliper is positioned farther radially from the hub, which means more leverage when the calipers pinch the rotor. It's the same physics as turning a wrench with a longer handle; you can apply more force with a longer moment arm.
Coefficient of friction of the pads. Good pads will grab the rotor harder, and will feel like you are stopping faster.
Diameter of the MC piston vs. the total surface area of the caliper pistons (at all corners). The larger the MC, the more hydraulic force is applied to your brakes per brake pedal distance traveled. It will feel like you can get on the brakes harder for less pedal travel.
Keep in mind that improving pedal feel is mostly "cosmetic", in the sense that it won't make any real difference in stopping or heat. However, it's partially important, just because we all like to have fun driving. Driving a car with crappy pedal feel is no fun, so it's a valid reason to upgrade.
Structural Braking Feel Upgrades
There is another pseudo-category here for upgrades that are not completely cosmetic in nature, which improve pedal feel. A lot of OEM brake systems don't have enough structural rigidity for high pressure braking conditions (sustained maximum deceleration). Sometimes the caliper or even the knuckle itself can start to flex, causing the pads to not be in alignment with the rotor anymore. This will destroy braking power, and in most cases the driver can feel something strange happening through the brake pedal. Sometimes this causes a phenomenon known as pad knockback, which occurs particularly during heavy cornering.
The only way to improve this kind of problem is to replace the caliper, and potentially the knuckle or hub, with a stronger part. Most aftermarket calipers don't have this problem, because in addition to being light, they are very strong. Sometimes you can find an OEM-made part which is robust enough to stop this. Thankfully, this is rarely a problem on the street; only track cars have major issues with brake rigidity.
The ABS System
Another source of popular mis-information is the Antilock Braking System (ABS), which is now required on all DOT-legal passenger vehicles sold in the USA. There are legions of armchair racers who will tell anyone who will listen about how bad ABS is for sporty driving, and that to be fast (on the auto-x course or track) you must disable it. Sadly, this is all wrong, and I'm going to explain why.
First let's start by talking about what ABS actually does. The purpose of ABS brakes is to prevent any of the 4 wheels from locking up under braking. This means each wheel should be in motion, and the tires should not be sliding against the road surface. The motivation behind this is because:
Wheels which are rotating with clean contact on the road allows the user to control the car in a panic maneuver. If the front tires are still rolling, you can steer around any problems. In addition, the rear of the car can get loose if the wheels lock, which makes it very hard to control. ABS is designed to prevent this.
You actually have more stopping power when the tire is rolling against the road than if the tire is sliding. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it's been studied extensively for automotive needs. HowStuffWorks has a quick summary of it.
Similar to the last 2 points, braking under cornering gives you much more lateral traction with ABS. Without ABS, the wheels will lock up and start to slide. A sliding tire can't resist any cornering force, and your car will only go in the direction it was going before you hit the brakes.
How does it work?
ABS works it's magic by measuring the several factors which actually impact braking. Primarily, this is the wheel speed for each corner. Modern systems may also have an internal G-sensor, to measure deceleration and cornering. The beauty of the ABS system is that it constantly monitors the wheel sensors, and applies just enough braking force to slow the wheel down. If the wheel ever stops turning, the ABS computer will suspend braking force for a fraction of a second (typically in the ms range), so that the tire can roll forward again. This happens repeatedly for as long as it takes for braking to finish. Most people have heard the pump noises when you step on the brakes; however the pulses at the wheel are much faster. The ABS pump only pumps at a much slower speed, because it is controlled independently from the pressure at the calipers. Orson has an outstanding description of this which goes into more detail than I can.
Braking Distance
You may have heard someone, somewhere claim that stopping distances are lower without ABS. This is only partially true. In theory, if you only cared about straight-line stopping, given enough tries you could produce a stop distance lower than some ABS-equipped car. However, humans are very inconsistent when it comes to non-ABS braking. You can use a technique called threshold braking, which is basically duplicating the ABS system with your foot. It's possible, but the important point is that you can't be 100% consistent with it all the time. ABS, on the other hand, will always be consistent, because it's computer controlled, and uses wheel sensors to gather information. With ABS, the stopping distance will be the same no matter how many times you brake the car. With threshold braking, a high percentage of times will be measurably worse than an ABS system. In this case, the winner will be the one who is more consistent. Again, Orson has an excellent summary of this comparison on his site too.
Modern ABS systems are marvels of engineering, because they work so well and are so simple to use. If you want to know more, see the links section below.
*golf clap* excellent post with some great info on it. Thanks for putting this together. Heck, I thought I knew a fair amount out braking and still learned some new stuff. Well worth the read.
Thanks! I enjoyed writing this; it's nice to be able to organize all my thoughts in a way that's useful for someone else. One of my next upgrades for the WRX is the braking system, and this gave me a really clear way to think about it.
What I think is missing for the Prelude is choosing an alternate OEM rear caliper, just like the Legend GS for the fronts. I'm thinking that bumping up the rear bias maybe 5%, especially if the car has been modified/lowered, would be the ticket to really improving the braking. I haven't seen any analysis of rear setups at all, which I think is a shame.
If I were doing it, I would find a rotor (from any car really) slightly larger in diameter, and try to find a caliper with a 5% larger piston area. This would take some searching, but it's far from difficult. The only major concern is getting a caliper with the same mount points as the stock one; if you have to change the caliper mounts, brackets can be very expensive. Most of the aftermarket adapter brackets I've seen are all in the >$200 range, so an original fit would be key.
I would start looking at the Legend rear setup first, and then maybe something modern like an RL/TL.
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What do you think about the Powerslot Plus sized rotor systems? Last I checked, they offer front and rear rotors kits for the 5th gen that just simply relocate the factory calipers to accomdate the larger rotors.
This should, as you stated, improve the leverage of the calipers and improve the heat capacity of the Prelude brake system, both good things obviously. I would think that if you did the larger rotors for the front AND rear at the same time, bias should remain good, with no drawbacks and all positives. However, for the 4th gen Prelude they ONLY offer a larger front rotor and nothing for the rear. I've toyed around with the idea of getting the larger rotors for my 4th gen VTEC, but never pulled the trigger due to my concern that it might shift the bias even further forward.
Mike, I've never seen that Powerslot kit before. It's definitely not bad, but if it were my money, I would get an upgrade which actually upgrades the calipers themselves. That kit would probably improve pedal feel, which is good, but I would want a little more out of a BBK. Otherwise, I would go with one of the OEM upgrades in this thread, since it's bound to be cheaper.
One of the best benefits from a BBK is losing unsprung weight. Most BBK calipers come from a few major maufacturers (most but not everybody):
Wilwood
AP Racing
Baer
Brembo
I am a particular fan of Wilwood, because their quality is very high. Keep in mind that you can also design your own BBK using off the shelf parts from the common manufacturers, but that takes skills and knowledge (and testing), so it's not recommended unless you really know what you are doing.
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Mike, I've never seen that Powerslot kit before. It's definitely not bad, but if it were my money, I would get an upgrade which actually upgrades the calipers themselves. That kit would probably improve pedal feel, which is good, but I would want a little more out of a BBK. Otherwise, I would go with one of the OEM upgrades in this thread, since it's bound to be cheaper.
One of the best benefits from a BBK is losing unsprung weight. Most BBK calipers come from a few major maufacturers (most but not everybody):
Wilwood
AP Racing
Baer
Brembo
I am a particular fan of Wilwood, because their quality is very high. Keep in mind that you can also design your own BBK using off the shelf parts from the common manufacturers, but that takes skills and knowledge (and testing), so it's not recommended unless you really know what you are doing.
Wouldn't the Wilwood BBK in the Front cause the brake bias issue though, since AFAIK no one offers a Rear BBK for the Prelude to "even it out"?
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Wouldn't the Wilwood BBK in the Front cause the brake bias issue though, since AFAIK no one offers a Rear BBK for the Prelude to "even it out"?
It would if you weren't careful. I'm sure it's possible to use a Wilwood caliper in the front and keep the stock bias. You could probably even do it with the stock rotor. Wilwood sells brackets too for most cars, so it would be a matter of choosing a caliper with almost the same piston and pad area as the OEM one, and then buying that with the right bracket. If the piston/pad area were about the same, then the bias should come out right (assuming you don't change the rotor).
I've considered using Wilwood for another brake project (not a Prelude), and I love them because they have a huge selection of calipers. They come in almost every shape and configuration, and I'm sure with some looking that you could find a good one for the Prelude.
EDIT: Of course the value of buying an off the shelf BBK is that they (should) have done all this engineering for you. Granted there are some BBK vendors who don't know their @ss from a hole in the ground, and you will come out worse than when you started. However, the big names definitely know what they are doing, which is why I recommend not doing this yourself unless you already knew everything in this FAQ. The BBK vendors have already done the hard work for you, but you have to pay for that extra value of course.
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^So if the vendors have done all this, then why have Brembo, etc not offered a rear caliper upgrade in their BBK's for the Prelude? It would seem they are ignoring the bias change that would occur with larger calipers on the front, and stock in the rear?
Personally, I run Hawk pads, brembo OEM blanks, and stainless lines (front/rear). Ive been very happy with that set up.
Thanks for the post, definitely answers some of the conflicting things I've heard.
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^So if the vendors have done all this, then why have Brembo, etc not offered a rear caliper upgrade in their BBK's for the Prelude? It would seem they are ignoring the bias change that would occur with larger calipers on the front, and stock in the rear?
Actually you can change the bias by just changing the front setup. If you decrease the piston area in the front and keep the rears unchanged, that will shift the bias rearward. I guess in theory its cheaper to adjust bias by just changing the fronts, since you wouldn't have to replace any rear hardware. It's probably a cost-saving measure (if I had to guess). In addition, there is so little braking power applied at the rear that the stock setup is probably just fine to handle the load. 75/25 is a very poor distribution for a sports car, but unfortunately you really can't avoid that kind of distribution unless you go to a RWD/AWD platform.
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I ordered a Wilwood Big Brake set for $780 from A1Performance.com or something like that...
Basically, it's the kind of company Artifex talks about that takes calipers from the company and then uses its own rotor and caliper relocator piece to form big brake kits in sizes or for cars that normally that company doesn't produce it for.
For example, Wilwood Company only offers a 12" rotor and 4 piston caliper upgrade for the Prelude front wheels. But A1Performance actually used a 13" rotor and retained the same caliper. You can see what happens with their kit after you install it. The caliper still has the same surface area, but that means that the rotor has a decent sized surface area on the inner part of the rotor that doesn't get constantly cleaned by applying the brakes, and does look pretty tacky.
Brake bite is better in my opinion, and alot of people have told me about how they can feel it when they drive my car, but I also have stainless lines all around, a borderline track pad made for the street (by wilwood) and my tires are relatively new Falken 615's, which are some decently sticky street tires, so all of those factors might've contributed to their opinions.
I guess the only good part about the setup is that the rotors are a larger heatsink, but I'm probably robbing a fair share of power to the wheels by having such a heavy rotor for the motor and transmission to spin.
Actually you can change the bias by just changing the front setup. If you decrease the piston area in the front and keep the rears unchanged, that will shift the bias rearward. I guess in theory its cheaper to adjust bias by just changing the fronts, since you wouldn't have to replace any rear hardware. It's probably a cost-saving measure (if I had to guess). In addition, there is so little braking power applied at the rear that the stock setup is probably just fine to handle the load. 75/25 is a very poor distribution for a sports car, but unfortunately you really can't avoid that kind of distribution unless you go to a RWD/AWD platform.
Ahh, ok. I wondered if it had something to do with the Prelude being a FWD platform.
I mean, the power is on the front wheels, the weight distribution is bias on to the front, etc. I guess its pretty damn impressive how well Preludes handle considering all the odds against them. lol
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Actually you can change the bias by just changing the front setup. If you decrease the piston area in the front and keep the rears unchanged, that will shift the bias rearward. I guess in theory its cheaper to adjust bias by just changing the fronts, since you wouldn't have to replace any rear hardware. It's probably a cost-saving measure (if I had to guess). In addition, there is so little braking power applied at the rear that the stock setup is probably just fine to handle the load. 75/25 is a very poor distribution for a sports car, but unfortunately you really can't avoid that kind of distribution unless you go to a RWD/AWD platform.
I would like to share my experience.
I put in my car the Tarox kit (6 piston caliper, disk size is 330mm vs the 286mm stock size), an italian brand like brembo, but little cheaper:
I changed the pads with a very quality pads (carbon lorraine RC6) with a very impressive improvement in the braking.
But with this setup the rears has a lot of problems with a poor traction, I felt a lot of oversteer during hard braking in the track.
So I was thinging to change the rear caliper with some others, but before this I tried to change just the rear pads (stock disk) with something more aggresive (Ebc yellow).
Surprise!
The rears became more "controllable", no oversteer and with all the grip you need also in the track.
Sorry for my bad english, I hope you can understand what I says
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