NYSpeed Track Day #1 - Friday June 15th, 2007

[quote=“RedrRocket,post:475,topic:26320"”]

a lot of people i seen were breaking way to early. early braking heats up rotors a lot more than hard breaking at the last minute.

[/quote]

Do you have anything to back that statement up, because everything I know about physics says otherwise.

Brakes work by turning the energy of the car’s momentum into heat. In the same way that it takes a lot more energy to accelerate your car from 0-100 in 10 seconds than it does to accelerate it from 0-100 in 20 seconds, the same applies for deceleration. Newton’s Second Law, force = mass X acceleration etc etc.

I can back this up with my personal experience. When I was braking late, and standing on the brakes enough to get the ABS to engage, they quickly overheated. My speed through the turns was the same, as was my top speed, but the amount of heat being generated was a lot higher on the harder stops.

It makes sense when you think about it. You can drive around town all day lightly using you brakes, and even in a slow sedan with terrible brakes you’ll never overheat them. Drive the same speed but wait till the last second to jam on the brakes at every light and they’ll quickly overheat. This is why the brake pads on my mom’s car last for years and years, but I go through brakes in a matter of months.