Brake Upgrade - Tech Tips

When you modify your vehicle with custom wheels and performance tires, you may need to upgrade your brakes at the same time. Stock brakes work fine with the factory rims and rubber, but as soon as you go up in size, the leverage on the wheel increases, and the vehicle's center of gravity changes as well, both of which impact braking effectiveness. Also, if the tires are stickier, your standard brakes may not be able to take advantage of the increased adhesion. Conversely, if you upgrade the brakes without improving the rubber that meets the road, you may not see a big difference in stopping ability. That's because brakes aren't really what stop your vehicle—tires do. What brakes do is slow the rotation of the wheels and tires.

6-Piston Caliper
That simple fact leads to another important point: You can't evaluate the effectiveness of a given system (stock or aftermarket) based solely on braking distance measured on a single stop from highway speeds. That number could change significantly simply by changing tires.


Not only that, stopping distance is only a small part of the entire spectrum of performance required of a brake system. There's a whole lot more to improving brake performance. Other elements to consider are control, balance and resistance to fade, among others. Just as improvements in handling require a complex interaction of several suspension components, so too does upgrading a brake system involve several different aspects. Simply adding bigger rotors with more pistons isn't necessarily the answer.


Recently a number of brake manufacturers have begun to offer race-derived, four-piston and even six-piston calipers for a variety of street vehicles. Increasing the number of pistons can improve a brake system, but perhaps not in the way you might think. What's interesting is that even though these units have more pistons, in some cases they may actually have the same—or even slightly less—total piston area than a two-piston system.

1-Piece Fixed Caliper
Why use a four- or six-piston caliper, then? Although they usually provide a shorter stopping distance (with the right tires), their primary virtue is allowing for larger brake pads in the same wheel package, which provide longer wear and higher heat-absorption capacity.