Brakes vs Horsepower

["Steve D'Gerolamo" <steved3@xxxxxxx>]

I spent 45 minutes on the phone last night with a Dodge Viper customer
(Tony Estes) who had just finished 1st and 2nd in two NASA races at Phoenix
Int'l Raceway this past weekend.  His approach to winning was to invest in
better braking and he installed one of our Movit kits on the front of his
96 GTS.  His competition, including John Hennessey and his 600+ hp Vipers,
was upset that they could not win on horsepower alone.  At PIR, the extra
horsepower is good for perhaps a second improvement in lap times whereas
Tony was cutting 5 seconds off his lap times since his last visit to the
track (to be fair, some of this improvement was due to new aerodynamics,
the rest to the bigger brakes) and braking up to 80' deeper in the deepest
corners (and this was with factory 993tt pads...race Pagid's & a rear Movit
kit should improve this significantly).  This braking distance improvement
was versus his stock brakes with PF90  pads.  The Movit kit pads are 50%
larger than standard Viper issue.
		The point to mentioning this is that there is a lot of potential in your
BMW's for better lap times without spending $5-20k on Euro motors and
supercharging.  Honing your skills through track time and investing in
better brakes (size and cooling DO matter) is far less costly and yields
better results, both in lap times and safety.  This does not necessarily
mean aftermarket....it can be as simple as upgrading your E36 325i/328i to
M3 brakes with floating rotors or using E32 front brakes on your E34 or
E28.  I'm sure E46 components will soon start finding there way onto
earlier models
		Movit has also come out with kits for the E38 and E39 cars.  The E38 kit
is very interesting in that its based on the rare 332mm Porsche GT cup
rotors.  The E39 uses the standard 993tt 322mm rotors with some very
complex brackets and caliper modifications.  All of the Movit kits are
available through Turner Motorsport and hopefully soon (based on
discussions this week) through Leo Franchi's Midwest Motorsports.  Both
companies have solid reputations as excellent BMW tuners and will surely do
this product line justice.  SD  
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Steve D'Gerolamo - The Ultimate Garage
201-262-0412 / steved3@domain.elided / http://www.ultimategarage.com

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