Does brake cooling really add value?
A fast car, a relatively small standard brake system & a powerful brake pad on the Bilster Berg! - Does that work well?
A look at the standard brake discs on our GR86 shows: Despite our brake cooling system, there's still a lot of temperature at play here. However, with a shiny cornflower blue finish across the entire surface, the contact pattern and braking performance are just right, which can be attributed to the high-quality OEM brake discs and the temperature-resistant Endless N39S brake pad. We ask ourselves what temperatures really prevail here and what influence this has on your and our choice of brake pad.
Equipped with our latest generation of brake disc temperature sensors, we let the Toyota GR86 onto the track in the afternoon with the brake cooling masked off. We see that the small brake discs offer little thermal capacity and heat up to 350 degrees under the Endless N39S right at the start of the warm-up lap. This trend continues and culminates in a maximum temperature of 570 degrees, or an average of 500 degrees for each braking session during the stint.
During the cool-down phase in the pits, we taped off the cooling system and waited until we had roughly the same starting temperature as in the first test. Although we didn't even quite manage that and went out onto the track with a disc temperature that was around 30 degrees higher, the brake cooling system revealed its potential after the first braking maneuvers. Over several laps, the average temperature barely climbed above 220 degrees. We wanted to find out and deliberately brought a lot of temperature into the brakes on the last lap, with the result that we only clearly exceeded the 400 degree mark with 442 degrees during the only - and also last - braking of the stint.
What are we holding on to? Even without our brake cooling kit, the enormously broadband N39S (0-850°C) functions as expected within its working range.
However, the wear on the disc increases exponentially if it is not even destroyed by the material structure in the long term at temperatures around 600 degrees, which can be seen with heavily used brake discs. And it is precisely at this limit that we find ourselves: if the brake disc is already at an average of 570 degrees, there will be numerous other small hotspots that are considerably hotter. These shorten the service life of the brake disc and brake pad enormously.
With cooling, even the standard brake system of the GR86 offers sufficient potential for further conversions and modifications, and the choice of pad can also be reconsidered. Fans of cost-effective solutions have the opportunity to think about near-standard pads, which would only be suitable for track use to a limited extent without brake cooling, while also investing in their own safety to the maximum. After all, significantly lower brake disk temperatures also reflect the overall thermal load on the system and its components, which must not fail under any circumstances: brake caliper, lubricated guide sleeves of the floating caliper on the GR86, brake piston seals, brake fluid.
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