Originally posted by Phil Rohtla:
The biggest single factor in braking performance? Tires, with pads as a close second. Putting r-compounds on helped the car stop in a much shorter distance, as did some types of pads. Heck, my T-Bird SC stopped like I was tossing a battelship anchor out of the car, and it's rotors are smaller than my SVT rotors. By an inch.
Well now wait a second...if bigger rotors don't make a difference since you can lock the wheels even with smaller ones, why would pads make a difference, since you can lock the wheels with the crappy ones?
Makes you wonder, huh?
The fact is, despite GRM's test on one car which is hardly representative of the average car, there's *generally* a LOT more to braking distance capability than simply clearing the hurdle of being able to lock the wheels, even given identical tires. This "i can lock the wheels so the brakes are as powerful as they need to be" thing is a very common misconception. You can lock the wheels with a 4-wheel drum setup but you better believe the braking distance is looooooong.
See, whether or not the wheels lock is NOT solely dependent on the friction between the tire and the road. An inferior braking system will spike to locking sooner than a superior one will due to the nature of the way the pads and the rotors interact. The fact that it locked isn't just because it generated enough braking power to overcome the tires and that's all that needs to be generated.
