hi all, i have been going through some past threads trying to decide what to do with brake upgrades. the car is currently standard s1 190. limited track use, but hard road use, and a tarmac rally approaching. long term aim is sc honda.
current thought is to get the AP 4 pot kit from eliseparts and use rs14 pagids. then probably shift current front discs to back.
now this kit is i believe the AP 5000. a couple people had voiced that the 3000 is better?? comments?
switching the fronts to the rear loses the handbrake correct?
Absolutely no need for 4-pots. I would put AP5000 discs all round and keep standard calipers on the front. For the rear I would suggest some of Geary’s nice rear calipers with handbrake functionality. You will probably have to change your uprights, but you’d need to do that anyway if you were gonna put the fronts on.
The AP calipers obviously look a bit more bling though
I followed this route with my Exige S and on a brake killer circuit (hockenheim) i overheated them within three laps! by the end of the fifteen minute session they were vibrating, had gone blue, had pad deposits and generally looked on their last legs.
I will go with the Lotus motorsport four pot/308mm discs next spring.
If you add the options to the S2 it can tip the metric ton! Which in fairness is still madly light for a car these days but no S1. I think you’re right to want better brakes than what you have tried.
Out of interest, have you tired Pagid RS15s? They never got hot enough on the S1 to be better then RS14s but might work on the S2.
to be honest though, i tried to be clever and avoid the cost of the Lotus Motzorsport kit coz people told me that 295s and std calipers would be fine. In trying to solve the problem cheaply i have wrecked a set of 5000 discs and a set of std discs…so i will end up spending even more than if i had bought the lotus kit in the first place.
I will bite the bullet in the spring and hopefully be done with it.
by the end of the fifteen minute session they had gone blue,
did you bed them in properly - not saying that you would not have ended up were you are now, but I thought that blueing the discs was a sign that they had not been bedded in properly?
It really depends what you want to do. On the road the standard brakes are perfecty adequate, and for occasional track use upgrading to a good ceramic pad like the RS14 is fine - they run colder than many pads and I have never experienced fluid problems with RS14s (whereas I have with Mintex 1144 and green stuff).
Standard brake bias is 73/37 front/rear. Even on a dry track this is leaving a lot of braking potential on the table, so if anything you want to be increasing the braking effort on the rears. Going to 4-pot on the front without changing the rear is a backward step.
Putting the front calipers on the rear and 4-pots on the front goes someway towards restoring the balance, but you really need to change the master cylinder at that point because you need to move so much more fluid. You also lose the handbrake.
I’ve put the AP 4-pots on the front and the HiTech 2-pots with the larger pistons in the rear and matched front and rear master cylinders on a bias bar to give 50/50 braking effort in “neutral” - I can wind up to 74/25 or back to about 40/60 for very wet - and I estimate I run no more than 55-60 to the front.
Only negative I would point to is the HiTechs - I tend to get a lot of fluid loss blowing back at the master cylinder. I don’t think it’s heat - I think its the handbrake mechanism. Still investigating that.
by the end of the fifteen minute session they had gone blue,
did you bed them in properly - not saying that you would not have ended up were you are now, but I thought that blueing the discs was a sign that they had not been bedded in properly?
i followed the instructions on the ap site and the pagid site (they were similar) it could be that i still did not do it right but i do not think so.
They started vibrating almost as soon as i started leaning on them. I think the s2 S is a bit too heavy for them…
The AP 5000 are just s…t !!
Had the same problem, killed two front sets plus 2 sets of RS14…
Should have gone also the AP 4 pots directly and front calipers to the back (have this setup on my 340r and it is brilliant with AP brake bias and hydraulic handbrake).
Well I have killed off a set of 295mm APs with RS14s
I have since changed to RS42 and had no problem might be worth a try before going for larger calipers have you also looked at cooling ducts?
A lot of peeps mainly on S2s have had issues with RS14s some say it could be the ABS kicking it off - all I know is at Rockingham had no issues with the 42s and the Rocks a bit of a brake killer