20 April 2009

Powerbrake™ Product News

Powerbrake develops race brake kit for Ferrari 430 Challenge

The Ferrari 430 Challenge (race car) is factory fitted with carbon ceramic discs and large cast-aluminum calipers. The carbon ceramic (CCER) discs, while light and durable under street use, have proved to be problematic under serious race use. The discs oxidize at temperatures of over 600 deg C, leading to excessive disc and pad wear. This may be the reason that Ferrari opted for the extremely large 405mm front CCER discs to try and keep front disc temperatures below 600 deg C under track conditions. The race pad compounds fitted by Ferrari to the 430 Challenge are medium friction, endurance grade race pads. Again, very high friction pad compounds may cause the front discs to run too hot. The second issue with the CCER discs is that they are very brittle and prone to cracking under even moderate impacts. The kind of bumping and barging experienced in Production Car and GT racing could lead to disc cracking. Finally, the replacement costs of both the CCER disc and appropriate pads are extremely high. Feedback from race customers around the world seems to indicate that the front CCER discs will last 3-5 race weekends (depending on the circuit) and rear CCER discs will last 5-8 race weekends. Some teams have reported having to run new front and rear pads for every race weekend. This makes the costs of racing on the factory CCER brake components extremely high. In fact the only up side of the CCER system is its light weight. Having said that, in practice, the massive disc size and resulting caliper size largely off-sets the weight advantage.

Longtime Powerbrake customer, Forza Racing (who run a fleet of six F360 Challenge and four F430 Challenge race cars), approached us late in 2008 to develop a full race brake kit for the F430C to replace the CCER brake system for race use. The design brief was to provide a system that would be more durable, more cost effective to run and offer similar or better brake performance under race conditions. The kit that we developed features our new Powerbrake PB62E 6-piston heavy duty billet race calipers (front & rear). Although designed for race use, the PB62E caliper features internal dust/weather seals making it fully suitable for long term street use as well. Discs (front & rear) are our 356x35mm 2-piece, floating GT Series race discs featuring lightweight billet disc bells. Also included are billet aluminium mounting brackets, Powerbrake Duraline s/steel braided brake hoses and all mounting bolts / hardware. We can offer over 30 different fast-road, track day, sprint and endurance race pad compounds for our PB62E calipers.

Forza's first race weekend on the new Powerbrake F430 Challenge kit took place on the weekend of the 20th of March 2009 at Kilarney Raceway in Cape Town. The car was driven by team manager Oscar de Oliveira, who was very happy with the brake performance under race conditions. He qualified in a superb time of 1.14,2. Oscar claims that the brake performance and modulation was a distinct improvement over the CCER system and he had no unwanted ABS intervention throughout the weekend. Oscar said that brake balance, consistency and pedal feel were also excellent. Caliper temperatures peaked at around 150 deg C and disc temperatures around 550 deg C after approx 60 laps of track use, which is ideal. At the time of this writing this car has completed over 240 laps under race and test conditions at Zwartkops and Kilarney circuits. Oscar has done a blistering lap time of 1.03,6 at Zwartkops Raceway with the new brake kit. Orders have been placed by Forza Racing for an additional three of the kits for the remaining F430 Challenge cars prepped by the Forza Racing Team. We have also received orders from the USA and Europe for the new Powerbrake F430C kit. It is worth mentioning that a similar kit can be supplied for F360 models as well. The kit is equally suited to street, track day and full race use with appropriate pad compound selection.

Overall weight of our kit versus the OEM CCER brakes? We were just 1,5 kg per corner heavier....

Running costs with the Powerbrake kit will be less than one tenth of the cost of racing on the CCER bakes for a season.