Hello,

This ought to be a FAQ somewhere. Wilwood does not recommend using their brakes on street cars. Why? They don't incorporate dust seals around the pistons. That means you really should be inspecting your pistons between each use and you should be rebuilding the calipers fairly regularly to ensure that you don't get brake dust or other dirt under the piston o-rings. If you do, you will force your brake fluid out of the piston and onto the pad and rotor. You will lose braking power.

Pretty simple. Use Wilwoods, which are excellent racing brakes, only if you plan on rebuilding or at least inspecting as often as you would on a racecar. What's that, every 100 miles or so?

Joel

 

Hello,

When we were looking for brakes for the racecar, we weren't going to let something petty like dust seals stop us from getting the best setup that we could for the WRX. But you can bet that Gary and I both had our fingers crossed, hoping we'd find a street car vendor using dust seals that makes a product capable of withstanding the rigors of racing. We don't have a problem rebuilding parts, it's just that we have so many parts that we rebuild, we were hoping to be able to simply eyeball the brakes to know they were in good condition... at least so we could skip that maintenance if time was running low for us.

Thankfully, StopTech makes professional race caliber brake systems for street cars. The same brakes you see winning races on our car and winning races on Corvettes and Vipers in WorldChallenge, GrandAm, and the OTC, are the ones you get as a consumer. Just a different pad material. And thankfully, not only do they have dust shields, but in over a year, we've inspected them rigorously and they've never needed a rebuild. It's one of the few parts of the car that's no longer in our minds. We don't have to worry about brakes.

Joel Gat
Crew Chief
Sheehan Motor Racing

 

Hello,

But the absolute best low cost option is stock brakes. I don't know why people complain so much about them. For better braking, FIRST get new tires. THEN get a new pad compound. With those two changes, switching to the hottest PFC pad we could get custom cut for us, we 100% totally eliminated brake fade in full race conditions. You could get far more streetable pads and still eliminate any fade in street or track conditions.

We only had to switch up our brakes because we were getting so much heat we were melting the retainers in our wheel bearings. If you're not making that much heat, you can probably make do with stockers.

Joel