If you've read the Event Diaries you may have noticed a common thread where I complain about the brakes all the time.

I finally got around to inspecting the brakes, and they were pretty much shot - rotors scored, pads worn nearly to the backing plates, and rust everywhere. Not race car material anymore. I guess 5 seasons on the same brakes will do that.

Well, any requirement for maintainence is an opportunity for an upgrade, so we swapped out the front brakes for new units from TCE Performance.

The OEM brakes, ready for removal

The replacement - Wilwood 6-pot calipers, and an aluminum-hat rotor. The rotor is marginally larger than stock. Autocross cars don't do a lot of extended braking, so we don't need the heat sink mass of larger rotors like road race cars do. The caliper is much lighter than stock, and should be a good deal stiffer too.

This is how the caliper mounts. The Wilwood caliper is fixed, not floating like the OEM caliper, so it just needs to bolt to an offset bracket like this. The rotor centrebore is slightly larger than the Talon hub's centrebore, so TCE provides this spacer ring to make up the difference.

A mounted caliper and rotor. Note the safety wire on the hat bolts. Nothing good ever came of a brake rotor detaching from a hat.

MORE TO COME