Track Brake Ducting
 

I just got done with a little project to upgrade my brake cooling.

For the most part my brakes worked well on tracks that werent to hard on brakes. With the exception of Road America. My one event there was an eye opening experience. Road america will eat your brakes in one lap: fade in turn 5, sparks and fire in turn 8. After a couple laps all hell can break loose in your wheel wells if your setup isnt good.

Now that I am running R-comps and about 35% more power it was time to upgrade the brake cooling before I had more problems on other tracks.

First I took apart the stock brake ducting to see what kind of space was avaliable, and what might be reuseable. The stock brake ducting consists of an inlet duct which forms to the bumper opening, a small elbow and the main duct which discharges at the front of the inner fender well. The two first pieces are held in by a bracket which in my case also held the stock fog lamps. These fog lamps block about 80% of the bumper opening, so between that and the limitations of the ducting terminating at the fender well brake cooling effectiveness of this ducting system was about nil.

The pic of the front bumper shows what it looks like with all that stuff removed. You can see the headlight manual crank or adjuster or whatever there.

I cut and painted the metal brackets to make sure they were clear of the air flow in the intake duct.

After some mockups and measuring i decided to reuse the inlet duct, it was an easy way to capture the total airflow through the bumper openings.

I ordered some racer bumper ducts, made from heavy duty plastic, along with high temp flexible brake ducting and some AWR knuckle mount diffusers. The AWR pieces are very nice and designed very smart. You can see them mounted to the knuckle below.

After some more thinking and mockup you can see how i planed to cut the bumper duct. The racer bumper duct is the exact same height as the stock inlet duct and less than 1" wider.

I cut the racer bumper duct at an angle to slightly angle the 3" hose mount outlet towards the inside of the car, and to cut off some of the width of the inlet opening to better match the stock inlet duct. The racer duct's 3" round opening is offset fully to one side which works perfectly to get past the headlight manual crank/adjuster deals.

And here is the assembly with, at this point, the one stock bolt holding the new duct onto the stock duct via the bracket.

Then i used some racer stainless heavy duty mesh (thanks gooroo) to provide protection from rocks, rubber, etc from getting blown into my rotors.

I used two pop rivets on each side to fix the stainles to the opening of the racer duct which is at the outlet of the stock inlet bumper duct.

The rivets on the one side also held the stock and racer ducts togeather. Then i added an additional stainless screw oposite the stock bolt to hold the mesh and two ducts togeather.

Then you can see what the assembly looks like installed. I used stainless hardware all around and plenty of antiseize.

You can also see the holes drilled for drainage in the new duct near the 3" hose adapter outlet.

I modified (read cut up) the stock brake ducts and the other plastic in the area to allow the 3" brake flex duct to pass through. The stock flat brake duct now acts as something of a tray for the new system.

These pics show how i cut up those stock pieces. I discarded the little intermediat elbow.

Also see how the flex duct gets past the washer bottle on the one side. Again the ducts have to head imediatly inboard to clear the tire travel.

Then once the knuckle ducts and the bumper duct assemblies are in there with all the stock plastic modiefied it was just a matter of routing the 3" flex duct under the frame rails and around along the sway bar with some molding of the flex duct shape and a bunch of zip ties to keep it out of the tire. Stainless hose clamps on each end and some final fitment adjustments.

looks impressive...always thought of doing this. was 3" round the largest ducting size down there?

Some more installed pics....

Thanks to Damian and Andy (GooRoo) for some tips and being able to look at what they did to get ideas.

Really Nice work.

Looks like a very functional setup; let us know how it works on the track! I can't quite tell from the photos, but does the air just blow against the rear rotor surface, or is there an exit path through the ventilators?

The opening in the plate is the the full 3" bore and it mostly blows on the inside of the rotor (to blow through the ventilators), but part of it does hit the back of the rotor.

It is actually probably pretty close to half and half, but AWR did put it as close to the middle as possible.

The majority of the flow will go through the vent vanes just by path of least resistance. The plate is also as close to the rotor as possible.

Awesome, looks like a good setup!

damn nice thread, i cant believe i missed it

I will be trying it out at a 3 day HPDE event next weekend. We will see!

Someone asked me for additional details on my duct setup.

These are of my Race car. I did basically the same setup with some minor improvments.