elh0102

I have a question for all you brake engineers out there. I have assumed that more aggressive track pads would generate more heat than street pads. But, is that really true? Isn't braking essentially the process of converting kinetic energy to heat? So, if you threshhold brake 3 seconds with high-friction track pads for a given turn, compared to 5 seconds with street pads to achieve the same entry speed, are you generating more heat with track pads? Rotor wear, yes, but I'm not sure about heat.

ghoffman

Look at it this way,
1) Assuming in your example above you spent the extra 2 seconds on the gas instead of the brake (which is the point of race brakes) you are going that much faster and the amount of kinetic energy goes up by the square of the velocity (remember 1/2MV**2) so potentially there is alot more energy and therefore heat.
2) The total power you put into the brakes is work per unit time. The slower you put the energy into a system the less total energy is expended. Spreading the time lessens the total power. Example: A Camry can get to 60 MPH in 10 seconds and use less power to do so than a C6Z needs to get to 60 in 3.7 seconds.

There are many other factors as well but chew on these 2 for a while!