Brake upgrade

[gavino]

When i was at the mitty this weekend at Road Atlanta I went on one of the touring laps. By the 4th lap i had almost set my brakes on fire. I've wanted to upgrade my brakes for a while but don't have the big bucks necessary to get the west coast fiero kit. But also wanted to increase the size of the brakes, what are my options?

[Fierofool]

The Grand Am upgrade is pretty straight forward.  Probably one of the easier brake upgrades to do.  Except for some grinding on one part of the bracket, I hear it's a straight bolt-on.  Gives you vented rotor as the most beneficial component.

Smoking the brakes?  How many times did you come into the pits?  That's the only time you're supposed to use brakes at Road Atlanta    

[TopNotch]

If you burned your brakes on the touring lap, you're going to have real problems if you do a PDX.
I have Grand Am front, and Seville/Grand Am in the back of my 86 SE. The brakes did fine on a PDX.

[WV Mike]

I also can't afford to buy an expensive brake kit to upgrade brakes. I have been slowly getting a few pieces at a time. I am going to upgrade my brakes to the 12" Corvette rotor with 88 Fiero calipers. Hopefully, I will be installing the brakes within the next few weeks. Plus with doing this upgrade, I should have emergency brakes also. Here is a link to the instructions I am following:

http://www.fieroaddiction.com/8712_r3.html

If you are interested, once I get the brakes installed, I will let you know how it went and if I ran into any problems.

[TopNotch]

The Grand Am/Seville upgrade gives you an e-brake. See here. My implementation is down the page a ways.

[WV Mike]

The Grand Am/Seville upgrade gives you an e-brake. See here. My implementation is down the page a ways.

Cool. Just checked your link. Definitely a good option and probably cheaper than my upgrade. Glad to see that the e-brake will work with it also.

[Fierofool]

Gavino, sounds like you were taking the track tour with the pace car that runs the circuit at 65 mph.  That shouldn't have caused the brakes to overheat.  I ran the PDX that TopNotch mentioned and I was getting speeds of 100+ for 40 minutes on the track.  I'm running stock brakes and suspension in a GT with a 3.4.  Never had a brake issue.  There are only 3 places on Road Atlanta that you really need to use your brakes.  That's at Turn 1, the end of the short stretch in turn 6 at the back end of the track, and turn 8 at the end of the long back straight.  Those should only be brief stabs then you're using the gears.  Could be that your brakes are dragging a little. 

[TopNotch]

No mention if his car is an automatic or standard. If automatic, the brakes are more important on the track. You can downshift an automatic, but most automatic trans drivers tend not to, and there aren't as many gears to choose from.

[gavino]

The reason my brakes got so hot was because the track was very crowded so every time I would get up to speed i would have to come to a stop. Im not that bad of a driver haha. I do really like the Grand Am/Seville upgrade. i never really looked at it before because i thought you couldn't get your e-brake to work with it. Also has anyone ever run a cooling duct to the front brakes. I was thinking of running a tube from the blinker to the brakes but i dont know if that would work or not. Any thoughts?

[Fierofool]

You could use some of the wider low profile exhaust tips mounted on the bottom surface of an aero nose or inside it and attach duct work to the back side and route it toward the brakes.  The difficult part would be that the duct work would need to be able to rotate with the wheels.  In order to prevent the wheels from rubbing it, it would need to come in from the top and attach to the wheel assembly at some point near the upper ball joint.