Lude Generation

A good read on "brake myths"



http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com/brake- ... 1688020147

Great read

I've only read a third of this so far, but...

All metals flex and "grow" when heated up, the cast iron rotors on your car are no different. When a piece of metal is repeatedly heated and cooled, it relies on the entire structure to flex evenly along with it. Introducing big, evenly spaced holes just gives the metal more wiggle room to flex on its own as its temperature changes unevenly to the metal around it. Drilling holes means less surface tension to combat this issue. There is no perfect way to heat and cool our rotors completely evenly while driving, so this is just a fact of life. This is why you will never see any serious modern race car running drilled rotors. Go ahead, Google it. I know I did when I first read about this.

Bugatti Veyron Brakes

Lamborghini Aventador Brakes

Ferrari Enzo Brakes

Zonda Pagani Brakes

Koenigsegg Agera R Brakes

Aston Martin DB9 Brakes

Mercedes AMG SLS Brakes

So?...

I think he hit the nail on the head early on, when he just suggested not going cheap

Some good info/some questionable/old mixed in between the attitude of the author. Not a fan of his delivery.

I think those cars are road cars and the people who drive them care a lot about how they look. Their owners expect their car to look "race car".

Merlin wrote:I think those cars are road cars and the people who drive them care a lot about how they look. Their owners expect their car to look "race car".

I'm not sure the R&D departments of those manufacturers would be too happy to hear that theorem

I'm no brake expert, but I do know quite a bit about brake discs (work related experience ) but I'm unsure on whether or not drilling is a good thing - I think there probably isn't actually a simple yes/no answer.

I suspect the optimum solution varies - it will come down to what the whole particular package is. e.g. a particular brake pad might have better performance but generate lots of dust or gas, meaning that drilled discs are required in order to give the dust/gas somewhere to dissipate, but then that needs to be balanced against the resultant loss of friction area etc.

The fact is that the act of having drilled holes will encourage cracking over the exact same disc of the same material etc that doesn't have holes (that's basic material science). But, then again it depends on how that affects the temperature that the disc runs at. If it would otherwise run so hot that the material would start to crack anyway, but by drilling it reduces the temperature to one that becomes stable in that regard, it again might be of benefit...

As for whether the reason formula 1 cars aren't drilled is because that's the 'best' answer, I suspect there are many other things at play, e.g. the various technical regs (it might be as simple as they're banned?) and/or the extremely high rotational speed, which would give huge radial forces. The result of that might be that although drilling would give beneficial cooling, the disc wouldn't then be strong enough, cracks would propagate very quickly and it would break apart, etc.?

NafemanNathan wrote:I'm not sure the R&D departments of those manufacturers would be too happy to hear that theorem

I'm sure that is what they work off

Marketing depts like that kinda thing and they, ultimately, tell the R&D which direction to go in..

They will have done studies and can show that holes in the discs sells more cars so they'll damn well have holes in, now just go and come up with a real enough sounding technical reason for them to be there.