Them's the brakes

[Mark Wyatt]

Were brakes totally 'free' in your class?

Interestingly, given that you mentioned brakes in one of our conversations, 
there is an article in Racecar Engineering March 2004 about Performance 
Friction's new brakes for F3 cars. Their claim is that one driver (a Menu 
Motorsport driver, but they didn't say who) could save a car's length under 
braking, claiming, in particular, better control/modulation. They also pointed 
out that better control allowed more rear bias, as less 'snatchiness' meant 
they could run the rears closer to the limit.

I'm surprised that they could get that much more out of brakes. They keep 
mentioning the 'competitor product', and I'm guessing that is someone like AP, 
so its a big susprise to me that they can do so much better than another decent 
product (maybe I'm wrong and the competitor product wasn't decent; maybe its 
just an old design). It must be down to the control and modulation 
characteristics; while you usually think of peak braking effort as being 
limited by tyres, but how close you can take the average to the peak, without 
'braking' traction is more a question of control.

Their calipers are monoblocs, using their own '03' pad material and they used 
their own disc. Their disc was smaller in diameter but thicker than previous 
practice (still lower mass than previously, but that reduction in diameter is a 
bit unexpected). They are four pots, as, apparently, that is the max allowed by 
the F3 regs.

I have to guess that a well designed monbloc has more potential for 
withstanding distortion than a multi-part design, which must be a part of the 
equation.

I have an awful suspicion that all the details of these bits are nice, except 
one; the price! (OK, well maybe they need more operating pressure for a given 
retarding force, which might need some reworking in the master cylider area for 
an installation that was marginal on ability to generate pressure; my guess is 
that if the friction characteristic changed dramatically with temp, they 
couldn't have good control.) Price is not mentioned in the article, nor in PF's 
advert in the same mag. Web site of Performance Friction is 
www.PerformanceFriction.com .

In the new products part of the same issue Alcon announce their new ventilated 
discs which 'improve heat transfer by at least 10%'. All too typically, they 
don't say 10% better than what, though.
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