Right before we bought our '01 Z28, the owner had all the brakes serviced and even upgrade
Sometimes the point of a particular exercise isn't as clear as one might think. Take, for example, installing a big-brake kit onto a newer Camaro. Many may think the main purpose is to shorten the distance needed to bring the car to a halt, but that's not the number one objective. Let's face it; new cars stop pretty damn well already. With ABS and modern components, GM put a lot of thought into these systems to make sure the car can "panic stop" in short order.
So, then, what's the point of spending big bucks upgrading a brake system? The answer is "repeatability." Sure, the new brake system will shave a few feet off the stopping distance, but the big payoff is that the new brakes will pull off repeated heavy braking over and over while better resisting brake fade. GM didn't set out to build race-quality brakes suitable for hitting the local road course. As such, the factory parts tend to degrade in performance quickly when being subjected to heavy punishment. This is where aftermarket companies like Wilwood Disc Brakes come into the equation.
Brakes work by converting forward momentum into heat energy, and this heat needs to be properly controlled. It needs to be insolated from the brake fluid and, most importantly, dissipated quickly from the rotors. This is where the larger mass and curved-vane arrangement of an aftermarket rotor really pays off. More mass means the rotor can hold more heat in addition to being stronger, while the curved design of the vanes helps move air through the rotor more efficiently than the less-expensive-to-produce factory rotors with straight vanes. Today, drilled rotors are more for looks, but slots still play a role by providing smoother pad engagement and improving the thermal balance across the rotor. The larger rotor diameter also moves the caliper away from the hub, thus increasing its leverage effect. Now, one might think that all this rotating weight might hurt other performance areas, and to some degree it does, but the benefits for a Camaro that needs to decelerate as well as accelerate, outweigh the downsides. Wilwood helps keep the overall weight down by employing a two-piece rotor with a center section, called a hat, composed of lightweight aluminum. Still, a bigger iron rotor will always be heavier because physics says it needs to be.
The first step to getting the new parts on the car was assembling the GT-72 rotors and hat
Another area where braking performance is gained is in caliper design. The factory brakes on our '01 Z28 use twin-piston floating calipers up front and single-piston versions in the rear. The aftermarket switches this over to a radial-mounted fixed caliper. The revised mounting simplifies the installation and gives two planes of adjustment so the caliper can be precisely aligned over the rotor. The caliper itself is far stronger than the factory unit to better resist flexing, which can degrade performance. The pistons are constructed of stainless steel to better insulate the brake fluid from the massive amounts of heat generated during repeated heavy braking. Piston area, pad volume, and a host of other aspects are optimized for doing one thing: quickly bleeding off speed over and over again. Add in brake fluid that's designed to operate at higher temperatures, along with the right brake pads, and the end result is a brake system that will be going strong long after the factory parts would have given up the struggle.
Black Betty, our '01 Z28 is first a street car, but we also love to run in various autocross and road course events. We found the road course laps were especially hard on our stock brakes and editor Licata reported they were AWOL after only one lap. To fix this fade, we took the fourth-gen to Wilwood's installation center for a set of their badass binders.
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Even with the lighter drilled rotors, the bigger Wilwood front brakes were almost the same
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For pads, we went with Wilwood's BP-10 "smart pads." These metallic composite pads possess
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Now one would think that the new six-piston calipers with their massive 14-inch rotors wou
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The six stainless steel pistons in the billet Superlite calipers use differential sizing t
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The GT-72 curved-vane 14-inch slotted rotor dwarfs the 12-inch stock-sized rotor. Even tho
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Before going through all the work of installing the bigger brakes, we did a test fit in ou
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Following the included instruction sheet, we used the proper shim between the spindle and
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With the radial mount bracket installed, we were able to put the spacers in place to posit
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With the caliper installed and torqued to spec, we installed the BP-10 brake pads. One nic
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After installing the new braided brake line, we were officially done with the front conver
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The rear brakes were as straightforward as the fronts. We also weighed the parts here and
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Threadlocker was used on all the critical fasteners as it was up front. Here, the radial c
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On the rear it was discovered that we needed to use three shims to position the new four-p
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The new slotted E-coated rotor installs just like the stocker. The black coating was intro
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Since the front binders handle the majority of a car's braking, the rear calipers employ f
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With the rear caliper bolted on, we only had to drop in the BP-10 pads and install the bri
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The last step in the install was to flush out all old brake fluid and rid the system of ai
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Yeah, we know the black rotors looked wicked cool, but they don't stay that way. After bed