Understood gents. Thank you very much for your input.
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Jeff, I am fine with the disc option, but I wish you used a cheaper pad with more volume. I have a similar pad in my ST60 kit and if I try hard enough, I can blow through a set of pads pretty quickly, and with replacement pads costing north of $500 they are expensive to run.
I know there are limitations with what can be produced, but are there any plans for thicker pad option like your 4pot kits?
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Understood on the pads. A couple of further notes to consider on our setup vs. the ST setup you're running now. ST uses the same basic pad shape as our AP Racing calipers (it's originally an old AP Racing shape). They use a D51 radial depth however, while ours is a D54, which gives our kit a bit more pad volume (although admittedly not a great deal more).
The bigger issue would be with the discs however. If you're running a high vane count disc like the one in our kit (72 vanes vs. 48 vanes), you're moving more cooling air, your discs temps are going to be lower, and your resulting pad wear rates will be decreased. All of the components in the system work together towards the end result.
That said, I hear you on the 25mm thick pads. One of the big problems that comes into play when going to calipers that use pads that thick is wheel fitment. When going from an 18mm thick pad to a 25mm, you're typically losing most of that 7 mm on wheel spoke clearance. When we designed this kit, we took that into consideration, and felt that the superior wheel clearance was worth the tradeoff for most of our customers, considering how they use their cars. Again though, that's not obviously the case with
everybody.
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That would be great, Jeff. A kit just like the one you've put together, but then with front discs in the 368-378mm range (rears at approx. 355mm) and with an APR Pro 5000+ series caliper that would take 25mm pads would be an amazing setup for more endurance oriented applications.
I will PM you about this later. Thanks for being open to this possibility.
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Understood, and no problem. We want to make what our customers need and want. While we obviously can't have 47 different brake kits per platform
, but I'm not opposed to multiple kits for the same platform. We're already doing so on a couple of the existing platforms that we service.
If we did a kit with a bigger disc, it would likely be tied to a thicker pad as well. So you'd be getting a significant increase in thermal capacity from both the pad and disc in the same kit. If we go down that path, maybe we'll call it our "Obscenely Overkill" big brake kit, or our OOBBK.
Also a note...It's going to be tough to fit anything much bigger than a 362mm disc inside an 18" wheel. Our Factory AP Racing BBK for the Corvette uses a disc that size, and the caliper is literally grazing stick-on wheel weights on the barrel of the wheel. Keep in mind that you still need enough room to drop a caliper on top of the disc. The shape of the caliper, pad retention mechanism, etc. all come into play, so what works for one manufacturer's setup on a disc of X size, may not work with a different caliper.
Behind an OEM C6 Z06 18" wheel
Behind an aftermarket, multi-piece 18" wheel
