What size brembos will fit a stock wheel? I have heard that the 380mm require 20" and the 405mm require 22" wheels.. which I certainly will not be getting.
I can't afford the wheels and brakes at the moment, but am considering the brakes since I ruined my rotors and pads at the track already anyway.
SO, does anyone have any experience with brembos under stock wheels?
Also, am I going to get more power and/or less fade with more pistons or more surface area?
I haven't put Brembos on stock wheels but allow me to disspell mis-information.
You can run 380 mm rotors with 19" aftermarket wheels (well top names, ie. HRE ect...) and you can run 405 mm rotors with 20" wheels. I know because I have them on my white M5. You do not need 21' or 22" (bling) wheels.
With the stockers the problem may come up with the rears. The rear Brembo caliper is much more substancial than the pewmee stock rear caliper and may not clear.
Later I will post a pic of my front 405's with the 20" HRE 590R.
Cheers
Ranger
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As a good rule, if you have 18" wheels you can fit a 14" system, 19" wheels can usually squeeze a 15" system. That's a rough estimate though because the offset and concavity of the wheel will be the limiting factor. I highly recommend contacting your dealer and requesting fitment templates, which you can then print out, cut up, and hold up to your stock wheels to see!!!
Be careful adjusting total piston area and the front/rear relationship. For track use, you can safely get away with increasing your front piston area a little bit compared to the rear. You don't want to go the other way though (track use sees more weight transfer than you'd see on the road...more weight transfer to the front = less rear brake). If you put too much rear brake on the car you could end up doing hand-brake turns everywhere. ;-) Of course ABS masks this, but it's still not ideal.
Number and size of pistons have more to do with pad taper problems on the track that's not normally much of an issue on the street. Cooling for track use can be critical though. If overheated, not only does brake efficiency get worse, but pad life can be more than halved.
Also, don't mix drilled and slotted disks by accident. Drilled disks can have quicker initial bite over slotted, and slotted over solid. Solid can give more fade problems for several reasons. Again, ABS can obscure a lot of this for folks not on the track often. A drilled disk on the back with a slotted disk on the front can lead to ABS (on rear especially) on initial brake application due to the better initial bite on the rear. The other way around (drilled front/slotted rear) is a safer bet to avoid ABS intervention.
Sorry - I cannot help with disk/caliper clearance problems, but you could shim a caliper out to a larger diameter disk down the road. The larger disk gives effectively more brake compared to an otherwise equal smaller disk. With that in mind, just the piston sizes in the caliper do not tell the whole story for your brake balance/bias.
I have seen many set-ups with stupidly large rear brakes for track use. This often leads to problems that are challenging to diagnose for those not familiar with how braking systems work.
The rule of thumb on BBK measurement for wheel clearance is to add 4" to the rotor size to determine wheel clearance. Therefore a 380mm kit would likely need 19" wheels and 405mm would likely needs 20" wheels for the barrel clearance. But, race wheels often have better clearance and stock wheels typically have worse.
Below are the clearance charts for the E60 Brembo BBKs.
The Brembo system uses a directionally vented disc out of the Brembo Racing program. It's larger in diameter and thicker in order to dissapate heat more efficiently. Piston count, by itself will have little bearing on fade. But a longer pad will help with heat management and fade. Below you can see the difference in the pad shapes and size. The Brembo six piston caliper uses a longer, larger pad than the four piston. Because the Brembo disc is a two piece design, the center aluminum hat keeps the heat out of the wheel bearings and helps the system stay cooler overall.
2006 M5 Alpine White/Silverstone Still alive, I think.(I miss it)
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