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1973 Camaro Baer Brakes Upgrade - Bigger Badder BindersWe Upgrade A Second-Gen From Twin-Piston To Baer's New Six-Piston Calipers. From the December, 2009 issue of Camaro Performers By Steven Rupp Photography by Steven Rupp
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When people think of brakes, they typically focus on their role in slowing a car down to a stop, but when it comes to performance driving, their main task is to make you faster. Yep, great brakes can knock heapin' chunks off your lap times if you decide to hit the autocross or road course. By having a brake system capable of quickly bleeding off speed repeatedly, a driver can drive deeper into a corner before having to hammer the binders. This ability to carry speed longer adds up over the course of a lap, and can turn an average car into track star. Here was our starting point,... Here was our starting point, a Baer Track system with floating PBR calipers and one-piece 13-inch rotors. A great braking system for the street, but for hard track use, we wanted something a little more robust. There also needs to be a discussion about what makes a particular braking system great, which includes more than just their ability to stop a car on a dime. Also important when choosing a performance set of brakes, is to look at their ability to take the punishment inherent to being abused repeatedly over a short period of time. When they can't take the heat, they vacate the kitchen in a little dance we call fade. This is when either the pads exceed the temperature to provide adequate friction, or when heat is transferred into the brake fluid to the point where it boils. Neither of these things will happen when you're cruising around town, but when you hit the track, it's a whole other ballgame. We pulled the caliper, hung... We pulled the caliper, hung it off to the side so all the brake fluid wouldn't leak out, then removed the rotor. The cad-plated bracket from the old kit is reused, so we left it in place. The silver backing plate is part of a brake cooling system that Mary's husband, David, fabricated. Baer has been building brakes for a long time now, and of their most popular brake packages has been their Track System. Consisting of a two-piston aluminum caliper and one-piece 13-inch rotor, it's leaps and bounds better than the stock stuff, but it does have limitations. One of these is related to the stiffness of the caliper. They were developed for the street, and under hard braking the bodies can flex, causing a loss of performance. They also feature aluminum pistons. The problem with aluminum is that it's a far better conductor of heat than the stainless steel found in most modern high-performance calipers. This is a bad thing since the last place you want brake heat transmitted is into your fluid. Baer saw these limitations and decided to develop a line of calipers with the performance driver in mind. Their new line of 6P calipers are extremely stiff, feature stainless pistons, and are more than capable of handing trips around any track while maintaining their streetability. Best of all, at $495 per caliper, they won't put you in permanent debt. So, Baer has a sexy new caliper and scores of customers with Track Systems already on their rides. With this in mind, they developed a kit that would let Track System owners upgrade their rides without buying a whole new brake package. One such longtime Baer customer is autocross maven Mary Pozzi. She's been rockin' a Track System on her '73 Camaro for years now, and knows their good, bad, and ugly sides. With a pair of 6P calipers in hand, we went over to Pozzi Racing to see if we could make her Camaro faster by slowing it down quicker.  The staggered diameters of...  The staggered diameters of the six pistons help eliminate tapered wear of the pads. More importantly, the pistons are made of stainless steel to reduce thermal transfer of heat into the brake fluid. They also feature dust and weather seals to hold up to road duty. The seals are recessed to ensure they never come in direct contact with the backing plate of the pad. This is critical since a seal that hits the red hot pad can cook and become the very debris that the seal is supposed to keep out.  One of our favorite aspects...  One of our favorite aspects of the 6P calipers is that they utilize standard C5/C6 brake pads (FMSI shape number D731). This means there's a huge selection of street and track pads to choose from. Also, if you have a problem, you can buy replacement pads just about anywhere. The design also includes stainless pad abutments which serve as anti-rattle/noise shims.  The calipers ship fully assembled,...  The calipers ship fully assembled, but to install them we needed to pull off the billet bracket and remove the supplied brake pads.  We then secured the new radial...  We then secured the new radial caliper mount bracket to the existing spindle bracket using the bolts from the track kit.  To ensure proper caliper alignment,...  To ensure proper caliper alignment, it's often necessary to shim the caliper. Baer was nice enough to include a package of clearly marked shims in various thicknesses.  After attaching the caliper,...  After attaching the caliper, we measured to make sure the rotor was running down dead center of the caliper. Skipping this step could enable poor brake performance and uneven pad wear.
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